Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


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Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola










Creole Identity in

the French Caribbean Novel



3   H. Adlai Murdoch

















University Press of Florida
Gainesville . Tallahassee . Tampa . Boca Raton
Pensacola . Orlando . Miami . Jacksonville . Ft. Myers











Copyright 2001 by H. Adlai Murdoch.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
All rights reserved

06 05 04 03 02 01 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murdoch, H. Adlai.
Creole identity in the French Caribbean novel / H. Adlai Murdoch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8130-1835-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Caribbean fiction (French)-History and criticism. 2. Creoles in
literature. I. Title.
PQ3944.M87 2001
843.009'9729-dc21     00-064908

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for
the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M
University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University,
Florida International University, Florida State University, University
of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida,
University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida
15 Northwest 15th Street
Gainesville, FL 32611-2079
http://www.upf.com









To my parents
To my wife, Judy

And to the people of the Caribbean









Know yourself, before they tell you who you are.
-African proverb









Contents


Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Conceptualizing Creoleness: French Caribbean
"Postcolonial" Discourse i

i. La Ldzarde: Alienation and the Poetics of Antillanit6 19

2. En attendant le bonheur: Creole Conjunctions and Cultural Survival 62

3. L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres: Textual Creolization and Cultural Identity ioi

4. L'Autre qui danse: The Modalities and Multiplicities of Metissage 142

5. Solibo Magnifique: Carnival, Opposition, and the Narration of the
Caribbean Maroon 197

Conclusion. Creolizing the Colonial Encounter 267

Notes 271

Selected Bibliography 277

Index 286










Acknowledgments


While it has long been a commonplace in projects such as these to point out
that those to be thanked are legion, in this case the axiom is literally an accu-
rate one. I would like to begin by thanking my dissertation committee at
Cornell University-Nelly Furman, Jonathan Culler, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
and N. Gregson Davis-who taught me the practice and value of close reading
and interpretation. At Wellesley College, I'd like to thank Margaret Cezair-
Thompson, Selwyn Cudjoe, Venita Datta, Salem Mekuria, Jean Stanley,
AmyNoel Wyman, and the late Michel Grimaud for stalwart company along
the way. Friends and colleagues, including Frangoise Lionnet, Kwame An-
thony Appiah, Michael Dash, Josephine Diamond, Anne Donadey, Tony
Hurley, Biodun Jeyifo, Renee Larrier, Edris Makward, Mireille Rosello, Dom-
inic Thomas, Keith Warner, Pascale DeSouza, and Claire Andrade-Watkins
have provided critical moments of support, encouragement, and intellectual
exchange over the years. My participation in the summer seminar at the
School of Criticism and Theory in 1993 and my intersections with Homi
Bhabha and my fellow participants proved a momentous turning point in the
gestation and development of this project.
   The French Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
has since 1996 provided me with a safe and supportive home base from which
to complete this project, and in this regard I'd like to thank Evelyne Accad,
Doug Kibbee, Emile Talbot, and Yvette-M. Smith for critical help and guid-
ance. The secretarial staff, especially Barb Oehlschlaeger-Garvey and Ann
Preisel, as well as Mustapha Hamil, Jane Kuntz, Elizabeth Zahnd, and other
members of my graduate seminars, played key roles in helping the book itself,
as well as the ideas in it, to see the light of day. Friends and colleagues in other
departments, particularly Kwaku Korang, Robert Dale Parker, and Zohreh
Sullivan of the English Department, know only too well the ways in which
their generosity of time and spirit helped shape the manuscript. I'd also like to
thank the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for the semester's




/ Acknowledgments


leave that afforded me valuable writing time and space at a critical juncture.
My exchanges with the other IPRH Fellows served to hone a number of ideas
and concepts. Also, the conversations I held with Suzanne Dracius during her
visit to the campus in April 1998 were of inestimable help in shaping my read-
ing of her work. I also offer my sincere thanks to Susan Fernandez and Deidre
Bryan of the University Press of Florida, who carefully shepherded the manu-
script through the different stages of production and demonstrated great pa-
tience and understanding with a first-time author.
   Portions of chapter 1 originally appeared as "(Re)Figuring Colonialism:
Narratological and Ideological Resistance in the Work of Edouard Glissant,"
Callaloo 15, 1 (Winter 1992):2-11, copyright 1992 by Charles H. Rowell, re-
printed by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
   Portions of chapter 2 originally appeared as "Divided Desire: Biculturality
and the Representation of Identity in En attendant le bonheur," Callaloo 18, 3
(Summer 1995):579-92, copyright 1995 by Charles H. Rowell, reprinted by
permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
   Portions of chapter 3 originally appeared as "(Dis)Placing Marginality:
Cultural Identity and Creole Resistance in Glissant and Maximin," Research
in African Literatures 25, 2 (1994):81-101, reprinted by permission of Indiana
University Press.
   Portions of chapters 3 and 4 originally appeared as "Exploring the Margin:
Models of Cultural Identity in the Postcolonial French Caribbean," Journal of
Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 6, 1 (Spring 1999), reprinted by per-
mission of the journal.
   Portions of chapter 5 originally appeared as "Re-Siting Resistance: Cha-
moiseau's Articulation of Creole Identity," Sites 3, 2 (Fall 1999), 315-21. I am
grateful to the publishers, Gordon and Breach, for permission to reprint.
   Portions of chapter 5 also appeared as "Inscribing Caribbean Oraliture: The
Polysemic Discourse of Patrick Chamoiseau," in Multiculturalism and Hy-
bridity in African Literatures, edited by Hal Wylie and Bernth Lindfors, copy-
right African Literature Association, 2000. Permission to reprint has been
granted by the publisher, Africa World Press.
   Portions of chapters i and 5 also appeared as "Narrating Creole Culture:
Strategies of Selfhood in the Francophone Caribbean Novel," in Migrating
Words and Worlds: Pan-Africanism Updated, edited by E. Anthony Hurley,
Renee Larrier, and Joseph McLaren, copyright African Literature Association




Acknowledgments / xi


1999. Permission to reprint has been granted by the publisher, Africa World
Press.
   The translations used in this book are taken from the following editions:
   Edouard Glissant, The Ripening, translated by J. Michael Dash, reprinted
by permission of Heinemann Educational Publishers, a division of Reed Edu-
cational and Professional Publishing Ltd.
   Maryse Cond6, Hdrdmakhonon, translated by Richard Philcox, reprinted
by permission of Lynne Rienner Publishers Ltd.
   Daniel Maximin, Lone Sun, translated by Clarisse Zimra, reprinted by per-
mission of the University Press of Virginia.
   Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent, translation copyright 1997 by
Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov. Afterword copyright 1997 by Rose-
Myriam Rejouis. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.
   All other translations are the work of John Garvey. Where double page cita-
tions appear in parentheses, the first number refers to the English translation
and the second to the French edition.
   Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my parents, Hilson and
Sylvia Murdoch, for the pride in West Indian culture and history and the devo-
tion to intellectual endeavor that they instilled in me so long ago in our native
Antigua. This book is in large part a product of their early encouragement. To
my wife, Judy, who lived with the ups, downs, and periodic small triumphs that
ultimately produced this volume, I owe more than I can ever say or show.









Introduction


Conceptualizing Creoleness
French Caribbean "Postcolonial" Discourse


I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
  and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation
Derek Walcott, "The Schooner Flight"




In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov proposes Christopher Colum-
bus's arrival in the New World as the political and temporal site establishing
the modernity of our contemporary identities: "Even if every date that permits
us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to
mark the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492. . . . We are all the
direct descendants of Columbus, it is with him that our genealogy begins,
insofar as the word beginning has a meaning" (5). In a similar vein, Paul Gilroy
posits in The Black Atlantic the notion of ethnic and cultural exchange with
Africa as the primary symbol of our era's emerging modernity. For the peoples
of the Caribbean, the inheritors of the traces of these twin historical trajecto-
ries, the ambiguities implicit in this post-Columbian era encapsulate the
doubleness that lies at the core of any identitarian framework through which
their interests might be discursively articulated. By joining the specific patterns
of slavery, colonialism, and racism engendered in the region with the com-
plexities of ethnic and cultural admixture brought about by the sugar-driven
tensions of the colonial encounter, it becomes increasingly evident that the
beginnings of Caribbean modernity are mediated, inter alia, by the destruc-
tion of the early Amerindian population, the transportation and enslavement
of an African labor force, the subsequent insertion of hundreds of thousands of
Indian and Chinese immigrants as indentured servants, and the integration of
British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese cultures that are the ineradi-
cable trace of the colonial period.
   More specifically, the story and trajectory of French Caribbean modernity




2 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

are simultaneously the story of a cycle of violence inseparable from the colo-
nial project-one present, indeed, from the very moment of its inception-
and the related story of the making and breaking of divided metropolitan
loyalties. As Gordon K. Lewis points out, "Colonialism generated in the Carib-
bean mentality a divisive loyalty to the metropolitan culture that explains the
historical tardiness of the final arrival of national independence ... and ... that
perverse attachment to the governing colonial power explains why . . . the
French Antilles remain politically tied to . . . France" (239-40). The cultural
and discursive implications of this division form the core of this book, for as a
result of the complex contradictions that emerge from the colonial period, any
vision of Caribbean modernity must take into account not only these intrinsic
patterns of domination, destruction, and death that are part of the region's
post-Columbian history, but the tensions and teleologies of an ethnocultural
heterogeneity whose particularization of global patterns of creolization was
recognized and celebrated by the awarding of the Goncourt and the Nobel
Literature prizes to regional authors Patrick Chamoiseau and Derek Walcott,
respectively, in 1992.
   But this heterogeneity is not in and of itself a monolithic construct. Indeed,
it is the specifics of the sociopolitical pluralism brought about by departmen-
talizing the overseas French Caribbean colonies of Guadeloupe and Martin-
ique in 1946, and their authors' subsequent attempts to explore alternate dis-
cursive parameters for articulating a cultural identity read as creole through its
elaboration of a complex yet unlocalizable set of differences -indeed, from a
postcoloniality that is not yet one-that this book seeks to explore.
   In theoretical terms, French Caribbean postcolonialism is itself the locus of
yet another level of paradoxical doubling. Typically, postcolonialism defines
the period when links of domination and subservience with the colonizing
country have been severed, when the subject territory can exercise that free-
dom of action and of expression inhibited by the colonial framework. But one
of the hallmarks of contemporary French Caribbean discourse is the very fact
that the pressing sociocultural and geopolitical paradoxes of its ties to the
French mainland have led its thinkers to explore alternative models of discur-
sive self-articulation that can mine the terrain of difference that sets the imag-
ined community against the metropole. As a result, the narrative strategies and
discursive patterns of these novels are necessarily varied; adopting and adapt-
ing varying attitudes toward the genesis and implications of Caribbean creol-
ization, they address alternative postcolonial possibilities, a repositioning of




Introduction / 3


the axis of the periphery and its other that retains the ambiguities of an alterity
both intrinsically different and yet not quite. Importantly, this is also the site of
a critical conjunction, for this doubling of postcolonialism's discursive bound-
aries is echoed in the complexities of the creole figure, a construct which, as I
shall show, is itself imbued with crucial characteristics of doubling, disjunc-
ture, and difference. Within this creole postcoloniality, then, lies the
articulative framework of an identitarian strategy that is both ambivalent and
differential; the true resonance of these creole fictions emerges in the discur-
sive space within which alternative sites and strategies of inscription rewrite
accepted notions of subjectivity, otherness, and modernity.
   While the doubleness of the creole figure is one facet of the sociocultural
phenomenon of Caribbean modernity, creolization as a process is by no
means restricted to the Caribbean region. Much of the history of the modern
period is characterized by patterns of migratory movement and population
inflows and outflows that have effectively creolized the structure of many eth-
nic groups and national communities. As a result, racial and cultural interac-
tion have long been integral aspects of the growth of nations in the modern
era. Ultimately, these culminations of a historical interpenetration of cultures
would produce what Michael Dash, in The Other America, calls "a growing
acknowledgement of plurality and creolization as a global phenomenon"; for
if, in Dash's words, the Caribbean is seen as "the vanguard in the process of
cross-culturality" (6), this conclusion compels us to seek out the specifics of
Caribbean difference, to examine these differential boundaries of hybridiza-
tion and creolization and the ways in which they were shaped by the complexi-
ties of the Caribbean experience. For the French Caribbean in particular,
notions of Caribbeanness and creoleness would form the discursive core of a
strategy of creative hybridity that sought to articulate identity through the ex-
ploration and exploitation of pluralism, ambiguity, and instability.
   How, then, can we approach the specific difference(s) that creoleness has
wrought in the Caribbean? And further, how is this creolization to be differen-
tiated from its related phenomena of hybridity and mdtissage? The in-between-
ness of French Caribbean postcolonialism generates a sense of group identity
that functions outside, and in spite of, the political ties to the metropole that
produce what Richard Burton has called an "unrequited longing for fusion,
either by possession or by absorption, with a valorized French Other" (1993:
83), producing a critical ambivalence that gestures toward the unhyphenated
use of the term "postcolonial" within the context of this study. Such issues of





4 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


alienation and of national and cultural group identity also impact questions of
exclusion and inclusion, of cultural intersection and ethnic heterogeneity as
they occur in a Caribbean context. Indeed, as Stephen Slemon suggests, "Post-
colonial nation-states develop new forms of international relations and self-
constitution as they proceed ... in the process developing new structures for
group identification and collectivity" (i8o). As we shall see, it is the constitu-
tion of the group in a differential identitarian context, and its capacity for shap-
ing and articulating the intersections and ambiguities of regional geopolitics,
that will be the chief concern not only of this work's critical framework but of
its authorial discourses as well.
   With these caveats, we can now look at the parameters of the term "creole,"
where close examination will show a corresponding association with the dis-
course of colonialism. Indeed, it is an inherently unstable category, shot
through with the ambiguities and essentialisms of its origins in the colonial
period. The OED standard definition inscribes the creole in terms of instabil-
ity and alterity, figuring a European or an African subject linked to displace-
ments of place rather than race, stressing the otherness of any specific origins
and the absence of any reference to skin color: "In the West Indies and other
parts of America, Mauritius, etc.: orig. A person born and naturalized in the
country, but of European (usually Spanish or French) or of African Negro
race: the name having no connotation of colour, and in its reference to origin
being distinguished on the one hand from born in Europe (or Africa), and on
the other hand from aboriginal."' In this way, a creole person can be either
white or black, colonizer or colonized, articulating an essential ambiguity that
both mediates and ruptures the strategies of containment that have circum-
scribed and determined the dominant designations of difference that have
been the traditional corollary of the colonial encounter. What emerges from
such a definition is primarily the play of difference that the term implies, for
indeed a creole subject or culture may be black or white, African, Caucasian,
or East Asian, colonial or metropolitan, or, for that matter, the product of
myriad ethnic and linguistic influences and origins. In other words, if the cre-
ole figure can be located only as one among several possibilities, or even, in
some cases, several possibilities at once, then the discursive creoleness I am
elaborating here may be engaged through similarly multiple sites and strate-
gies of doubling, difference, and dislocation. It is the undecidability of this
shifting signifier, then, upon which I am drawing, in its most creative sense, to
posit a continuum of discursive division and doubleness as the basic frame-




Introduction / 5


work upon which these variant fictions of the creole are constructed. Every
choice in this selection of novels, then, will be seen to be similar to its others
yet different, each being a specific instantiation of a complex, unlocalizable
social and cultural discourse.
   But the importance of articulating a so-called third space, particularly
where it serves to locate a postcolonial position, must also be the simultaneous
recognition of how this space functions in discursive terms. Homi Bhabha's
useful formulation is of interest here: "The importance of hybridity is not to be
able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hy-
bridity. . . is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge. This
third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures
of authority" (1990:211). It is thus hybridity's role in formulating alternative
discursive positions, rather than the binary framework driving hybridity itself,
that becomes crucial in formulating an enabling framework for the Caribbean
process of creolization, marking the division between a globalizing cultural
hybridity and the specific difference grounding its regional instantiation.
   In a certain sense, the importance of patterns of creole interaction as a sort
of structural foundation for Caribbean societies was established through the
work of the poet and historian Edward Brathwaite. In The Development of
Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, Brathwaite proposed that the principle of
cultural distinctness upon which much of the historical definition of the re-
gion was drawn be abandoned in favor of an increasing recognition of the
intrinsic sociocultural pluralism of the islands. Drawing on this notion, the
editors of the recent volume Caribbean Creolizations have suggested a current
definition of this cultural process, rooted in transformation and shaped by the
region's syncretism: "Creolization is thus defined as a syncretic process of
transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural pat-
terns of varied social and historical experiences and identities" (3). What is
foregrounded here is the notion of change; in conjunction with the multiplici-
ties of history, culture, and identity, the resulting juxtapositions and interac-
tions give rise to associative strategies of adaptability, re-presentation, and
relationality: indeed, in its capacity for creative contestation, Balutansky and
Sourieau claim that "creolization becomes a power for reversing the processes
of acculturation (or assimilation), deculturation, discontinuity, and marginal-
ization that have affected the entire Caribbean" (5). With increasingly few
groups left untouched by this process of exchange, defining the specifics of
difference becomes an even more pressing question; as Stuart Hall argues in




6 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


"When Was 'the Post-colonial'?": "Understood in its global and transcultural
context, colonisation has made ethnic absolutism an increasingly untenable
cultural strategy. It made the 'colonies' themselves, and even more, large tracts
of the 'post-colonial' world, always-already 'diasporic' in relation to what might
be thought of as their cultures of origin" (1996:250). If "Caribbeanness" as a
cultural/discursive framework is to be adequately addressed and defined, it
must be thought of not simply in terms of a binary relationship between the
Other and the Same -where these nonspecific patterns of ethnocultural inter-
penetration are pluralized through colonial repetition-but through a set of
commonalities and practices that engage difference even as they diverge from
the geopolitical patterns governing the hierarchical relations between metro-
pole and colony. In stressing this point, Hall opens the door to the infinite
possibilities of an interstitial postcolonial praxis that operates against the grain
of nations and borders.
   Each of these fictions, then, by interrogating the complex creole network of
language, history, politics, and ethnic and cultural admixture that are at work
in the French Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique, addresses
the core issues of Caribbean creole identity, albeit in significantly different
ways. They do so by tapping the traces of confrontation, contradiction, and
ambivalence to reveal varying aspects of the tensions and textures of interac-
tion, coexistence, and cultural interpenetration that (re)define the terms of an
ongoing Caribbean pluralism. The discursive practices framed by these works
articulate differential figures of openness, multiplicity, and modernity that
resonate with polysemic pluralism, constructing new categories of a relational,
postcolonial identity from the interstices of cultural signification.
   Inhabitants neither of colonies nor independent countries, French West
Indians must enact a daily double gesture that splits their subjectivity between
metropole and department, extending additional patterns of complexity to a
region already subtended by traces of alienation, displacement, and double-
ness. Indeed, as if to underscore the ironies and paradoxes that limn the terrain
of this relationship, the fiftieth anniversary of the departmentalization law was
feted in both department and metropole; first in Paris, through an exposition at
the Palais de Chaillot from 16 November through 15 December 1996, under
the theme Les dipartements d'outre-mer: quatre siscles d'histoire commune.
This event was then restaged in the Antilles, installed in the Salle Osenat in
Schoelcher, Martinique, from 9 to 26 April 1997. While a more sober-minded
view of the deleterious overall effect of departmentalization on these territo-




Introduction /


ries in areas like unemployment and exports could be easily articulated, this
example of the double vision of the DOMs (ddpartement d'outre- mer, or
French overseas department) sums up quite effectively the paradoxes and in-
consistencies of the overseas departmental relationship.
   If the works of the five authors studied here embody a sense of Caribbean
creoleness, then, they do so as much because of their variety of character and
milieu as because of the dissimilar approaches they take to discourse and rep-
resentation. These works seek to trace and transform the tensions of alienation
and displacement that shape the postcolonial pluralisms of ethnicity, culture,
and politics at work in the French Caribbean. Here the concept of ethnicity
will be of particular importance, given its multivalent postcolonial resonances
as Stuart Hall has articulated them in "New Ethnicities": "Ethnicity acknowl-
edges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjec-
tivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned,
situated, and all knowledge is contextual" (1996:446). From this perspective,
ethnicity is no longer simply a corollary of reductive and destructive forms
of nationalism but is integral to the construction of differential discourses of
identitarianism within a postcolonial context.
   La Ldzarde, the subject of chapter i, was Edouard Glissant's first novel.
Published in 1958, it received the prestigious Prix Charles Renaudot in
France, paradoxically appearing at a time when the very survival of the French
republic appeared to be in jeopardy. The novel's interrogation of the subjec-
tive and social implications for his native Martinique of the decade-old depart-
mental relation with France inaugurated a fresh look at the terms and condi-
tions that had brought this relationship into being. By engaging in fictional
terms with an event that was progressively reshaping both Martinican politics
and its national psyche, and by recasting the decision in terms of a pivotal
election, Glissant was able to critique the genesis of the Cesaire-sponsored loi
de departmentalisation of 1946. As Gregson Davis points out in Aimd Cdsaire,
this law "required two years of unflagging advocacy in the face of opposition
from the Right before it was eventually successful" (95). The novel would be a
discursive examination of the repercussions of a decision that, arguably, had
wrought as momentous a change in Martinican life as the Act of Emancipa-
tion that had preceded it by exactly one hundred years.
   The discursive and structural complexity of La Ldzarde is an initial move,
the beginning of his effort, as Celia Britton puts it in her recent book Edouard
Glissant and Postcolonial Theory, "to grasp the whole of the complex, multiply




8 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


interrelated and overdetermined cultural reality of Martinique in its relation to
France and to the rest of the Caribbean" (8). But where the primary focus of
Britton's study is to place Glissant's use of language in a postcolonial frame, my
own aim is to reveal the extent to which, from a Glissantian perspective, the
intrinsic doubleness and ambiguity already innate in the departmental mo-
ment had overdetermined the multiple levels of intra-island social and subjec-
tive relations. It is this fracturing of the already colonized Martinican psyche,
its simultaneous repetition and dissolution of self and Other, metropole and
periphery, that is ultimately the subject of La Ldzarde.
   In Maryse Cond6's En attendant le bonheur, on the other hand, I examine
the ways in which Cond6's autobigraphical novel manipulates the key issues of
ethnicity, politics, and place to interrogate the location of a space for Carib-
bean women's identity. As I shall argue, Cond6 does this principally by merg-
ing unorthodox discursive patterns with the re-presentation of a fragmentary
subjectivity, in order to analyze more closely what Leah Hewitt, in her Auto-
biographical Tightropes, terms the protagonist's "search for a 'place' of her
own, a sense of roots, belonging, and worth" (163). In contrast to Hewitt's focus
on the autobiographical, however, my study stresses Cond6's conflation of
fragmented voice, place, and perspective as a means of engaging the elusive
core of an undefinable creoleness that provides the underpinning for concepts
of Caribbean womanhood. The deliberate polyphony of Cond6's prose elides
the divisions between oral exchange, discursive aside, and interior monologue,
so that the multiple pasts and dislocated present of Veronica, her protagonist,
become figures for the pluralized discourses that re-present the creolization of
her Guadeloupean origins. By pursuing her identity quest through a series of
sexual relationships-the first with a Guadeloupean mulatto, then with a
white French professional, and lastly with a black African politician with
claims to nobility-Veronica's complexities reflect and embody the multiple
axes and alliances that continue to determine any framework for collective
identity that can be constructed in the Caribbean context. The intrinsic pat-
terns of alienation that arise from any and all of Veronica's associations under-
score the complex, multipartite space(s) of Caribbean creolization, while the
author's innovative turn with a narrative discourse whose displacements medi-
ate between alienation and liberation demonstrates, as Cond6 herself put it in
a recent article, that "language for the West Indian writer is the only way of
shaping the future" (1993:127). The difference and diversity of creoleness in the
Caribbean are the elements ultimately valorized by her writing.




Introduction / 9


   By contrast, Daniel Maximin's L'Isold Soleil takes an almost purely discur-
sive approach to its (re)articulation of the principal axes of historical and cul-
tural identity in the French Caribbean. While, on the one hand, this might be
read as a response to the historic instantiation of colonialism through dis-
course, such critics as Benita Parry have long since shown that, in a post-
colonial context, simply negating a framework of oppression does nothing to
alter the established tenor of its terms. Rather, Maximin's goal is the (re)writ-
ing of the historical and psychocultural experience in the French Caribbean,
exposing and articulating an occulted history from the perspective of its
people. He accomplishes this by deploying an astonishing array of meta-
fictional techniques and devices, constructing a polyphonic panoply that
ranges across two centuries of Caribbeanness. His work thus reveals the his-
toric inscription of a people's identity through a series of critical lieux de
memoire that both demonstrates and defines their spirit of cultural resistance.
This paradigm of literary marooning takes as its point of departure its
protagonist's desire to discursively (re)construct the grandes dtapes of her
family's history. By constantly shifting voices, positionalities, and perspectives,
inscribing an insistent self-reflexivity that meditates on patterns of discursive
doubleness even as it erects and erases them, Maximin's novel writes about
writing the Caribbean into being. Maximin thus puts into play a self-sustaining
interrogation of difference and pluralism that embodies the very idea of Carib-
bean multiplicity that is the subject of his novel.
   In my approach to Suzanne Dracius's L'Autre qui danse, I take as my point
of departure the conflation of ethnocultural metissage and geocultural exile
that the author inscribes through the tensions traced by the contradictory char-
acteristics of the two sisters who are her novel's protagonists. By interrogating
the very basis of what it means to be both French and West Indian-by tracing
the psychocultural displacements intrinsic to the journey from Martinique to
France and its inevitable return-Dracius highlights the challenges and diffi-
culties posed by the inability to locate a space of social and cultural belonging
for the subject. Also, her choice of mixed-race, or mdtises, Caribbean women
as icons of this complex category of disjunctures allows the author to re-present
the plurality of ethnicity, culture, and place that undergirds the creolization of
the Martinican subject even as she explores the importance of these implica-
tions for a feminine component always already dominated and displaced.
Dracius is able to incorporate and interrogate key issues of language use, cul-




io / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tural authenticity, and exile and belonging-particularly for the new genera-
tion of negropolitains-as she traces the opposing parameters of her fraternal
protagonists through a shifting canvas of narrative techniques.
   Finally, my reading of Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique-a novel
that appeared some four years before the publication of Texaco brought him
such critical acclaim-takes as its point of departure the cultural and linguis-
tic polyphony that is such an integral part of the Martinican experience. The
novel's concentration on the underrepresented and disappearing class of djo-
beurs allows for both parody and metafictional play, providing insights into the
metropolitan constructions of alienation that rend both the social whole and
its speech patterns into fragments of an ethnocultural ensemble whose actions
enlighten even as they entertain. Ultimately, it is this cultural unrepresen-
tability whose polyvalence Chamoiseau both champions and turns to discur-
sive advantage, deriving a critical discourse of difference from its intersections
of language and culture, ethnicity and class.
   Each of these texts inscribes its own instantiation of cultural difference,
reading and writing key concepts of Caribbean creolization from a variety of
positions and perspectives. Writing the poetics of Caribbean creole perfor-
mance, then, calls for a disjunctural literary discourse, generating sites and
strategies whereby the inscription of narrative dislocation and linguistic ex-
perimentation in the very fabric of the narrative figures the negotiation of so-
ciocultural identity and empowerment through pluralism and difference.


Articulating Antillanite

The principles of antillanit, or Caribbeanness, that Glissant elaborates most
fully in Le Discours antillais (translated as Caribbean Discourse [CD]) form
a complete epistemological break with the tensions and teleologies of negri-
tude. Realizing that a simple response to the hierarchies of a colonial dis-
course does nothing to negate its essential properties, Glissant seeks to specify
the terms and conditions of a creole culture that he locates beyond the bound-
aries of (neo)colonialism, within a Caribbean context of constant creative
flux and an insistent, multiple modernity. Thus the core of antillanit6 is in-
scribed between the articulative axes of uprooting and transformation, per-
haps the two principal elements that have informed strategies of subaltern
survival: "I feel that what makes this difference between a people that survives
elsewhere, that maintains its original nature, and a population that is trans-




Introduction / ii


formed elsewhere into another people . . . and that thus enters the constantly
shifting and variable process of creolization (of relationship, of relativity), is
that the latter has not brought with it, not collectively continued, the methods
of existence and survival, both material and spiritual, which it practiced before
being uprooted" (CD 15; emphasis in the original). Within this critical context
of transformation the initial instantiation of Caribbean creolization takes
shape; through a curious concatenation of change and pluralism, of becoming
less than self or Other but simultaneously more than the sum of both, the
creative instabilities and undecidabilities of racial and cultural admixture
eventually spawn the multipartite core of French West Indian subjectivity.
   By inscribing and analyzing destructive regional tendencies toward what he
terms "Reversion"-the misplaced obsession with a single origin-and "Di-
version" - the neocolonial concealment of an ongoing domination -Glissant
illuminates the disturbing facets of cultural and historical dispossession to
frame the latent possibilities of an alternative, emergent creolization.2 This
generative framework turns the ambivalence and incessant slippage of the
Caribbean condition into a discursive redefinition of the what and the how of
French West Indian being and becoming. As Glissant puts it, "Today the
French Caribbean individual . . . understands that from all this history ...
another reality has come about. . . . He can conceive that synthesis is not a
process of bastardization as he used to be told, but a productive activity
through which each element is enriched. He has become Caribbean (CD 8;
emphasis in the original). Functioning through displacement, relocation, and
transformation, patterns of mutation and metamorphosis replace notions of
pure origin with the fertile imaginativeness of the cross-cultural imagination.
   What Glissant stresses, in other words, is the creativity of the composite, a
construct founded in hybridity but one that also surpasses it, a productive
multiplicity that continually transforms and reinvents itself. The historical and
geopolitical specificities of the French Caribbean, the cultural pluralisms en-
gendered by ethnic admixture, and the dualities of departmental dependence
make this a scene of creolization that displaces negative notions of braiding,
binarism, and sterility. "Creolization as an idea is not primarily the glorifica-
tion of the composite nature of a people: indeed, no people has been spared
the crosscultural process. . . . To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization
has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of'creolized' that is consid-
ered as halfway between two 'pure' extremes" (CD 140).
   Glissant would continue to valorize the relative aspects of this notion of




12 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Caribbean creolization in the Poetique de la relation (translated as Poetics of
Relation [PR]): "Creolization seems to be a limitless mdtissage, its elements
diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas
certain forms of metissage can concentrate one more time" (34). Here, by
emphasizing the phenomenon of diffraction, Glissant valorizes the ethnic and
cultural interpenetration germane to the Caribbean experience; within this
context of multiple, interrelated cultures, notions of purity were quickly
erased, the islands' history as sites of contact and exchange being facilitated by
the very openness of the Caribbean Sea that now embodies a new configura-
tion of those traces of both self and Other that departmentalism re-cites and
rewrites. However, departmental realities should not impede the inscription of
cultural identity. "The hope for a Caribbean cultural identity must not be
hampered by our people not achieving independence, so that. . . our threat-
ened but vital Caribbeanness ... would disappear before taking root" (PR 224).
Here, the artist's role is crucial; since s/he both "articulates this threatened
reality but also explores the often hidden workings of this fragmenting process"
(PR 235), this joining of culture with geopolitics lays the discursive ground-
work for Caribbean creolization.
   While Glissant's vision of creolization has apparently adapted to the bur-
geoning globalization of hybridity between the publication of Le Discours
antillais in 1981 and the appearance of Poetique de la relation some nine years
later, my own reading of his theoretical position is grounded in his nationalis-
tic inscription of the Caribbean as an intense, specific paradigm of a more
global, generalized phenomenon of creolization. This groundbreaking vision,
most clearly articulated in the Discours, positions the French Caribbean
squarely in the forefront of a field of discourse that insists upon the unfixed,
relational nature of contemporary cultural identity in general and of its Carib-
bean paradigm in particular, generating a network of difference that inscribes
a new framework for identitarianism through the paradoxical ambiguity of an
interstitial geopolitics. However, contrary to Dash's position that "Glissant pro-
vides a way out of the temptation to relapse into identitarian thought"
(1995:148), I contend that it is precisely the category of identitarianism that
largely subtends Glissant's work; the cultural and geopolitical dilemma of de-
partmentalization supplies not only the impetus for isolating a viable post-
colonial alternative to departmentalism, but the catalyst for transforming this
intrinsic doubleness into the forms and formulas that will mediate the com-
plexities of French Caribbean cultural identity in a discourse all its own. For in




Introduction / 13


this project to fully articulate the Caribbean as "a multiple series of relation-
ships" (CD 139), Glissant's vision of antillanit6, shaped and spawned by textu-
ality, is but a partner with poetics.


Toward a "Poetics of Relation"

Glissant's Poetics of Relation is an expansion and elucidation of the ideas es-
poused in his earlier Caribbean Discourse, drawing on the parameters and
particularities of the region's historical experience to map the boundaries of a
world in constant cultural flux. Here, while noting the extent to which geopo-
litical events and movements have made creolization a global phenomenon,
Glissant inscribes regional realities as framing a unique and intense transac-
tional space: "The Caribbean . . . may be held up as one of the places in the
world where Relation presents itself most visibly. . . . the Caribbean . . . ap-
proximates the idea of Relation for us as much as possible" (PR 33-34/46). For
him, the region is a microcosmic paradigm of multiple, multiform historical
and cultural transformation.
   By stressing patterns of fluctuation and circularity, Glissant insists that rela-
tional poetics must be deliberately and yet creatively unstable. It is a form of
discourse that "remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological
stability.... A poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in
contact with everything possible" (PR 32/44). This is a perspective, then, that
prizes openness and doubleness, an "unrootedness" that functions through
diffraction and what he terms "errantry." There is no question, however, that,
for Glissant, the case of Caribbean creolization is the paradigmatic form of this
cultural interconnectedness: "What took place in the Caribbean, which could
be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for
us as much as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock. . . a mdtissage,
but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and else-
where, rooted and open" (PR 34; emphasis in the original). Grounded in si-
multaneity and paradox, in the interlectal space between being and becoming,
a relational poetics is the discursive re-presentation of these multiple traces of
affiliation and synthesis.
   If an intrinsic openness and lack of boundaries are necessarily what is
stressed here, these elements point to a process and a poetics of infinite possi-
bility. This notion of pluralism, transformation, and exchange is made more
explicit in the Introduction a une podtique du divers: "In order for relation to




14 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


exist, there must be two or more self-contained identities or entities that accept
both change and exchange" (42; my translation). These ideas were first elabo-
rated in a critical section of Poetique de la relation; drawing on the distinction
made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Mille Plateaux, Glissant
constructed two contrasting sets of characteristics to differentiate between root
and relation identity, underlining the inscription in origin, filiation, and singu-
larity of the one and the insistence on contact and chaos, community and
connection of the other (PR 157-58). The figure of the rhizome, the product of
this intersection of differences, became the metaphor for the articulation of
identity in a creolized culture: "Root identity therefore rooted the thought of
self and of territory and set in motion the thought of the other and of voyage.
. . . Relation identity exults the thought of errantry and of totality" (PR 144).
Through his framing of a composite construct whose core characteristics verge
on the re-citation and repetition of cultural intersections, Glissant emphasizes
the polyvalence and simultaneity of a cultural inscription that deliberately
crosses boundaries of politics and temporality, history and aesthetics.


Charting Creolit6

As a set of cultural principles, crdolitd insists upon the openness and complex-
ity of the identitarian experience in the (French) Caribbean context but estab-
lishes its difference from antillanit6's geopolitical concerns by concentrating
on developing patterns of creative expression that would reflect the multiplic-
ity of the creole mosaic. Thus the creole language serves as a fundamental
metaphor for creolit6's prise de position, not only in its structural amalgam-
ation and transformation of various strands of both African and European
lexical and grammatical patterns, but in its generative history as an icon of
plantation resistance and cultural communication that continues into the con-
temporary period. While relatively broad in scope, then, creolite does empha-
size the conflation of cultural pluralism and artistic expression as a means of
re-presenting Caribbean creoleness. Both global and local, it aims at demar-
ginalizing the departments' link to the metropole and at valorizing the expres-
sion of diversity over the implicit oneness of Western universalism.
   It is here, then, that the theoretical divergence between antillanit6 and
creolit6 is initially inscribed; rather than a framework for geopolitical iden-
titarianism, creoleness, as it is articulated in the manifesto In Praise of Creole-
ness by Jean Bernab6, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, seeks to




Introduction / 15


mediate the cultural expression of a heterogeneous human experience. "That
is why it seems that, for the moment, full knowledge of Creoleness will be re-
served for Art, for Art absolutely. That will be the precondition of our identity's
strengthening" (90; emphasis in the original). In other words, creolit6 sets itself
up as a broad-based aesthetic framework meant to catalyze the inscription of
hybrid ethnocultural contact.
   Now it would be no exaggeration to point out that the crdolistes have been
increasingly and vociferously attacked on precisely these grounds in recent
years, both by critics and by other French Caribbean novelists.3 But while these
critical perspectives by authors like Maryse Cond6 incorporate an acknowl-
edgment of the artistic achievement of an author like Chamoiseau, the critical
reception of creolit6 does remain problematic to a certain extent, since its
apparent insistence upon a sort of creole plenitude located among the djobeurs
and lower classes and in an idyllic, predepartmental past lays it open to the
dreaded charge of essentialism.4 Here, the narrow world of the storyteller, the
folktale, and the country market is pitted against an increasingly interactive
and circulatory relation between department, metropole, and the world at
large. As Richard Burton puts it, "Prospective and progressive in theory, Creo-
lit6 is in practice often retrospective, even regressive, in character.... There is
a danger, in short, that Creolite may itself fall prey to the trap of universalism
and essentialism so vigorously denounced in the Eloge" (NAC 156). It is pre-
cisely this paradox of an apparently regressive interculturality that is perhaps
the greatest challenge posed by creolit6.
   But such discursive excavations into the past are far from unknown in the
postcolonial context. As Frangoise Lionnet points out in her article "Logiques
metisses," a typical response on the part of subaltern groups to modernization
efforts read as assimilationist and undertaken by a dominant culture is "to re-
tain a sense of its own cultural authenticity by advocating a return to [pre-
colonial] traditions . . . mythifying its own original ethnic or cultural purity"
(105). And in fact, such a reading echoes, perhaps not coincidentally, a posi-
tion enunciated by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth: "The claim to
a national culture in the past . . . rehabilitate[s] that nation and serve[s] as a
justification for the hope of a future national culture" (210). By drawing up
cultural paradigms for the present and future based on occulted patterns and
principles of the past, then, postcolonial discourses in general, and their Carib-
bean creolizations in particular, are engaging in a program of contestation
with implied constructive and transformative potential for their subjects.




i6 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


   In his admittedly oedipal reading of the life, times, and work of Aim6
Cesaire, Raphael Confiant seeks to refine the definition of creolization by
enlarging its discursive and geopolitical context. By simultaneously stressing
the key roles of "multiplicity" and "identity," he invests the creolization process
with global importance through its modernist mediation of the interpenetra-
tion of peoples and cultures: "The term 'creole' is thus eminently modern ...
even post-modern, in the sense that it signals the emergence of a new model of
identity that might be termed 'multiple' or 'mosaic,' and that appears to be
establishing itself almost everywhere" (1993:266; my translation). For Con-
fiant, creolization thus becomes a process that assumes specific sites and strat-
egies when articulated in a Caribbean context.
   Most recently, in a landmark and wide-ranging interview, published in the
journal Transition-probably not coincidentally-almost exactly ten years af-
ter the pronouncement and publication of Eloge de la crdolitd, all three
creolistes buttress and flesh out the discursive positions they had elaborated
earlier. Here they point out that creolite is intrinsically a plural concept-"our
position is that there are several Creolites" (142)-valorize the role of disjunc-
ture in its articulation of identity-"Creolite is all about understanding mo-
saic, multiple identities" (153)-and suggest that creolization is more than a
simple synthesis, more than metissage. "There's mdtissage in creolization, but
creolization is chaos -shock, mixture, combination, alchemy" (136). Not sim-
ply conflict, then, but a conjoining, the interaction of the many in a context of
difference.
   A creolized Caribbean discursive framework such as we have discussed
remaps the literary terrain, an enunciatory positioning of contestation over the
canonical. The relocation of the frictions of cultural fragmentation and colo-
nial subjection to a doubled, heterogeneous space of collective identification
crystallizes in the double-voiced narratives by Maryse Cond6 and Daniel
Maximin of Guadeloupe, and by Martinique's Edouard Glissant, Patrick Cha-
moiseau, and Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie. Their work bridges the binaries beset-
ting the regional condition, emphasizing a simultaneous slippage and prolif-
eration of enunciatory positions to inscribe an ideology of indeterminate
interconnection as the generative ground of French West Indian postcolonial
subjectivity. Neither specific adherents nor opponents of Glissant's theory of
antillanit6, or Caribbeanness, or of the creolite, or creoleness, articulated by
Bernab6, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, these discourses draw on the creative
conflation of discourse and subjectivity to articulate their interrogation and




Introduction / r


illumination of indigenous identitarian patterns and pluralisms, manipulating
the antinomies of a dis-membered historical heritage into the generative
ground of a nationness that writes the myriad ethnic, cultural, and linguistic
patterns of the region into the warp and woof of a creole Caribbean difference.
The resulting patterns of interstitial identity rewrite and reframe reductive
notions of postcolonialism that either articulate only a negativized response to
colonial domination on its own terms or insist upon a completeness of tempo-
ral and political disjuncture that would be beyond the capacity of the DOMs
to articulate. These several novelistic discourses envisage new sites of cultural
difference and subjective contestation that derive alternative strategies of rep-
resentation and empowerment from the multiplicities of ethnic and cultural
pluralism and historical displacement.
   In a recent refinement-however necessary such an evolutionary step
might be deemed-of the spirit and practice of creolit6, Ernest Pepin and
Raphael Confiant choose to stress the problematics of coexistence and hetero-
geneity that, in contrast to the linear universalisms of the metropole, form the
core of Caribbean creoleness: "An identity of coexistence is necessary and is an
imperative to reject the exclusiveness of the One and its militant isolation. It is
from this fertile ground that Creolite stems, not as an antinegritude but as a
broadening of the initial breakthrough of our world as it actually is, as a light
revealing our heterogeneous reality" (SC 98). Further, the role of language is
reinscribed as a mediating metaphor for an open, modernist framework of
intercultural multiplicity: "Creolit6 is immersed within the 'creolized' moder-
nity of the world and thus supports the creativity of the Creole language ...
Through this relationship to languages, which also applies to cultural rela-
tions, creolit6 rediscovers another history of the world-the history of its mul-
tiplicity" (SC 98). By reasserting these principles of pluralism, within a context
framed by modernity, language, and multiplicity, creolit6 as a concept aban-
dons perhaps to some degree those programmatic strictures and structures that
implied its limitation to the narrow confines of folk art. Indeed, by valorizing
its literariness, creolit6 redefines its primacy as a form of cultural poetics: "The
fundamental literary stakes of creolit6 are to re-vision language, narrative aes-
thetics, orchestration of events and places from a plural conception of identity
... validating and developing all the strategies crafted by our people in re-
sponse to the requirements of their specific history" (SC 99-ioo). By mapping
plural identities through pluralized discourses, the specificities of the Carib-
bean context inscribe their difference, part of an overall framework through




i8 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


which these selected works forge new poetic paths and parameters for a discur-
sive identitarianism that is both more than antillanit6 or creolite, yet neither
simply the one nor the other.
   These intrinsic ambiguities and anxieties of the departmental moment in
the Caribbean illuminate the thematics and teleologies of a dynamic and
transformative culture whose interrogation of the temporalities and paradoxes
of postcoloniality refigure the very terms in which postcoloniality itself may be
defined. In tandem with these plurivalent, decentered discourses, whose very
openness, as we shall see, interrogates and exploits the ambiguities of the word
"creole" itself, the formal constituents of narrative can further the articulation
of a differential creole perspective, enacting emblems of pluralism and hetero-
geneity embedded in and reflected through narrative form, theme, and dis-
course.
   The five works studied here occupy a particular place in the articulation of
French Caribbean discursive identity. Given that the large majority are first
novels, they form a definitive yet divergent thematic cluster that frames the
range of approaches and practices that simultaneously define and designate
the creole experience in the French Caribbean. Finally, as we try to come to
terms with the sites and strategies of the creole inscribed in these novels, their
discourses should perhaps be read more as variants than as models of antil-
lanit6, creolit6, or a specific historicity. Discursively, they re-cite and reframe
plural paradigms of Caribbeanness in order to explore and extend the contours
and possibilities of a creole cultural framework that would be a functional sign
of regional difference. The narratives examined here, then, interrogate creole
issues through the prism of a composite Caribbean pluralism that both incor-
porates and surpasses the theoretical concepts of antillanit6 and creolit6.













La Ldzarde
Alienation and the Poetics of Antillanit6


Le Divers n'est donn6 6 chacun que comme
une relation, non comme un absolu pouvoir ni
une unique possession.... L'Autre est en moi,
parce que je suis moi. De meme, le Je perit,
dont l'Autre est absent (abstrait).
Edouard Glissant, L'Intention poitique






Glissant's Martinique: Antillanite and Literature

The structures and strategies of creole doubling that I have outlined in the
introduction are established in the work of the Martinican author Edouard
Glissant. Through the deliberate recuperation of the dualities and disjunc-
tures of a forgotten colonial history, his novels interrogate the shape and sub-
stance of an interstitial identity grounded in the Caribbean experience. A poet
and essayist as well as a novelist, he has produced since the 1950s several books
of poetry, a half-dozen novels, and four books of essays, in which he has discur-
sively explored the myriad oppositional phenomena produced by colonialism
and, more important, departmentalization in the region. Glissant's work
stages the poetics of identity in the Caribbean context, the influence of his
work so far-reaching that he is now acknowledged by later authors, like Cha-
moiseau and Confiant, as having made it possible for them to articulate their
vision of a creolized Caribbean culture. For Glissant, as we have seen, antil-
lanit6, or Caribbeanness, and a podtique de la relation, or cross-cultural poet-
ics, embody the cornerstones of a discursive practice whose deliberate disjunc-
tures of language and linearity reflect the tensions and teleologies of the
colonial encounter. It is the particular significance of the departmental mo-




20 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ment, the presumption of its capacity to divide the regional experience into a
sort of ethereal "before" and "after" while concealing its preservation of colo-
nial realities, that provides Glissant with a context for his exploration of the
paradoxes and parameters of French Caribbean identity.
   In a certain sense, Glissant's own trajectory placed him in close proximity to
Martinique's transition from colony to department. Born in 1928, he attended
the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, the prestigious school also fre-
quented by Cesaire and Fanon. Although he left to pursue his studies in the
metropole in 1946, the year of departmentalization, he would have been eigh-
teen years old at this pivotal moment in Martinican history. Thus it can be
claimed that the transition of the French Caribbean colonies to departmental
status in 1946 provided the impetus for his interrogation of the new relation-
ship, its form as re-presentative as it is relational. The presumption of equality
that accompanied the new regime, the idea that Guadeloupe and Martinique
were now departments no different from, say, the Cantal or the Puy-de-D6me,
spoke to the need to explore and elaborate the contradictions of cultural per-
spective and erasure of historical experience that were insistently mediated by
issues of distance and difference, the mer and the metropole that still separated
the Antillais from the mere-patrie. The recognition of the presence of a new
temporality produced expectations that would supposedly wipe clean the slate
of history, tending to ignore realities of cultural and political difference; this
persistent ambiguity would become the hallmark and defining sign of the re-
gion, even as it reflected the larger patterns of the periphery.
   The seeds of this hybrid inscription had been sown over time on a number
of levels: the remarkable and persistent oscillations of island history since their
official colonization by France in 1635 not only demonstrate the extent of the
metropole's double vision with regard to its overseas Others but also reinforce
the importance in this relationship of the colonial intersection of politics and
language. Martinique was first, if only briefly, declared to be a department of
France as a result of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1793, and slavery was
abolished the following year. This panacea was quickly brought to an end by
the British occupation of 1794-1802, with slavery being officially reinstated
with the island's return to French control, lasting until the official emancipa-
tion decree of 27 April 1848. The changes of regime in France between 1848
and 1880, with their concomitant conferral and retraction of universal male
suffrage, free education, and the dispersal of the labor force from the planta-
tions, resulted in a globally assimilationalist policy that successive generations




La Ldzarde / 21


have alternately confirmed or denied. The culmination of this flux and reflux
was the integration act of 1946, a transformative moment upon which, follow-
ing a bill proposed by Aim6 Cesaire, the French Caribbean's full assimilation
into the political structure of the metropolitan power may be profitably con-
trasted with an Anglophone Caribbean that was on the verge of implementing
its movement toward independence. If, then, the legacy of this process, as
Richard Burton points out, is "to possess a double consciousness as both a West
Indian and, since the departmentalization law of 1946, an integral citizen of
France" (1992:186), the tensions of these twin allegiances would, appropriately,
be progressively articulated in the very domains of politics and language which
had mediated the inscription of metropolitan codes of domination and hege-
mony.
   For, as we shall see, it is primarily in the field of language that the ongoing
contestation of the colonial encounter takes place; it is through the nuances
and the mastery of language that both colonizer and colonized refract and
demarcate the intersection of the issues of culture and politics that both define
and divide their cultures. As Frantz Fanon points out, "To speak . . . means
above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. . . . Every
colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority
complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural original-
ity-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is,
with the culture of the mother country" (1968a:17-18). The ordeal of being
forbidden to speak creole at school-and, among the burgeoning middle
classes, even at home-on pain of punishment creates a situation in which the
colonial subject is forced to develop a psycholinguistic "double conscious-
ness," in which he or she adopts a language determined by the social context or
even, in some cases, by the interlocutor. The internalization of these cultural
and political dichotomies that are the product of the metropolitan relationship
splits the DOM-TOM subject into a bipolar construct that simultaneously
reflects the terms of the Other and the Same. This struggle for identity is in-
scribed in the diffuse dualities of cultural doubleness. As Richard Burton
agues, "He therefore confronts the metropolitan power. . . both as 'other'-
since, its departmental status notwithstanding, Martinique is still ultimately a
possession of France-and as 'same"' (1992:186). And it is at this juncture, in
the interstices of an alienation that makes such critical distinctions increas-
ingly impossible, within a hybrid framework located precisely at the intersec-
tion of colonialism and discourse, that the discursive articulation of regional




22 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


issues of identity politics and ethnocultural pluralism begins to assume an
overarching importance.
   If the concept of representation as an underpinning of discourse was what
allowed colonialism to advance and impose the terms of its authoritarian sys-
tem of knowledge, and to appropriate the world of the colonized as a represent-
able system both fixed and knowable, then the terms of its contestation would
have to be both subversive and deliberately nonlinear, framed as a discourse
that would interrogate and explode the binary assumptions of metropolitan
mastery. The discursive context with which writers like Glissant would now
have to contend had articulated an intentionality linked to colonial power
which had allowed Europe to reduce its Others to a fixed reality, erecting
stereotypes of race and class meant to rationalize the need for the reductive
hierarchies of the colonial relation. Yet the primary paradox of this discursive
system was its simultaneous elaboration of a duplicitous double standard, one
in which principles of civility-and civilization-were applicable only to the
world of the metropole. By exploiting this authoritarian ambivalence, an am-
biguity which is the corollary of the binary discourses of the colonial encoun-
ter, novelists like Glissant were ultimately able to construct their own dis-
course of creolization, of antillanit6, articulating an alternative rather than a
response to colonial authority, and mapping an innovative site of discursive
and cultural re-presentation which would counter colonial hegemony by ex-
ploiting, assimilating, and transforming the gaps and antitheses inherent in
what was ultimately a plural colonial project.
   Glissant's theory of antillanit6 forms a loose framework within which the
fictional context of his work is situated; his novels explore and interrogate the
fragmented trajectory and multiple subject positions of Martinican history,
seeking to identify various points at which the disjunctures of the past can be
assimilated into the complex cultural pluralisms of the present. In his four
books of essays, Glissant consistently articulates pluralistic notions of writing
and culture as a means of elucidating and contextualizing the historical expe-
rience of the region. Leveling the diversity and heterogeneity of Le Divers
against the universalist claims of Le Meme, Glissant seeks to inscribe the mul-
tiple paths that have eventuated the complexities of contemporary Caribbean
culture. This he accomplishes, in part, by undertaking a close reading of what
he calls Le Ddtour, revealing a construct whose very heterogeneity functions in
direct contrast to the hegemonic unicity of what he terms "Reversion . . . the
obsession with a single origin . . . 'to negate contact"' (CD 16/30).




La Ldzarde / 23


   These univocal impositions are subverted and transformed, however, when
confronted with the complexities of forced exile, the principles of cultural
transformation and adaptation, and the identitarian contestations of a creol-
ized, departmentalized population: "Diversion is the final recourse of a popu-
lation whose domination by an Other is concealed: one must look for the
principle of domination elsewhere, when it is not obvious in the country itself.
For the means of domination (assimilation) is the best of camouflage, as the
physical manifestation of domination . . . is not directly visible. The creole
language is the first area of Diversion" (CD 20/32). His concept of the Ddtour
is thus manifestly and unalterably linked here not only to colonial domination
but to the specifically Martinican issues of departmentalization, assimilation,
neocolonialism, and the viability of an indigenous lingua franca.
   In later sections of Le Discours antillais,1 a massive work synthesizing no-
tions of Caribbean history, society, literature, and culture, he articulates and
expands more fully upon his concept of the political and performative aspects
of the creolization of the Caribbean. As we have seen in the introduction, it is
here that Glissant constructs the cornerstones of a discourse of difference that
can mediate the staging of identity's discursive and ethnocultural complexities
in the Caribbean context: antillanitd, or Caribbeanness, and a podtique de la
relation, or a cross-cultural poetics. These two interrelated and interdependent
concepts form the basis of Glissant's account of the specificity of the Carib-
bean experience, distilling the core concepts of his theoretical and narrative
discourses to weave a relational, even complicitous, identitarianism that will
undergird the form of his fiction: "The concept of Caribbeaness springs from
a reality which we will have to question, but one which also corresponds to a
vow whose legitimacy we will have to establish. . . . Reality is undeniable:
cultures derived from the plantation system, insular civilisations . . . social
pyramids with . . . African or Hindu at its foundation, European at the peak,
with compromised languages; a general cultural phenomenon of creolisation"
(CD 221-22/422).
   Only by affirming the specificity of this culture and the values it articulates
through the process of creolization will the formulation and maintenance of
the Caribbean identity be assured. Between the desire and the alienation of
antillanit6, what undergirds Glissant's discursive undertaking is the translation
of the double experience of integration and exclusion engaged by departmen-
talization, of the fragmentation and cultural pluralism of borderlines, into a
collective experience of nationness that is inscribed by a new Caribbean tex-





24 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tual poetics of difference. By exposing the ambiguity grounding not only the
hierarchical patterns of authoritarianism on which colonialism was based, but
also a DOM-TOM system that simultaneously seduces the Antillais into believ-
ing in the value of a relationship with the metropole while concealing the
geopolitical realities of an ongoing colonial relationship, Glissant constructs a
counterdiscourse that goes beyond a simple response to colonial discourse on
its own terms. It confronts and masters the fractured past by rewriting the rup-
tures and disjunctures, the hierarchies and contradictions, of the colonial ex-
perience into a cross-cultural poetics that locates new sites of contestation and
community through alternative strategies of discursive exploration.2For if the
slippage opened up within its framework allows us to suggest that colonialism
in fact articulated a crisis of confidence in imposing stereotypes of race and
culture on the Other-a process that occurs, in Benita Parry's words, when
"the civil discourse of a culturally cohesive community is mutated into the text
of a civilizing mission," so that "its enunciatory assumptions are revealed to be
in conflict with its means of social control" (1987:41)-then the core ambiva-
lence of this hegemonic script is in fact that which permits a postcolonial cre-
ole discourse to establish itself by staging the negotiation and resiting of a
strategic gap.
   By revealing that both colonizer and colonized are implicated in the laby-
rinth of colonial positionality, Glissant compels us to rethink the traditional
paradigms of colonialism and postcolonialism, and to recognize the necessity
of constructing a creole discourse that will reflect the ongoing complicities of
the colonial encounter. A postcolonial discourse that responds to the fixed
realities of colonial hegemony on their own terms, and fails to take this imbri-
cation into account, runs the risk of relegitimizing the very hierarchies it seeks
to overturn. Glissant's discourse evades these polarities by tracing opposi-
tionality through a site of contestation whose ground is neither the ambivalent
authority of a colonial discourse nor the rigidified responses of its Other. As we
have seen, Glissant contrasts the figures of root and rhizome as oppositional
spatiocultural perspectives on the Caribbean heritage of creolization; in his
view, the latter framework assumes the plural, protean properties of its hybrid
culture, as its insistence on fragmentation and doubling subverts metropolitan
concepts of rootedness and monoculture through the intrinsic pluralities of its
construction. By interrogating the assumptions of hierarchy and assymetry as-
signed to roles in the colonial script, Glissant is able to evade the linear logic of
what he terms "root-identity," drawing rather on the disjunctive, multidimen-




La Ldzarde / 25


sional, polyvalent temporalities of the "relation-identity" to create a series of
ruptures that dis-locate a metropolitan legacy of universalism and exclusion.
For if a textual poetics of difference is to be forged from the disparate disso-
nances of the creole, then the translation of patterns of ambiguity into repeat-
able categories of meaning, into a hybrid transdisciplinarity which goes be-
yond the binarisms of the colonial canon, must also address the cultural
complexities of the society it seeks to represent.


La Lizarde: The Politics of Colonial Ambiguity

Glissant's first novel, La Ldzarde,3 won the Prix Renaudot upon its publication
in 1958 and has since been recognized as one of the seminal works in the
francophone Caribbean literary canon. Set in the fictional community of
Lambrianne, the novel may be read as a thinly disguised re-presentation of the
author's homeland of Martinique. The plot revolves around the elections of
September 1945, marking a historical and cultural turning point for the French
colony which would lead ultimately to departmentalization. Essentially, the
intrigue concerns a group of young political activists who, seeing the desired
outcome of the elections threatened by the presence of a notorious political
henchman of the opposition, decide on his elimination. Fearing discovery,
exposure, and their party's subsequent defeat if they carry out the deed them-
selves, however, they suborn a young peasant from the countryside and induce
him to commit the murder for them. Both this ploy and the peasant's efforts
prove dramatically successful, but the novel ends with an election victory fol-
lowed by a final, symbolic act of retribution visited upon the companion of the
unwary instrument of this electoral success.
   In this novel Glissant makes use of the plethora of ambiguities attending the
politics of post/colonial liminality to address the relative positionality of both
colonizer and colonized in a context of social and political flux. The novel
thus becomes both means and point of interrogation, an ever-expanding net-
work of ambivalences that ultimately implodes and collapses upon itself. Its
characters, and the issues they embody and explore, appear to regress rather
than to progress, and their inability to properly address the complex issues that
frame this moment of transition will eventually doom them to an ending that
is anything but a point of resolution. The pressing issues of disjuncture and
duality that are presaged by the plot allow these facets of post/colonial identity
to be formulated as a series of questions. Key patterns and parameters of the




26 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

novel are made subject to a number of signs and codes in order to reflect and
refract the ambiguous structures engendered by the presumptive mastery of a
colonial discourse. His vision of a poetics of cultural creolization interrogates
the factitious basis of colonial binarisms as it simultaneously exposes the extent
to which their necessary imbrication constructs an alternative discursive
space, mapping a geopolitics grounded in the signifying system of the creole. It
is difficult, however, to echo the sentiment of thematic optimism some recent
critics have apparently been able to cull from their reading of La Ldzarde; in
my own view, the novel tends much more toward a darker, more pessimistic,
and conflictual trajectory, with an absence of any really positive sense of reso-
lution or accomplishment in either subjective or political terms.4
   Protean patterns of positionality and oppositionality are set in train by the
conflictual economy of the colonial encounter, producing a society whose
internal contradictions and covert parallels may reasonably be read in terms of
race, ethnicity, and class. However, Glissant specifically inscribes nonlinear
forms of narrative address in order to further contextualize the desire for a
discourse that does not retrace the boundaries of colonial oppression. The
ethnic and cultural fragmentation of the Martinican experience and its histori-
cal subjection to the doubling and dispersal of a colonial discourse tend to
translate this pluralism into hybrid signs of postcolonial possibility. Through
Glissant's reading of the reflexive relationship of self and Other as they are
constituted in the conflictual confines of colonialism, the political possibilities
of a nascent postcolonialism can be reinscribed by opening up the latent com-
plexities of Martinican departmentalism. As Richard Burton suggests, "The
great strength of Glissant's historical vision . . . lies precisely in his determina-
tion to understand, espouse and assume the Martinican reality in all its multi-
faceted contradictoriness" (1984:305). In other words, Glissant's idea of a cul-
tural poetics of difference culls the authoritarian ambiguities that have shaped
the Martinican experience into a discourse that re-presents its overwhelming
cultural realities of doubling and hybridity.
   Perhaps the narrative's most effective figure for these polarities is that of the
novel's title. For while in its feminine form in the novel the substantive ldzarde
refers primarily to the Lezarde river, a figure, as we shall see, for the complex
divisions and pluralities that mark the community of Lambrianne, in its mas-
culine, referential connotation the substantive also signifies a crack, or fissure.
This double resonance of a literal and figurative splitting effectively encapsu-
lates the discontinuities that deinne the community, generating an initiatory




La Ldzarde / 2


ambiguity of ideology and perspective which is maintained and amplified
throughout the novel. Snaking down from the mountains through the town to
finally expire in the sea, the river is thus a primary marker not only of the
critical disjunctions that are the corollary of the colonial encounter but also of
the intersubjective experience of the community at large. The entirety of
chapter 6 is given over to the personification of the river and to the tracing of its
protean, pluralistic evocation of the community it both divides and defines.
Characterized variously as "a people in revolt" (32/30), "a factory owner in-
specting his boilers closely" (32/30), "a naked girl, heedless of passers-by on the
banks" (32/30-31)" and "like a woman fulfilled and ripe with pleasure" (32/31),
the ever-changing river seems to personify the complex nature both of the
people and of their geopolitical context, the diversity and difference that colo-
nialism paradoxically produces through its appropriation of peoples and cul-
tures and the assumption of its authority to differentiate. These plural possibili-
ties disturb the simple binaries instantiating the colonial as a knowable, fixed
reality; the very title of the novel suggests from the outset the unrelieved uncer-
tainties awaiting Lambrianne in its moment of decision.
   Discursive notions of post/colonial intersubjectivity converge through the
persistent parallels that the narrative establishes between the peasant, Thal,
and Mathieu, the leader of the group of activists, and, perhaps even more
important, between Tha l and Garin, the henchman of the opposition he
agrees to kill, and through the larger possibilities of protean transformation
signified by the Lezarde; the people, both individually and as the subjective
categories they represent, as well as the compelling collaborative and con-
flictual intricacies of their politics, combine to inscribe the complex, liminal,
contradictory culture of Lambrianne. Embodying as he does the compound
parallels and contradictions of the colonial relationship, Tha l is the crux of
doubling and difference; as a multiple site of post/colonial signification, he
functions in the plot to chart the ambivalent progress of the novel's basic arma-
ture, an urgent call for the recognition of the complex temporalities of colonial
authority and the differential categories it imposes upon the colonized. By
dispersing and realigning the fixed positionality of the colonial stereotype,
Glissant's complex elaboration of the multiple location of subjective sites pro-
duced by a colonial discourse ultimately underlines the role of the interstice in
the negotiation of the periphery.
   From the outset, markers of the double nature of the colonial condition
abound, serving to alert the reader to situational complexities and challenges




28 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


of which the characters remain unaware. One of the most striking aspects of
La Ldzarde's narration is its insistence on protean, fragmented changes in per-
spective. The address constantly alternates between je, ils, vous, and nous; it
appears to be constantly contradicting and metamorphosing itself as it shifts to
accommodate changes in ideological and expository perspective. The entire
sixth chapter of the third section is narrated in the second person singular,
drawing on deliberate strategies of doubling and disjuncture that simulta-
neously trace and displace the triangle mapped by reader, character, and nar-
rator. Even at the beginning of the novel, issues of division and parallelism are
clearly at work, identifying the various sites at which colonialism has rendered
the basic binarisms of this society creatively unstable.
   The fragmentation of the colonial population signified through the plural
characterization of the Lezarde is recuperated by the world of distance separat-
ing Mathieu and Tha l, the two protagonists. Mathieu is a town dweller, a
bourgeois -as are the rest of the activists -concerned, it seems, more with the
nuances of political ideology than with the conflicts and compromises of its
actual praxis. Tha l is a peasant from the countryside, a man of the soil closer
to the realities of struggle and survival than Mathieu and his cohorts ever will
be. Yet somehow the complexities of this liminal moment, in their capacity to
define the past as well as the future, seem to summarize all that both binds and
separates them, a capacity reflected in the political act whose resonances and
consequences they will both come to share.
   The uncertainties produced by the colonial discourse that determines both
their worlds are deepened further by the deliberate obscurantism of the
narrator's repeated references to himself in the third person. The most direct
result of such a narrative strategy is to defeat the possibility of ascertaining his
or her other identity with any sense of certainty, a goal whose origins may
perhaps be traced back to a refusal to accept an implicit identification with any
one ideological position. However, this does not prevent the narrator from
repeatedly referring to him/herself in the first person, pointing to the
multivalency of his own role in the text: "I heard these words, but I was still a
child, and they echoed within me. I was both witness and object: the one who
sees and the one who must endure, who is called and who is shaped. I knew Thaul
and Mathieu" (22/16; emphasis mine). In fact, the narrator is represented as
being also subject to the undecidabilities of the discourse itself: "And I, as a
child (child of this story, growing with each word . . .)" (33/22; parentheses in




La Ldzarde / 29


original). In this strategy, which also reflects the disjunctures and ambiguities
of colonialism through the form of the narration itself, the negotiation of the
space that separates self and Other challenges and rewrites the traditional
boundary between individual and community, colonizer and colonized. In-
deed, reading La Ldzarde involves an intricate process of cross-referencing and
elimination, aided by duplications of important narrative sequences, whole
chapters enclosed in parentheses, and the elusive, doubled re-presentation of
the simultaneity of key events-all aimed at undermining the fixed polarities
of the colonial encounter and exposing the double subjection of colonizer and
colonized to the uncommon ruptures and resemblances imposed by a colo-
nial discourse.
   Tha l, the primary protagonist of La Ldzarde and, as we shall see, the pri-
mary counterpart of Garin, his intended victim, is a character whose social
identity may be said to embody the indeterminacy and dispersal that are in-
scribed by the attempt to read the polarities of a colonial discourse through
patterns of alterity drawn from the psychoanalytic paradigm.' While we should
take care not to impose Westernized norms blindly upon the uncertainties of
the colonial script, at the same time such readings are valuable for the insights
they can add to an understanding of the tensions and pluralities at work in the
scene. Tha l, we recall, is a peasant, leading an uncomplicated existence in
the hills of the Lambrianne landscape when we first encounter him. Indeed,
the first words of the first chapter, which will eventually be ironically recuper-
ated by the opening words of the last, draw on these patterns of departure and
discovery: "Tha l left his house in the mountains, and there was already a
sprinkle of sunlight on the dew-covered rust spots of the roof. Primeval warmth
of man's first dawn!" (i8/n)." Drawn from the countryside to the political and
interpellative structures of the city, he is, significantly, still marked by the geo-
graphical extremes of the country, just able to perceive "the boundary of
known and unknown" (18/11-12); further, the liminality of his situation is em-
phasized: "His journey had only just begun" (19/12).
   Importantly, not only is his psychological ambiguity marked from the out-
set, "as Tha l descends . . . everything gradually comes apart" (19/12), but his
dogs, which will have a key role to play in the resolution of the plot and whose
importance is linked to their master's ambivalent attitude toward and tenuous
control over them, are immediately given pride of place. "Then he heard the
dogs. Sillon! Mandolke! They had been named, since he had grown up in a




30 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

world of legend and mystery. . . inspiring Tha l with admiration as well as the
desire to escape. These dogs knew their master's feeling of repulsion, a feeling
he had always suppressed" (19/12). This tenuousness of the master's voice, the
oppositional fear and favor in which these animals are held by him, will as-
sume ever-increasing importance as it parallels Tha l's progress toward the
definitive encounter with the Other; he is positioned, literally, in the middle
ground, situated between "the black angry rocks of the ocean . . . and the
gentle murmuring of the beaches of the sea" (51/59). But Tha l has an
unshakeable attachment to both Mathieu and Garin; indeed, his double at-
tachment to them both places him as colonial subject marking a moment of
transition in an undecidable, interstitial space, and the narrative draws on
these multiple conflicts and collusions to rewrite the implications of tradi-
tional colonial tropes of alienation and duality.
   Insistently, the parallelisms and conflicts of Tha l and Mathieu continue to
determine the dialectical development of the narrative: "'But I come from the
mountains... .I am driven by a passion I do not understand. I wish to under-
stand this passion!' Mathieu smiled but he was a victim of the same passion"
(31-32/29). It is increasingly clear that each is both overdetermined by a colo-
nial discourse and already alienated as the object of desire of the other. Indeed,
Mathieu speaks to Valerie of Tha l as "my best friend," and says of him that "I
am his brother" (83-84/107); significantly, Tha l, in turn, also speaks to Garin
of Mathieu as "my brother" (98/127).
   This subjective interpenetration that they share is also written on Valerie's
mediating body, as the passion for her which both men share comes to signify
their passion for a free Lambrianne and the blindness and contestation that
simultaneously separate them and subordinate them to colonial misprision.
This inscription of Valerie as symbolic object of desire may be profitably con-
trasted with the figure of Mycea, whom Beverley Ormerod, in a recent article,
sees as "an emblem of integrity and revolutionary ardour. . . . she is an ideal-
ized, abstract figure, proud and reserved, in contrast to the more sensual girls
around her." If, however, as Ormerod argues, Mycea is indeed a figure who
"stands for the Caribbean landscape, pregnant with half-lost memories that
hint at Martinique's unrealized need for self-discovery" (1999:111), one con-
clusion that may plausibly be drawn here suggests the subjugation of female
characters and female desire, at least in the early Glissant, to a dominant,
overarching masculinity. For if Valerie may also be read as a figure for a Lam-




La Ldzarde / 31


brianne possessed by the Other, then, as we shall see, the killing of Valerie by
Tha l's dogs, which closes the novel, the uncanny return of the colonial re-
pressed, is a firm foreclosure of feminine desire, as well as a remarkable rendi-
tion of the uncommon, unrecognized persistence of colonial discourses in the
construction of strategies of liberation. The narrative's annulment of this mu-
tual object of desire becomes a powerful indictment of the blind acceptance of
authoritarian linearities in a colonial context of uncertainty.
   The incessant (re)doubling of character and situation through which
Glissant maps the heterotopia of postcolonial subjectivity is thus put into place
early in the intrigue. By implicitly comparing Tha l's inscription in the land
and his implicit separation from the world of secular politics with the bour-
geois vision and strategic fragmentation of the activists, Glissant quickly con-
veys the various voices and positions of the colonial experience. The double
nature of life in Lambrianne, soon to become a figure for the alienated subjec-
tivity inherent in the intragroup relationships, is what Tha l discovers when he
descends from the mountains, only to find in himself the same duality: "Tha l
finally got to know the plain, with its heavy, dazzling light . . . and silence
explosive enough to take hold of a man's strength. He was most dazzled by the
impalpable, mysterious unrelieved intoxication .. . the ceaseless struggle be-
tween the principle of drought and the accident of water" (27/24; emphasis
mine). The underlying principle of existence in Lambrianne is this conflictual
duality-extending from the liminal, oppositional relationship between land
and water, hill and plain, to the intersubjectivity that overdetermines the in-
habitants-whose relationships, as we shall observe, draw on patterns that are
the product of the multilayered structures of their individual existences.
   The activists themselves, as Frederick I. Case suggests, are cut off, both
socially and politically, from the community whose interests they claim to pro-
tect: "Glissant's group of young intellectuals is somewhat removed from the
socioeconomic ills of their society insofar as the group is comprised of a num-
ber of relatively privileged individuals" (1985:70). But what needs to be empha-
sized here, in my view, is the extent to which this internal socioeconomic
separation serves to erect a doubly symbolic state of blindness; by attempting to
eliminate their compatriot Garin, and in accomplishing this task through the
third-party proxy of Tha l, they repeat and exacerbate the already complex set
of contradictions through which the colonial script locates and overdeter-
mines both the narrative and its subjects. The initial, mysterious meeting be-





32 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tween Mathieu and Tha l, for example, suggests the existence of a series of
subconscious links between them whose boundaries encompass more than
the merely tangible.
   These schisms and parallels recur discursively at several critical junctures
in the narrative, especially at the moment when the group decides to kill
Garin, the political agitator. The critical imbalance represented by his pres-
ence is clearly put by the text: "They had learnt that a government official had
been authorized to put down the political movement in Lambrianne. It was to
be expected. But the man chosen happened to be an old inhabitant of the
country, a renegade and hence doubly guilty. He had to be rendered harmless.
Everyone knew that, renegade that he was, he was prepared to commit the
worst acts of violence; our friends decided that it was up to them to muzzle this
beast" (24/18-19). Garin's very status, then, is problematic on a number of lev-
els; criminal, renegade, and social outcast though he may be, not only is he a
member of the community, a colonial subject to the same degree as Thal,
Mathieu, and the others, but, at the same time, his criminal role separates him
from this community just as his governmental role inscribes him in the
colonizer's domain.
   The complexity that attends this ambiguous character and the coming
event of his death takes place in a doubling of discourses and positions whose
deliberate disjunctures mark the impossibility of locating the simple polar
opposites that are the supposed corollary of colonialism. For the group, their
own reluctance to perform this political murder themselves separates them
not only from their intended victim but also from their chosen agent, Thal.
"Soon the group of friends found itself alone, feverish and impatient. They all
knew they would have to prove their worth. They decided therefore to elimi-
nate the official. 'But,' thought Mathieu, 'we cannot do it ourselves, we are too
well-known, too easily located.'.. .That was the nature of the land and its first
suppression of injustice. The land which was learning the new and violent way
of the world, after so much forgotten violence; and it made its cry heard" (25/
19-20). Indeed, perhaps the largest irony in the decision to eliminate Garin is
the unspoken fact that he is a fellow national, a colonial subject, despite his
questionable political loyalties. So political victory for the group of bourgeois
activists depends upon defeating colonial oppression through the proxy of a
member of the peasant class, chosen to eliminate yet another colonial subject
working to ensure the survival of the colonial status quo. Such contradictions
work to underline further the positional fragmentation of the forces of libera-




La Ldzarde / 33


tion symbolized by their leader, Mathieu. His realization that "we cannot do it
ourselves" not only presents him as speaking, or thinking, for the others of the
group-an act which preserves sociopolitical hierarchies even as it serves to
underline his own sense of superiority and distance-but presents him
through a sort of discursive twilight that is neither direct speech-for it re-
mains an unspoken thought-nor free indirect discourse nor, for that matter,
reported speech. This sort of discursive displacement has the effect not only of
separating the group from the larger social whole in whose name, or for whose
benefit, it purports to act, but also separates Mathieu, in his role as leader, from
the rest of the group for whom he appears to think and speak.
   Further complicating the discourse is the immediate jump from Mathieu's
internalized utterances to an omniscient form of narrative commentary, one
which tends to blur the lines separating both narrative moments:'"'We cannot
do it ourselves, we are too well-known, too easily located.' . . . That was the
nature of the land." Such a sequence of diversified discursive positions serves
to problematize the multiform subjectivity of the activists and their various
roles, and to underline the pluralisms of a colonial society seeking to translate
its uncertainties into a site of contestation. Far from being a positive attempt to
"write into existence" a "transcend[ent] . . . deed," then, as Chris Bongie ar-
gues (1998:146), the complex intersections of plot and discourse in La Ldzarde
may be said to be putting into place a framework for interrogating and illumi-
nating the complexities and contradictions attending the post/colonial site
through the complications and resonances of the assassination deed itself.
   More globally, the narrative discourse of La Ldzarde goes to peculiar
lengths to reflect the plural sites and perspectives of this liminal post/colonial
moment. In the last scene, for example, by virtue of its double representation
as a sort of direct thought enclosed within quotation marks, the form of
Mathieu's discourse reflects the extent to which the situation reflects the
undecidabilities of the colonial script, inscribing the pains that the narrative
must take in order to re-present the infinite economy of exchange which this
scene enacts. Indeed, the entire novel is also strikingly marked by the persis-
tent, unremitting use of free indirect discourse (FID) across the narrative spec-
trum,6 a style with implications that seem particularly appropriate to the re-
presentation of specific patterns of colonial subjectivity. While FID has been
critically defined by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan as "contributing or being
analogous to the governing thematic principle(s) of the work under consider-
ation . . . convey[ing] the theme of the discontinuous, developing self"




34 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

(1983:113), it is a form that is also intrinsically reflective of the alienation and
insufficiency of colonial roles. From its initial identification of a subject un-
able to adequately express itself as "I," FID also effectively articulates the par-
tial presence and identitarian displacement of those rendered subject to the
discursive dislocations of the colonial encounter. The ever-increasing use of
FID by postcolonial authors bears witness to their recognition of the potential
of this narrative code to re-present the overlapping, oppositional, and frag-
mented formulations of identity that emerge in the negotiation of the post/
colonial moment.
   From this perspective, then, the repeated re-presentation of the group of
conspirators through the prism of FID specifically articulates the fragmenta-
tion of any fixed, unitary colonial positions, a splitting whose traces mark both
colonizer and colonized. By staging their ambivalence through a narrative
perspective that specifically suggests an incomplete discursive subject, Glis-
sant shows both colonialism's deleterious disjunctures and the latent possi-
bilities for resiting colonial re-presentation in a narrative context he would
ultimately define as antillanitd. As we shall see, in the period immediately
following Garin's death, at what is perhaps the novel's most critical stage of
doubling and disjuncture, the entire community is ultimately figured by these
patterns of subjective displacement.
   The intrinsic pluralities and polarities that produce the divisions of a colo-
nial perspective are also effectively shown at that key moment in the text when
Tha l agrees to kill Garin for the activists. Here, a wealth of subjective signifi-
cation is incorporated into the interstices of the narrative: "He did not hesitate
because of moral scruples, he would tell them that. It was not the prospect of
bloodshed that made him reluctant. . . . The sacrifice of a human life is highly
regarded in mythology. Is this also true of stark reality? Was one man the key to
the order and the balance that were his ultimate goals? . . . Of course, this
renegade was capable of ordering even more suffering on the people. And
misery thicker than a dense fog approaching from the sea would darken the
land. That had to be prevented. That was the essential thing. . . . (Before a
dumbfounded Tha l stands Pablo. He had known from ever since that Tha l
would accept. . . . He was calm, gentle, in command of the situation)" (49-50/
56-57)-
   By re-presenting Tha l's pained rationalization of his acquiescence to the
murder in FID, the narrative conveys both his sense of internal division and his
simultaneous distance from the rest of the activists with whom he has thrown




La Ldzarde / 35


in his lot. This use of free indirect discourse, underlined by the presence of
parentheses and the stark contrast of Pablo's demeanor, signifies the fragmen-
tation that is already ingrained in this liminal community, the uneven perspec-
tives and positions at work in the society whose axes are symbolized by
Mathieu, Tha l, and Garin. For the tensions that both bind and separate the
inhabitants are also those translated by the narrator into the plural resonances
of his discursive act. While the inability of the subject to express himself as "I,"
which is implied by FID's joining of narrator and character, tends to suggest
Tha l's simultaneous placement in a number of positions, this idea is consoli-
dated by the really intriguing presence of the commentary accompanying
Pablo's distanced, calm acceptance of Tha l's stupefaction, a narrative gloss
whose placement in parentheses underscores the marginal role of the average
character in this context. Glissant will again make use of parentheses in the
text, at a more intriguing moment and on a much more significant scale, but
the bracketing of this fragment reinforces the sense of marginality raised by
these discursive positions, and questions the very structures of separation recu-
perated by the divisions implicit within a colonial discourse.
   The creolization that is at work in Glissant's narrative is one that operates
simultaneously on several levels. Since his goal is the re-presentation of the
conflictual forces that have split both the colonial subject and its cultural
memory, he accomplishes this by problematizing both the content and the
form of the narrative framework. In other words, the constant regression, dou-
bling, and discursive reversal that recur throughout the novel determine not
only the ideological positions assumed by the characters but also the discourse
that provides the terrain for their actions. Thus, in contradistinction to Chris
Bongie's astonishing assertion that "La Ldzarde moves forward in a relatively
straight line" (1998:146), it seems to me that the deliberate doubling and frag-
mentation of the work's narrative line and perspective appear incontestable,
forming an integral part of the author's discursive articulation of the antino-
mies undergirding the intersection of departmentalism and postcolonialism.
Indeed, I would argue that it is in such complex ambiguities and undec-
idabilities that Glissant's modernity is primarily inscribed.
   From this perspective, perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly the most
critical, scene in the novel is the one recounted in chapter i6 of part i. It re-
presents a meeting held by the activists in which questions of means and
method are discussed, and already we are forewarned of the deliberate dis-
placements and disequilibrium that the discourse will undergo; the narrative




36 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

tells us that "there they held a strange conversation, terse, impulsive, crazy,
with crosscurrents and alluvial deposits which swirled under the surface of
what they said, bearing their secret passions" (53/62). The scene is striking
more from the perspective of its form than from that of its content; indeed, the
conversation is rather enigmatic and elliptical. But not only is the scene intro-
duced through the use of the first-person plural, it effectively occurs twice. In
the first instance, the dialogue is presented without mediation or commentary,
in a "theatrical" format in which each speaker is designated simply by name,
followed by a colon and his or her respective "lines." But then, as if this distur-
bance of previously established patterns of narrative modality were insuffi-
cient, the scene is immediately recuperated and reproduced, this time in ital-
ics but now through a first-person narrative introduced as "minutes of the last
meeting," and contravening the linear sequences of its previous re-presenta-
tion to the extent that every utterance is now displaced from its original posi-
tion relative to the other utterances in the scene.
   The striking manner in which the presentation of this scene stages its own
double difference from the novel's already alternative temporalities of post/
colonial displacement-for it is the singular occurrence of its kind-compels
us to consider its deliberate construction of an ambiguous space of opposi-
tional discursive "otherness." For Glissant is very clearly putting into place
structures that will ground the very terms in which the novel will articulate the
temporal dislocation and identificatory substitutions that are the corollaries of
an Antillean imaginary of the creole; indeed, the chapter is a paradigm of the
doubling and displacement upon which the novel's pluralities of character
and plot are largely based. Integral to a reading of the first scene is the fact that
the theatrical format upon which it draws articulates the nuances of role-play-
ing, the mimetic re-presentation of the already written. By implicitly defining
the activists as role-players, he constructs an important relation between the
duality of the self-image and the alienation of an attenuated identity, colonial
cultural subjects caught in the interstices of discursive disjuncture. In other
words, each role-player occupies a paradoxical subjective space, serving as an
ambivalent agent of colonialism's inevitable rhetoric of repetition, and this
complex re-iteration constitutes the first level of the doubling by which the
chapter recuperates the complex cultural connections and political contradic-
tions that form the basis of a creole community. The ostensible reason for the
meeting, the sanctioning of Mathieu's increasingly high-handed behavior,
serves only to underline the perceptible subjective dispersal that attends it.




La Ldzarde / 3-


"Margarita: You are the one responsible. Thael: Yes. Yes. It's me. Gilles:
Mathieu had made up his mind a long time ago. Michel: What are we doing?
Luc: Mathieu must redeem himself. I propose excluding him from the group
for two months. Thael: You are a good Catholic? " (54/63). But further, its
astonishing departure from preestablished patterns of narration marks a delib-
erate discursive attempt to inscribe the traces of an interstitial intersubjectivity
in the very fabric of the narrative, creolizing the discourse through the implied
alienation and doubling of these sociopolitical/dramatic roles and emphasiz-
ing the alluvial slippages and metonymies of a latent, emerging antillanit6.
   Along similar lines, the chapter's second level of doubling or second mo-
ment of re-presentation, in which the content of the primary scene is simulta-
neously glossed and displaced, effectively problematizes further the entire nar-
rative structure of the novel, vacating paradigms of textual authority and
placing the entire site under the sign of erasure. By rearticulating the intrinsic
ambivalence of both of these subjects and of the foundational framework in
which they are forced to act, the narrative/dddoublement disperses the situ-
ational space, interrogating the dialectical assumptions underlying colonial
practice and undermining the symbolic certitude of its signifying system.
"Minutes of the last meeting; Mathieu under discussion. Pablo as recording
secretary . . . there is a discussion as to who is the leader. I don't say a word.
Mathieu is our leader and yet we have no leader: both things are true ... as if
any anyone can be helped. . . . There is only the tumult, the savage call, the
burning flame, but I am sure that we are on the verge of finding something"
(56/65-66). As the rapport is made to serve double duty as a functional second-
ary level of commentary to which only reader and reporter are privy, the con-
stant, repeated redoubling of the discursive framework, combined with the
insistent (under)mining of uncertainty (Matthew is our leader and yet we have
no leader: both things are true.... There is only the tumult), inscribe the un-
decidabilities and disseminations of postcolonial positionality in the insistent
liminalities of meaning of the region's contemporary context.
   This reflexive turn transforms the "imagined community" of the colonial
French Caribbean from inhabitants of a confined symbolic space to one en-
gaging hybrid communal possibilities, accomplishing a resiting of the bound-
aries of national narratives and, implicitly, of discursive paradigms of the
postcolonial. The complex, staggered evolution of the plot conveys the perfor-
mance of difference by opening up new spaces of contestation and translation
by articulating the supplementary ideological turns and reciprocities of both




38 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

situation and character. This peripatetic quality attaching to the narration
underlines the elaborate nature of the pervasive intersubjectivity in the creole
economy of exchange governing both narrative structure and colonial subject.
   The event that perhaps best symbolizes the interpenetrative instability of
the positions at work in the community of Lambrianne follows Tha l's con-
quest of his own hesitations: "He is not as prepared as he thought to plunge a
knife into the chest of another man" (71/89-90). He then goes back into the
hills to find, in what Maria do Nascimento calls a "voyage initiatique et ... une
complicit6 avec le mystere des origines (416)," the source of the Lezarde river,
the figure for the oppositional orientations of the entire community, bottled up
beneath Garin's house.
   Garin, along with Tha l and Mathieu, represents the third node in the
complex triad of subjective signification that governs the text. Both a colonial
and a well-known henchman of the opposition, Garin has a history of violence
and subversion; he is described as "the renegade Garin. (A man who grew up
without care; first a waiter, then chauffeur to an important plantation owner
and soon a man capable of anything: he has killed for money. . . . He had left
the country when there were threats against his life. He came back with new
authority, on an official mission!) This rough creature now gives orders, throws
his weight about" (71/89). These negative characteristics aside, this strategic
location of Garin's identity structure within parentheses serves to draw atten-
tion to the fact that it is indeed his positionality, rather than his personal at-
tributes, that will ultimately influence and determine his meeting with Tha l
and the direction of the plot. Further, we are told that he is engaged in a
somewhat questionable affair with the very planter with whom he used to
work; while the disposition of land on the eve of such a momentous election
can certainly redound to the profit of the unscrupulous, Garin simultaneously
appears to be in the deal for his own ends: "'I represent the law. And you
cannot accuse me without implicating yourself as well. . . . Not as a personal
favour. Those days are gone.'. . . The slight man is at the mercy of his former
chauffeur " (75/95). Garin's task is to follow the Lezarde to the sea, a journey of
three days, but it is deliberately left unclear whether his disingenuous agenda
is ultimately meant to bring enrichment to his former employer or to himself.
Either action, however, will only disperse and deepen further the oppositions
at work in the plot that render Garin an indeterminate signifier of colonial
instability; ultimately, the ambivalent ideological perspective that underwrites




La Ldzarde / 39


his alterity will parallel the problematic trajectory signified by Tha l's attempt
on his life, making possible an extraorinary subjective transformation that will,
through their respective roles, firmly link the double subjection of these two
protagonists to the overlapping temporalities of this liminal moment in Carib-
bean geopolitics.
   The house that Garin has built over the source of the Lezarde, then, pos-
sesses an unsurpassed importance in the development of the narrative. The
revelatory character of Tha l's moment of discovery is represented quite
clearly in the text.

   Then he discovers the house. Heavy, shuttered. . . . This house fascinates
   him. He cannot figure out why, but it seems somehow monstrous. Yet it
   was like any other, closed in on itself, silent. Tha l prowls around all day.
   ... The front is most impressive: the paint fresh, the walls cared for. The
   wind and rain come from the north, he thinks. It is the other side that
   protects the house really. . . . [He] goes back to look more closely at the
   extraordinary stream of water, he could hear the murmur of the spring
   coming from inside the house. . . . the middle of the room is empty, a
   yawning emptiness.... Empty and lifeless. That is until Tha l, guided by
   the noise, arrives at the spring from which the water is flowing. The impris-
   oned source of the Lezarde, guarded by thick walls, surrounded by marble
   tiles, like an idol bedecked with ornaments.... It all begins here. 72-74/
   91-93-
From its closed shutters to its monstrous appearance, the house is an enigma.
Indeed, its hybrid centrality, significantly offset by the emptiness at its center,
generates a double metonymic link both to Garin's authoritarian association
with the colonizer and to the sheltered source of the Lezarde that makes it a
perfect figure for the power and inscrutable ambiguity of the colonial site. Its
enigmatic quality also draws metonymically on Garin's contradictory social
position. On the one hand, as a native of Lambrianne, he is as much a mem-
ber, and a product, of this colonial society as Tha l, Mathieu, and the other
activists; he is subject to the same pattern of discursive strictures as they are. On
the other hand, his decision to place himself at the disposal of those working
against the interests of independence and autonomy also inscribes him in the
field of the Other, immediately rendering him an intrinsically complex and
ambivalent figure. The extraordinary ambiguity of this position makes his




40 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


house a perfect figure for the doubled inscriptions attending the colonial en-
counter and places him in a similarly indeterminate position to that taken by
Tha l with regard to the activists.
   Both Tha l and Garin, then, are caught up in the interstices of an identity
crisis, neither completely colonial subjects nor wholly representative of the
Other in whose desire they are both already inscribed. Thus Tha l's statement
that "it all begins here" suggests his own implicit recognition of the forces
joining them both and of the joint role that Tha l, Garin, and his control of the
source of the Lezarde in its role as cultural signifier have to play in the articu-
lation of a field of signification from this creole temporality of difference.
   Given the importance of the Lezarde to the cultural cohesion of Lam-
brianne, then, the location of its source under the control of the colonizer's
double agent suggests a recognition of the protean nature of colonial authority.
In other words, because the complex figure of the source-both symbol of the
past and starting point of the future-signifies the oppositions of the colonial
condition for both colonizer and colonized, this ambivalence produces in turn
a space within which all who are subject to colonial intervention become im-
bricated in this attempt to trace a differential line of descent for the imminent
postcolonial moment. Interestingly, this space is not only controlled by Garin;
its center remains empty until Tha l enters it, and the latter's realization that "I
discover the source at the same time that I find the man" (74/92) is indicative
of the paradoxically central relationship that he is about to form with his elu-
sive quarry.
   In what is perhaps the most significant sequence in the narrative, Garin and
Tha l proceed to descend the Lezarde together, both aware that Garin knows
that Tha l's ultimate task is to kill him. Together, they function as an articu-
lated sign of the undecidability of the colonial site, their reciprocal affiliation
an ineluctable, strategic symbiosis immediately made overt at the beginning of
chapter 3 of part 2: "They begin their descent, one following the other, bound
by an invisible thread.... they turn with no alternative to the mocking com plic-
ity of the streaming waters" (77/98; emphasis mine). Yet at the same time, it is
this very imbrication that must be surpassed so that an alternative, tertiary pat-
tern of postcolonial antillanit6 may supplant it: "At such moments they both
pulled at the invisible bonds that held them together.... they both grow weak
in the oppressive silence that. . . condemn[s] and oppress[es] them. . . . Garin
is affected (disturbed, overcome) by this waiting for Tha l, by the wish which
will only be fulfilled by his, Garin's, death. But he is not conscious of all this"




La Ldzarde / 41


(78-79/100). The river whose traces they follow downstream now inhabits that
unnameable place of slippage and of doubling that is produced as the colonial
site re-presents the unsettling anxieties and affiliations that are its hallmark.
   The ineluctable conflict and consensus that governs this interaction be-
tween Tha l and Garin will ultimately shape new sites of resistance and
contestation. Given that each is simultaneously interpellated both as a post-
colonial inhabitant of Lambrianne and as the colonial Other in whose dis-
course the subject is always already alienated -Garin's link to the opposition is
matched by Tha l's acceptance of his murderous task-the desire for recogni-
tion from this Other that governs the indeterminacy of their discursive subjec-
tion will force them to sink, or swim, together.
   Importantly, the narrator leaves no doubt as to the complicity of both char-
acters in the trajectory of events limned by their descent of the river. They are
joined not only by the geopolitical discourse that shapes their specific subjec-
tivity but also by a sort of destiny that draws them increasingly closer together:
"So Tha l and Garin follow fate, along the course of the river. . . They are
together now. The obstacles along the way are less trouble now. Tha l helps
Garin out of the mud, Garin carries Tha l from one embankment to another.
... So, little by little, they become closer" (86/n1). Yet at the same time, their
rhetoric remains ensnared in the ambivalent indeterminacies of the colonial
encounter. Glissant's vision of the construction of a creole cultural community
that must prevail against the grain of an overarching discourse of domination
stages the symbolic formation of this body politic, mediated by the hybrid
creativity of a liminal moment of displacement and disjuncture.
   This Glissantian perspective on Caribbean realities, which Beverley Orm-
erod describes in her book An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel as
"an attempt to acquire a sense of the continuous flow of time which lies dor-
mant in the Caribbean landscape" (36), deliberately establishes a specific dis-
cursive temporality of difference in order to reflect and convey the contradic-
tions and discontinuities that have determined the regional experience. In
terms of the liminal moment of transition symbolized by the impending elec-
tions, the repetitions, obscurities, and parallels that emerge from the ideologi-
cal interaction centering on Garin's death signify a re-presentation of the com-
plex undercurrents that together create the imaginary of this people. The
pluralities of the past, present, and the imminent future, re-presented through
the affinities and antitheses of identity and ideology, converge in these hetero-
topic lines of character and plot whose insistent inversions mark the impossi-





42 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


bility of a linear narrative logic. These relational aspects of the discursive space
of La Ldzarde operate within a larger framework of colonial undecidability
that forces the recuperation of its tensions through the temporal ruptures and
identitarian rifts of the narrative. The discursive "double signification" that
permeates La Ldzarde links these protean alluvial traces of colonial division to
the interstitial inscription of an impending departmentalization. This synthe-
sis of narrative, cultural, and ideological patterns limns the impossibility of a
unitary logic and prefigures the ineluctable collision of interests and positions
that attend the redefinition of colonial teleologies. In the tangential intersec-
tions of Tha l and Garin, and their encounter with the chiaroscuro world of
the Lezarde river, colonialism's binary boundaries of origin and identity will
be contested, reformulated, and relocated.
   In journeying down the river, the two men form a paradoxical bond; their
mediation by the symbolic resonances of the Lezarde leads to "their strange,
almost unconscious friendship, the fraternity that they were in spite of them-
selves about to share" (94/122). If the river transforms and unites them, it simul-
taneously disturbs the oppositions that they represent to the extent that the
approaching sea must now contain this combination of unity and irreconcil-
ability. This critical juncture between river and sea, as Beverley Ormerod sug-
gests, becomes "a transition from flux and mutability to a timeless immobility,
an infinite spaciousness, and induces in both men a surrender to the inevi-
table" (1985:48). What is inescapable, however, is the presence of that sym-
bolic, relational reciprocity that implicitly mediates their functional intersec-
tion within the text, and that ultimately determines both the moment and the
manner of Garin's death.
   For significantly, Garin's demise by drowning, when it does occur, does not
take place in the waters of the Lezarde; this event occurs just beyond the point
where the river joins and becomes one with the sea. This site of transition is
marked by a sandbar, and it is Garin's attempt to traverse this bar that precipi-
tates his death. The Rubicon-like symbolic importance of the bar is indicated
early on in the narrative, when in a prefigurative moment of discussion among
the activists, the intricacies and dualities of the impending transition are in-
scribed in symbolic terms: "'The sea is a little like politics,' Pablo was saying. .
.. there was a sand bar feared even by accomplished swimmers, and which was
approached with extreme caution by sailing boats on their return from fishing.
... 'Politics is a serious matter, neither romantic nor mysterious. Let's go be-
yond the sand bar, but let's guard against any eventuality'. . . .'No one has ever




La Ldzarde / 43


drowned, not so?"' (40-41/43). Notwithstanding the debatable and paradoxical
means adopted by the group to arrive - through Thal - at the bar, it is Garin's
vain attempt to cross the bar and the implications of this symbolic transition
from the discursive space of the river to that of the sea that define this act as a
symbolic moment of performative modernity for them both, a transition
supplemented by the crucial fact that Tha l is never shown to be directly re-
sponsible for Garin's death except for his role in overturning their boat.
   Indeed, the text clearly shows Tha l's ongoing hesitation with regard to the
actuality of murder and, significantly, conveys this through free indirect dis-
course: "Why all this noise, all these words? He cannot do it. He could never in
cold blood, kill a man" (100/129-30). Importantly, we also see Tha l's subordi-
nate stance in this schema, and the predominant role played by the sea in
articulating these final axes of association and antithesis:

   The sea weighs these things and takes the life of one and the death of the
   other! Look. Look again.... Garin cries out (his entire body leaning into
   the wall, he wants to overcome the sand bar, to laugh in the sunlight on the
   other side, he wants to mock Tha l, he is mocking the sea where all plans
   are undone. . . . Then at last he leaps on Garin. . . . The canoe against the
   sea, and Tha6l against Garin. When the sea wages war, nothing is left but
   foam.... The water breaks the fragile bond between them. Garin struggles
   against the blue maelstrom.... Tha l swims.... He does not know that the
   sea has overcome Garin.... Where is the river, the Lezarde.... Valerie is
   swimming with him. (113-14/146-47; emphasis mine)

Here, it is effectively the sea that takes Garin's life; and indeed, for a moment,
Tha l remains quite unaware of this eventuality. Subjected as they are to the
symbolic script of the sea, which, paradoxically, condemns one of them to
death and, as we shall see, the other to life in a deliberate dialectic of ongoing
colonial duality, the tortuous complexities of their mutual condition, one now
also mediated by Valerie but over which both Tha l and Garin had little if any
control, are now resited by this passage of translation, significantly inscribed
from the outset as the terminal point in the Lezarde's figurative passage
through the community of Lambrianne.
   The water and the land have always marked the ineluctable boundaries of
this discursive economy-in a critical referential gesture, the sea signifies both
the horrors of the Middle Passage in a slavery-dominated past and the umbili-
cal tie of the Antilles to the metropolitan mere-patrie, the very tie placed in




44 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

question by the imminent departmental election-and now also mark indel-
ibly the manner of Garin's demise. For whereas the stated goal of Tha l's en-
counter with Garin was always his death, it was also a goal that, given the
parallelism of their ideological inscription in the text, Tha l could not be al-
lowed to carry out personally, since such an act would imply the creation of an
unbridgeable chiasmus of subjective signification. The manner and moment
of Garin's death thus simultaneously set the stage for the remarkable
identitarian revelation that follows, the scene marking both an end and a be-
ginning for Tha l's double existence in the community of Lambrianne, and
preparing his entry into the symbolic realm of patriarchal culture. Water itself
plays a critical role here, undermining any illusions of subjective mastery or
control. As Michael Dash appositely remarks in his reading of the forces at
work in this scene, "The water does not perform a cleansing role here but
indeed quite an opposed function, that of challenging the certitude of a pure
consciousness" (1992:80). Ultimately, as we shall see, it is precisely these pat-
terns of certitude and purity that are placed in question-and left unre-
solved-by this critical encounter between Garin and Tha l. Garin, then,
mediating the axes of this passage in one of the most critical moments in the
novel, dies attempting to "overcome the sandbar," to accomplish, in effect, a
discursive metastasis from the dualities of the river to the infinite timelessness
of the sea. But the interstices of the very colonial discourse by which he is
overdetermined also tend to conceal the fact that this attempted transition is in
fact an unmediated leap from a binary colonial past to a plural postcolonial
future, from overdetermination to liberation without taking care to negotiate
the traces and modalities of an interstitial, implicit difference which is almost
absolute but not quite-and that Garin's attempt was therefore doomed from
the very outset. It is through the flux and fluidity of such an interstitial mo-
ment-one whose tensions underwrite the construction of the migrant col-
laborative consciousness of the creole-that the connections and contesta-
tions of a new cultural identification will be charted and defined.
   Indeed, the symbolic significance of the bar should not be understated. We
recall Jacques Lacan's reformulation of Ferdinand de Saussure's construction
of the bar separating signifier and signified. Lacan's rereading of Saussure pos-
its the bar as a "barrier resisting signification. . . the irreducibility in which the
relations between signifier and signified, the resistance to signification is con-
stituted" (1977:149, 164). He further points out the importance of "the crossing
of the bar-and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of




La Ldzarde / 45


signification" (1977:164). Now if we return to the text to reread Garin's attempt
to cross the bar from the perspective of this liminal moment of postcolonial
transition, it becomes clear that, notwithstanding this postcolonial paradigm's
intrinsic subversion of the binary bases of Western theory, such a crossing
would have implied the accomplishment of an alternative paradigm of
signification rewriting and overdetermining the entire symbolic structure of
the narrative economy, immediately risking its imminent closure. In other
words, given the creole constraints that must continue to shape the form of the
narrative and the positionality of its characters, not only was it literally and
figuratively impossible for Garin to cross the bar, he could not have been al-
lowed to do so, for such an action would have implied the retroactive joining of
figure to ground, of signifier to signified, erasing the pervasive duality of metro-
politan hierarchies and displacing the compulsive disjunctures of departmen-
talization whose appropriation and institution create these contestatory sites of
sociopolitical identity. The novel's initial insistence on a radical relocation and
revision of the implicit divisions at work in an encounter between the discur-
sive linearities of colonialism and the perpetual dislocations of departmental-
ization compels the foreclosure of any eventuality that would recuperate the
very dichotomies whose revision and recognition are necessary to the differen-
tial praxis of a new cultural community where values would be grounded in
the diverse affiliations of antillanit6.
   But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this critical moment in the nar-
rative is the way in which it allows a new articulation of Tha l as a post-
colonial subject who is arguably less than one-neither entirely colonizer nor
colonized-but now recognizably double. As the death of Garin is reported
and the local representative of colonial authority, the policeman Alphonse
Tigamba-who by virtue of his social role, his ineluctable colonial inscrip-
tion, and his close knowledge of the group's members embodies perhaps the
ultimate compromise-begins the interrogation, the discourse incorporates a
series of italicized responses whose double register-as both narrative com-
mentary and internal monologue by Tigamba-simultaneously conveys
Tigamba's anguish at his foreknowledge of a plot now apparently come to
fruition, and reinforces the sudden transformation of Tha l's identitarian posi-
tion: "'What happened?' 'We went out in a boat.... We overturned, he did not
come back.' The starkness of words. You killed him, but what to do? Be careful
what you say, this man is powerful" (118/153). For, in a sudden and astonishing
reversal, we discover that in the wake of these events the protagonist suddenly




46 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


no longer calls himself by the name with which we have become familiar. In
response to Tigamba's question, "What is your name?" (118/153), he identifies
himself for the first time by his full name, "Raphael Targin." In other words,
not only has this subject, given his involvement in rather than his responsibil-
ity for Garin's death, instantiated a new identity, but the inextricable link be-
tween the demise of Garin and this new nomenclature is signaled by the strik-
ing fact that "Targin" constitutes an almost exact anagram of "Garin," with the
name of the Other preserved in the supplement of the initial "t" and in the
final four letters that close both "Tha l" and "Raphael." Indeed, the signifi-
cance of this nominative and positional exchange is reinforced by the next line
of narrative commentary/monologue, which appears in italics following
Tha l's identificatory speech act: "Raphaul Targin, and no longer Thaul" (n8/
154)-
   By literally writing his performance with the letters of ambiguity, Tha l
signals his dual inscription as both self and Other, his ineluctable inscriptive
isolation from the group of activists simultaneously rendering him the contra-
dictory counterpart of an already overdetermined Garin. Given his uncon-
scious subjection to these parameters of Otherness, by virtue of which he for-
goes the necessary step of explicitly acknowledging the affiliative ambiguity by
which he is shaped, the constitutive imbrication of his identity with the field of
the Other through which the nascent postcolonial community must be written
unknowingly sets up the ultimate return of the colonial repressed, the un-
canny reinscription of the very elusive enunciative modalities that beset the
terrain of the colonial encounter.


The Discourse of Antillanite

The sweeping interrogation and re-placement of colonial positionalities that
are at the heart of Glissant's narrative practice involve both the discourse and
the subjects of the colonial encounter. Indeed, the narrative sets up a doubled
framework within which binary patterns appear to persist within the relation-
ship between the colony and the metropole, while these patterns and their
corollaries of fragmentation are simultaneously subverted, undermining any
attendant assumptions of chronology and coherence. This Glissantian double-
ness, as we have seen, extends both from colony to metropole and along the
twin trajectories traced by Mathieu and Tha l and Tha l and Garin, shaping




La Ldzarde / 4


the patterns and paradigms of the pervasive complicity that defines this post-
colonial condition.
   Glissant makes use of a variety of innovative techniques to mark and mea-
sure the contingent nature of coincidence and event in the narrative, inscrib-
ing as he does so a deliberate deferral of narrative resolution whose symbolic
implications are revealed only at the end of the novel. For example, chapter 6
of part 3, titled "L'Election," is narrated in the second-person singular, a delib-
erately self-reflexive turn that implicates both author and reader even as it
inscribes revolving patterns of discursive and subjective alienation, reinforcing
the notion, as Michael Dash suggests, that "the subject in Glissant has a shap-
ing effect on and is shaped by the object of its attention" (1995:64). Other
innovations abound, all contributing to an overall narrative discourse that in-
stantiates the very fragmentation, dislocation, and pluralism that constitute
the subject of the narration.
   In this regard, chapter u1 of part 2, titled "L'Acte," represents an extraordi-
nary attempt at conveying both the inexorability of impending events and the
simultaneity of a multitude of narrative situations. "Four journeys. Four direc-
tions. . . . Four clear furrows in the surrounding confusion" (104/136). The
discourse slips imperceptibly from one character and situation to another,
from a conversation between Mathieu and Papa Longou6, the quimboiseur, to
one between Luc and Gilles, who are elsewhere but in the same moment: "'I
cannot hear you, Mister Mathieu. Ah! My sight is going, and my hearing too.
...' 'The sea!' Luc exclaims (but they, Luc and Michel, are near the railings
around the square, waiting for those who set out-Where to? . . . )" (107/139).
Glissant's deliberate attempts to subvert the authoritative linearities of omni-
scient, chronological narration are grounded in his conviction, clearly articu-
lated later in the Discours antillais (105/198), that realist narrative is not in-
scribed in the cultural topography of Antilleans since its attendant binaries and
linearities are not reflective of the Antillean experience; by contrast, the dis-
continuities and disjunctures of his fictive discourse recuperate the discordant
doubling of Caribbean history and geopolitics.
   Yet, most remarkable is probably the fact that all of chapter 1o of part 2,
articulating an event paralleling in importance that critical moment in the
intrigue when Garin and Tha l are on the verge of undertaking their momen-
tous river descent, is enclosed in parentheses. This chapter recounts a large,
nighttime political meeting held on the market square of Lambrianne. Ten-




48 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

sion is high and the event is highly significant, for the election of which it is the
harbinger cannot be far off. It might be expected that this would be the point
where declarations would be made, sides taken, denouncements carried out,
and political platforms established. However, while the text rhetorically enacts
these gestures, it simultaneously undermines and marginalizes them through
the presence of parentheses and by rendering the entire scene in free indirect
discourse. The inherent ambiguity and fragmentation of FID succeed in eras-
ing the name and the space of identity, since the protean nature of the narra-
tive voice effectively prohibits any attempt to recuperate a tangible position-
ality from the narrative, recuperating the inherent ambivalence of a liminal
postcoloniality that reinscribes the binaries of the very authority it seeks to
displace.
   The parentheses, then, are discursively resonant in several ways. They
point, for example, to the hierarchical relationship between political activity
and the descent of the river by Garin and Tha l, implicitly interrogating the
efficacy of the former. They also address the overall discursive status of this
extract and the moment it articulates; since the totality of the chapter, almost
five pages long, is entirely located within parentheses, this may be read as a
primary sign of its status as a narrative within a narrative, and of the sig-
nificance of its embedded status. If, as Tzvetan Todorov points out in his Intro-
duction to Poetics, an embedded narrative establishes "a relation of causal ex-
planation [or] a relation of thematic juxtaposition" (1981:53), then the
narrative characteristics of this sequence may be taken as a microcosmic re-
representation of the thematics of the main text. The alterity that FID conveys
joins with the embedded narrative to produce an incessant dis-figuring of both
narrative and subjective cohesion.
   Once the meeting opens, these tendencies toward the erasure of linearity
are immediately extended. Not only does the narrative avoid stable origins, it is
linked to a specific speaker only through the most tenuous of metonymic as-
sociations: "The meeting was opened by a party speaker. He spoke of the im-
portance of the country, not of the pettiness of its exploiters. The time had
come to cast aside fear. They had trapped us like caged rats within the encir-
cling sea. But we have made their barren prison fertile with our blood and
sweat, and made it our own. Poverty was an old friend. The question was as
clear as water pouring from the rock. Nothing could be clearer: this is a purely
feudal relationship. How long could we tolerate the sight of our oppressors,
unpunished and unworthy? We must all fght for what we believe in" (102/132;




La Ldzarde / 49


emphasis mine). Since this passage incorporates several paradoxical stages of
discursive slippage, it calls for a close, nuanced reading of its patterns.
   If we begin to reread this passage from the point where the political dis-
course itself begins, the first thing that strikes us is its opening in medias res,
and the absence of the article in the original French: "Importance of the coun-
try." This lack of a semantic grounding tends to displace the words from the
context of the speaker; its effect is to erase any temporal or subjective con-
textualization from the enunciation of this discourse. Its tone, content, and
orientation tend to suggest the existence of a specific point of ideological or
geopolitical reference, but the rule of subversion engaged by the absence of
the article simultaneously works along with the mode of free indirect discourse
to prohibit any precision of attribution, and thus to pluralize the discursive
voice. Already textual ambiguity and polyphony are inscribed as the primary
terms of representation, with pluralism and dispersal already in place as over-
determinants of the text.
   Through the multiple, protean resonances of the pronoun nous (we, us),
the rest of the passage continually undergoes further displacement, re-present-
ing a colonial condition of subjection and embodying the contestation of the
marginal, the displaced, the (under)represented. Just as the possession of the
cagibi (cage) does not erase its presence nor alter its linear lines of colonial
descent, so the assumption of self-determination on a national scale will not
alter the duality of this liminal moment of transition as postcolonial subjects
assuming limited control of an environment whose history and temporality
differ radically from the metropole. The polyvalency of subject positions that
marks this postcolonial society is continually figured by its own intrinsic oppo-
sitions and contradictions. And so even the final exhortation of "we must all
fight for what we believe in," a plural address to a plural subject which implies
a speaker at one with his audience, suggests rhetorically a unity in contesta-
tion, but upon closer examination it is in fact delimited by the suggestion of
social fragmentation and disjuncture which may be inferred from the fact that
the exhortation has to be made at all.
   In sum, then, the entire chapter embodies a subversive subtext, a subjective
liminality that is perpetually reinforced and recuperated by the rhetorical
structure of its own discourse. By further enclosing these communal contradic-
tions within parentheses, the contingent nature of the meeting itself is under-
lined, the uselessness of conventional politics within a context of unknowable
and unfathomable ambiguity reinforced. Given the symbolically important




50 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

and ineluctable trajectory about to be traced by Tha l and Garin, and its im-
plicit effect upon the community whose complexities they purport to repre-
sent, the entire meeting may just as well never have occurred. The whole
chapter, therefore, traces an intrinsic reiterative doubling of subjectivity which
is perpetually reinforced and recuperated by the unstable rhetorical opera-
tions of the colonial encounter. Its remapping of a supposedly central politics
into a peripheral praxis still inscribed in the margin provides a striking struc-
tural echo of the extent to which the traditional approaches of a colonial hier-
archy, and an inscription in its attendant authority, are made to verge on the
irrelevant, by ignoring the multiple perspectives and protean relationships in-
trinsic to a burgeoning antillanit6. The multiplicities and undecidabilities of
place generate an interstitial incalculability that localizes the inscription of
Caribbeanness even as it interrogates the subjective and discursive modalities
of the metropolitan binary.
   Perhaps the primary way in which the associative ambiguities and parallels
by which this text resites and reframes both its colonial characters and the
discourse that determines their sense of community is through the deliberate
decentering of identity and perspective through free indirect discourse. While
its primary function is typically the transmission of thought and commentary
through its merging of character and narrator, FID has found increasingly
common use among postcolonial authors as an effective means of conveying
issues of alienation and displacement, through the appropriation of the inher-
ent dualities germane to this form. Pointing to its role as a narrative device for
simultaneously conveying thought and commentary, Wallace Martin suc-
cinctly defines FID as "a mixture or merging of narrator and character"
(1986:138). This merging of perspectives intrinsically joins subjects as well,
rendering it impossible to distinguish between them, to set them apart. It may
be said to signify a split in the ego of the discursive subject; the subject so
signified does not, and cannot, affirm itself as "I," for only direct discourse
possesses the capacity to mediate this inscription. Such a subject does not
speak but is spoken for, relinquishing both the ability to fully engage in dis-
course and the characteristics of a fully constituted discursive subject. When
FID is placed at the service of a narrative that translates and refigures the
contradictions of the colonial situation and its attendant discourses, it becomes
the mark of a pluralist and substitutive framework, decentering the fixity of
meaning and of identity. If FID is then assimilated as the discursive sign of the
divided and fragmented colonial subject, it can reflect and recuperate the in-




La Ldzarde / 51


trinsic multiplicity and dispersal of the colonial subjective space. As we shall
see, Glissant's use of this discursive form extends and enhances his narra-
tivization of the problematics of postcolonial pluralism.
   Glissant's extensive and varied use of FID as a referential framework for the
alienation and ambiguity of his characters constitutes an important and inno-
vative inscription of this narrative device within a context of postcolonial dis-
course. The subtle shifts in tone and perspective that presage the inscription of
FID underline the perpetual slippage signified by its constant resurgence. For
example, the entire speech conveying Tha l's acceptance of his murderous
task is written in FID, suggesting not only the speaker's intrinsic indecision but
his simultaneous separation and alienation from the perspective of his coun-
terparts: "But what is the nature of the link between myth and reality? The
sacrifice of a human life is highly regarded in mythology. Is this also true of
stark reality? Was one man the key to the order and the balance that were his
ultimate goals? Was this one man's death enough to attain peace of mind? "
(49/56). Here, Tha l appears ready to commit this political act as much for
himself as for the others (connaitre la srenit6); interestingly, the important
role played by legend and sacrifice in Tha l's subconscious, quite visible in
this extract, will return to revise his future at the end of the novel.
   But perhaps the most striking instance of FID in La Ldzarde occurs follow-
ing the death of the political henchman Garin, during the inquest presided
over by Judge Parel. This episode, which opens part 3 of the novel, titled
"L'Election," significantly contains not a single line of direct discourse pertain-
ing to the events under investigation. The few lines of attributable direct
speech serve to contextualize the colonial community through the courtroom
proceedings, and concern reminiscences of petty larceny, or the bribes that the
judge would accept for a reduction or revocation of sentence. Turning the
proceedings to Garin's case immediately engenders FID and its concomitant
alienation, as our narrative access to the judge's consciousness, for all practical
purposes, is couched in its disjunctures: "There was now this case of a drown-
ing! ... Why did these people always want to go to the sea; did he, Parel, High
Court judge, go down there? ... He had been ordered to make a full investiga-
tion, to show no mercy to this boy; the Garin fellow was important" (123/161).
By textually subjecting the judge, symbol of colonial authority, to the divisions
and dualities of a colonial discourse, Glissant's recognition of his authority
within a colonial framework is simultaneously placed under erasure. An alter-
nation between the dualities that mediate between "the Garin fellow" and the





52 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


judge himself takes place, reinforcing the double slippage that occurs between
sign and act and between discourse and subject, and resiting these multiple
misprisions of colonial authority: "But the judge hated important people.
What right had they to tell a judge what decision to make? Just because some
idiot did not know how to swim!" (123/161). By switching imperceptibly from
omniscient reporting to internal monologue, Glissant makes ambiguity and
dislocation the ground of this scene's representative economy, exacerbating
the imbrication of the judge and of the community at large in the fragmenta-
tion of identity generated by the colonial project.
   The high point of the scene, Tha l's testimony, is also marked in its turn by
this nonattributability and plurality of the discourse. In the space of three short
sentences, the narrative enacts a remarkable sequence of variations in perspec-
tive, which, while retaining Tha l as the focalizer, decenters and disperses the
narrative center even farther: "Tha l was amazed, so many people had turned
up, all this ritual. The young man was not afraid, he simply waited for things to
run their course. His statement before the court made an impression because
it was so simply delivered and so precise in its details; this young man could
not have invented these things, he was sincere" (124/162). In the first sentence,
the use of the demonstrative adjectives ce and cette (this) marks the shift from
the third-person omniscient narration with which the sentence began (Tha l
was amazed), to the internal monologue of Tha l's own perception. But this
shift is only temporary, for the following sentence, introduced by "the young
man," immediately reverts to an omniscient third-person narrative, the change
in perspective suggesting a subjective division within Tha l and, paradoxi-
cally, the simultaneous participation of narrator and community in this sym-
bolic ritual of resurgence. The final sentence, however, is perhaps the most
noteworthy, for while it picks up where its predecessor leaves off, the introduc-
tory "His statement" stemming rhetorically from "the young man," and the
sudden reappearance of the demonstrative "this young man" in the middle of
the sentence, without the semblance of any sort of transition, reinscribe the
discourse into a free indirect mode, conveying the sentiments of the narrator,
the judge, and the community at large, and thus the progressively protean
perspective both of the population and of the discursive strategy that represents
them. More important, the metonymic relation between community and free
indirect discourse within the same discursive space tends to demonstrate the
pervasive subjective slippage attending both Tha l and, by implication, Garin,
his principal counterpart, as they are reinscribed in this colonial site. These




La Ldzarde / 53


oppositions and contradictions, the subtle shifts in subjective and in discursive
perspective, mark the displacement effected by a colonial discourse and figure
its re-presentation of a subjective category whose peripatetic excursions mark
it as incontrovertibly interstitial.
   In the end, Judge Parel even sums up the proceedings and pronounces the
verdict in free indirect discourse, determining that "it was implausible that this
young fellow could have killed Garin, you needed a lot of imagination to come
up with that. And this Garin fellow was during his lifetime supposedly on the
judge's side, but to no avail; the latter felt no remorse at his death" (125/163).
While these intersections of identity seem the natural culmination of the frag-
mentation and doubling produced by the colonial script, the affiliative inde-
terminacy re-presented and appropriated in this narrative by the incessant slip-
pages of FID appear to generate no discursive differentiation between Thal,
the judge, and the community at large. From a symbolic perspective, the
judge's pronouncement, couched as it is in FID, allows him to speak in the
name of the entire community that he represents, but each element here
speaks with, for, and in place of the other, extending the alterities of the
postcolonial perspective both to the narrative structure and to the fractured
forms of identity that are the corollary of its figures.
   Following the election victory, however, somehow a hollowness seems to
remain. Interestingly, despite this death by remote control, the indecision and
uncertainty that have pervaded the narrative scene extend, ironically, to the
very question of the vote; the following exchange between the peasant Lom6
and Mathieu emphasizes the ideological ignorance and instability that are at
the heart of this community: "Brother Mathieu, who will get our vote?" "The
people, of course." "Who are the people, friend?" (128/166). The explosion of joy
that greets the election result-the activists have backed the winning party-
in reality does nothing either to effect a new communal temporality or to dis-
locate teleologies already at work on the sociocultural level. In other words,
the fact that the death of Garin and the election it precedes do not effectively
warn of the dangerous dualities that are the implicit corollary of an impending
departmentalization places the entire ideological project-method and
means, victor and vanquished-at risk of dissolution. And in this poetics of a
disconcerted collectivity, both narrator and narration have consistently dis-
played a telling combination of self-reflexivity and ambivalence that under-
scores the novel's deliberate structural re-vision of the very issues it interro-
gates.





54 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

   Ultimately, what Glissant puts into practice is a metafictional approach to
the narration of antillanit6. His conflation of the multiplicities of image, dis-
course, and subjectivity creates a narrative economy that constantly reflects on
the means and terms of its production, and that consistently interrogates and
subverts its implicit chronologies of cause and effect, subject and object to
displace any linear assumptions of discursive and identitarian production. At
the level of discourse, for example, the reader cannot help but be struck by the
consciously tentative tone of the narrative voice. Indeed, the narrator, who
remains eternally unnamed, repeatedly blurs the lines of continuity between
self, community, and reader; the demarcations of division that simultaneously
establish patterns of affiliation and separation between the major characters
extend to engender major dualities of narrative perspective. For example, early
on, a clear distinction is made between the adult who narrates and the child
who witnesses, emphasizing, through a series of repetitions and double regis-
ters, the duality that mediates between temporalities of then and now. "And I,
as a child (the child of this story, growing with each word) accompany these
women, I roll around on the sand.... .I do not know (I will grow with this story)
that the river symbolized the true nature of everyday toil. . . . I do not yet know
that a man only fulfils himself when he savours the meaning of the land in his
own story (in its moments of passion and joy)" (33/31-32). His extraordinary
morcelization of the progress of growth and awareness not only problematizes
the status of the subject, it suggests that the narrator who is "the child of this
story, growing with each word" does so almost as a fragmented corollary of the
discourse, the disjuncture and signification of the story generating and impart-
ing a reflected, relative meaning to his own life. Here, the impossibility of
designating precisely a singular subjective space is testimony once again to the
ineluctable fragmentation of subjectivity and its alienation within the sign.
   Similarly, the multiplicity of perspectives and of peripeteia in the narrative
is intentionally present to undermine any intimation of a possible authority,
through the metonymic relation to the notoriously false linearity of the discur-
sively constructed existence-as, for example, in autobiography, as contempo-
rary literary theory has demonstrated7-where the effect of retrospective narra-
tion is to engender from random events seemingly apparent connections of
cause and effect. As Hayden White points out, "This value attached to
narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real
events display the coherence, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is
and can only be imaginary" (1981:23).8 In other words, the multiplicity of dis-




La Ldzarde / 55


placements, positions, and parallels that the narrative successively puts into
place deliberately interrogates narrative assumptions, reducing the role of the
subject in the construction of meaning and simultaneously valorizing the in-
determinacy of the narrative act.
   In his book Edouard Glissant, Michael Dash reads these narrative disjunc-
tures as a means toward the emergence of "individual awareness, whether po-
litical, emotional, or spiritual; it is not only the narrator who grows within the
story, but several of the others do so as well, measurably and at times painfully"
(62). As early as chapter 2, the narrator insists upon the mutability of his status,
his perspective in fact positioned midway between agency and submission: "I
heard these words, but I was still a child, and they echoed within me. I was
both witness and object: the one who sees and who must endure, who is called
and who is shaped. I knew Tha l and Mathieu and all their friends; here is
how" (22/16). It is the very interstitial nature of the narrator's predicament that
engenders its value, shaping and being shaped by a desire to merge both past
and present, criticism and creativity, from his position in the middle. As Dash
points out in his book, "He confesses desperately to the desire both to remem-
ber and understand the past and to be a witness and participant . . . both a
witness and a recorder, the incompatibility of omniscience and direct experi-
ence, objectivity and subjectivity" (63). The protean mutability of the narrative
voice, which slips repeatedly from "I" to "we," and indeed to "you," mimes this
deliberate indeterminacy in order to further reinscribe the plural perspectives
and creative instability of this creole community.
   The community itself is ultimately defined in one of those passages in-
scribed in the second person: "You suddenly understood that this entire history
had been nothing but a fierce collective effort to escape the mean destiny that
had been imposed on this world, the petty provincialism that overwhelmed
this country, as well as feelings of shame and self-disgust" (168-69/216). As the
narrative nears its end, it falls to the exhausted Mathieu to proffer a definition
of the uniquely plural nature of this nascent creole community: "Almost all the
peoples of the world coming together here. Not for a day; for centuries. And
what comes out of it? The Caribbean people. The Africans our ancestors, in-
dentured Breton servants, Hindu coolies, Chinese shop-keepers. All together
and we were expected to forget Africa. And what happens? We have not forgot-
ten. Very well" (173/222). It is from the transformative encounters of this ethno-
cultural melting pot that the specificity of Antillean culture took shape, and
this many-sidedness is, at bottom, what informs Glissant's complex construc-




56 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

tion of character, plot, and voice, enabling his discourse to reflect both the
birth pangs of the Franco-Caribbean experience, and the latent but protean
possibilities of its diasporic transnationalism. It will be the novel's explosive
end, however, that will ultimately bring into perspective the implicit, simulta-
neous parallels and contradictions that any consideration of the full complexi-
ties of geopolitical creolization must embrace.
   While the narrator's transition from child to man recuperates the liminal
nature of the narrative events, it is the indeterminacy of the narrative itself that
remains the heart of the matter: "The child that I was and the man that I am
have this in common: they confuse legend and history" (82/105). The network
of signification traced by the narrator and his narrative, persistent and perva-
sive throughout the novel, eventually provides a coda of commentary that de-
mands a new vision from the doubleness it insistently reiterates, even as it
appears to valorize the disjunctures of the past: "I am a child in the street and
a man in my memory. . . . Yes, I feel I am two people, a sensation frozen in
time. I still hear echoes of the last celebration, I still hear the wild rejoicing of
bygone days" (180/230). It is this narrative subtext of instability, then, a creole
carnival of doubleness and masking, parallelism and slippage, that overdeter-
mines both text and character even as it insists upon the ineluctability of its
own disjunction, whose interrogation of an incomplete departmental vision
ultimately permits the final, most explosive encounter of the novel to take
place.
   Glissant closes the narrative with a convulsive episode, choosing the mo-
ment of her postelection return to Tha l's cottage on the eve of their wedding
to immolate Valerie-textual symbol of a liberated Lambrianne doubly de-
sired by both Tha l and Mathieu-by Tha l's dogs, Sillon and Mandolke.
From the beginning these animals have been defined by their noms de ldgende
and by the fact that they "seemed to have concentrated in themselves the ex-
plosive force of the highlands." There is also the important corollary that their
vicious nature is only tenuously controlled by Tha l; indeed, in a gesture that
underlines the figural duality that is to come, we can credit this force with
"inspiring Tha l with admiration as well as the desire to escape" (12/19). If they
answer only to him, the interaction of both is but an involuted one at best. In
one gesture, by insisting on the exception that proves the rule, Glissant puts
the paradoxes undergirding the entire narrative into focus, bringing the novel's
binarisms full circle and demonstrating the destructive capacity of rejected
colonial desire by underlining the consequence of such misrecognition. He




La Ldzarde / 5;


accomplishes this while implicitly criticizing and condemning the pervasive
blindness that continues to plague the necessary construction of a creole con-
text of politics and performance as a legitimate backdrop for a postcolonial
praxis of Caribbean creolization.
   It is of more than passing interest that the entirety of chapter 20 of part 1, in
which Valerie's future is foretold by Papa Longou6, is enclosed in parentheses
in the narrative. We have already noted Glissant's strategic use of such tech-
niques to signal contexts of doubling and simultaneity, as well as supposedly
elided or marginalized events; significantly, here, Papa Longou6's prediction,
warning of an encounter with dogs on a dark mountain, prefigures the exact
circumstances of Valerie's ultimate death. Also, both Valerie, who is also
Mathieu's cousin, and Tha l are orphans; while Mathieu has lost his father,
and finds a surrogate one in Papa Longou6, the sense of exile that binds this
pair renders them a symbolic mirror image of each other. Tha l's physical and
psychological exile grounds the dualities of a young man who, ironically, is
"too young to vote" (148/191), and this in turn mimics Valerie's symbolic recu-
peration of the forces that have overdetermined Tha l and that also define the
larger community: "Yes, Valerie had with her both the grandeur of the moun-
tains and the endurance of the plains" (141/182).
   Importantly, her symbolic complicity in Garin's death, culminating in the
relationship that develops during the election process, is symbolically pre-
figured by the absence of the bar: "and they found each other, finally free to
love each other (and not for one moment were they disturbed by thoughts of the
sand bar, and not once did they remember the terrifying swim, neither Tha l
who had experienced it nor Valerie who had imagined it), finally delivered to
each other in this moment of calm and shared confidence" (161/207; emphasis
mine). Sharing this state of calm certainty, they forget the symbolic function of
the barrier to signification and the assumption of linearity between past and
future that its absence re-presents, which are precisely the issues that are about
to be put to the test in the alternative crossing that awaits them.
   Given her own symbolic, symbiotic, yet differential relationship to Thal,
then, Valerie's death represents the painful but necessary exposure of the inevi-
table conjunction of colonizer and colonized to Tha l's eyes. Their ascent of
the mountain symbolically retraces Tha l's captious descent of the Lezarde
with Garin and designates their own mutual subconscious implication within
a misplaced authority that must be ruptured in order for it to be ultimately
supplanted by the complex liberative ideologies of a cultural and political




58 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

creolization. The figures that accompany the ascent seem to surge threaten-
ingly about them; Valerie seems to see "terrible shadows rise up on either side,
waiting to pounce on her, already closing in, lying in wait, pressing in on her"
(190/246). The beasts, whom Tha l greets by "the legendary names he had
given to his dogs, names from that tale which terrified him as a child," seem to
perceive an imminent attack upon their master, and "they rushed out so
quickly that there was no hope of escape" (192-93/248-49). The suddenness
and viciousness of this overwhelming attack, which Tha l is powerless to stop,
puts an end to the multiple symbolic resonances that attach to their expecta-
tions of conjugal association, and punctuates the simple linearity of the de-
nouement by exposing the incompatibility of the colonial desire within which
both Tha l and Valerie are confined. The symbolic function of her death at
the hands of the dogs seems to make possible this confrontation with accepted
but inadequate colonial binaries of self and Other, and to compel their appro-
priation and relocation to an alternative site of difference, a moment of recog-
nition which ultimately allows the contestation and pluralism of an incipient
antillanit6 to take hold.
   This event also marks the textual return of the repressed, the inevitable
reappearance of the master's discourse when its authoritarian modalities are
accepted but their implications ignored. For in the shocking, symbolic ending
of La Ldzarde may be traced the culmination of a submission to colonial con-
trol and a simultaneous refusal to countenance the contradictions engendered
by the desire for a dialectics of difference. Glissant's deliberately intertextual
ending entails a veiled rereading of the Greek myth of Actaeon and Artemis,
the goddess of hunting, in which the hunter Actaeon, having been turned into
a stag, was attacked and killed by his own dogs for having secretly watched
Artemis bathing. Indeed, so attached were Actaeon's dogs said to be to him
that they were completely inconsolable following his death until Chiron,
Actaeon's centaur-mentor, made them a likeness of their master.9 This substi-
tutive doubling of one of the seminal myths of Western culture-generating a
new myth which is both a displacement and a replacement of the Greek origi-
nal-holds important implications for the transition to a differential perspec-
tive on writing and authority, and marks a discursive act of appropriation that
objectively reveals the necessity of constructing a differential mode of resis-
tance which operates from a resiting rather than a simple reversal of binary
colonial roles. In a sense, through Valerie, Lambrianne is destroyed by that
very Western discourse with which Thal, the hunter, had sought too readily to




La Ldzarde / 59


assimilate, the attack reflecting the final traces of his subconscious acquies-
cence to a colonial culture that is inscribed both through his love of myth and
attachment to these noms de ldgende. This sense of double jeopardy emerges
from the unavowed but indisputable submission to the dominant strictures of
colonial control implicit in his acceptance of his murderous task and his blind-
ness to the attendant subjective ambivalence that it entailed. As Targin takes
the place of Garin, his own colonial mentor and counterpart, the return to
engagement that closes the novel, with the dogs licking Tha l's feet with their
bloody muzzles while he makes plans to starve them into death on the site of
the source, tropes Chiron's construction of Actaeon's likeness in that his return
to the origins of the Lezarde -and, by implication, of the community it repre-
sents-with these murderous beasts marks symbolically a new beginning for
subject and community that operates simultaneously on several levels, as a
belated but necessary recognition of the symbolic significance of an un-
articulated submission to colonial authority, and the ineluctable resurgence of
the displaced desire it engenders. The repetition and difference framing
Tha l's act together mark this location in the present as a space of creolization
from which this hybrid culture will ultimately derive its true legitimacy.
   This symbolic (re)source to which Tha l (re)turns, in what Dominique
Lecloux calls a "progression . . . dans l'univers de l'ombre, vers une connais-
sance plus approfondie de ses racines (407)," assumes greater imoportance
when the reductive resonances of his primary identity pattern, an uncompli-
cated confrontation with the patrons of power, are attacked and erased. His
decision to destroy the dogs upon this site through this starvation-induced
madness symbolically unravels the false oppositions and secret desires upon
which the colonial framework is constituted, simultaneously articulating
through its fissures a social and textual poetics of difference that negotiates the
interstices of pluralism to herald a new basis for an ethics of postcolonial iden-
tity.
   Yet the critical nature of certain events that are key to the outcome of the
plot refuses an easy dismissal, in this early exposition of creole cultural perfor-
mance as an articulative archetype for a postcolonial Caribbean paradigm of
antillanit6. It is interesting to note that Papa Longou6, the community's quim-
boiseur and thus its primary material link with the iterability of the past, dies at
almost the exact moment that the election result is announced, suggesting a
post/colonial future umbilically- and therefore dangerously- separate and
distinct from the colonial and indeed the ancestral past. Indeed, each of the




6o / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


novel's three deaths enacts a symbolic engagement with the discontinuities
and dualities of this encounter between past and future. Yet if, in this context
of contestation, patterns of pluralism tend to mark a sort of communal discon-
tinuity, then Garin, himself a principal site of post/colonial ambivalence, must
perish within the sphere of this very landscape in order for his doubled coun-
terpart to have the possibility of escaping the confines of a linear authority, a set
of confines he is ultimately forced to confront. With both Tha l and Garin
linked to patterns of hybrid signification, Tha l's eventual acceptance of the
material implications of geopolitical creolization through Valerie's death is
ultimately dependent upon his symbolic separation from Garin and from the
profound paradoxes of the post/colonial moment his activities re-present.
These three doomed characters, then, as Michael Dash rightly argues, "share
a common refusal or inability to grasp the significance of the changes taking
place around them or of the values of the Lezarde river" (1995:72). Together,
they trace the complex, common teleology of an interjacent, postcolonial past
and future that figures the community of Lambrianne.
   Each of these protagonists -Tha l, Mathieu, and Garin-must articulate
with his Others if the full complexities of this liminal moment are to be elabo-
rated and addressed. But through their devotion to the development of the
supposedly differential discourse of departmentalism, and their simultaneous,
unwitting submission to the name of an outmoded but still tellingly capable
pattern of colonial authority, they locate -albeit inadvertently-the divergent
undercurrents and strategies by which colonialism can continue to influence
the societies in which it has been implanted.
   The pervasive nature of this force is ultimately figured by Valerie's violent
and apparently inexplicable death at the hands of Tha l's dogs. With the
martyred Valerie the object of desire of both Tha l and Mathieu, the eventual
effects of these parallels and disjunctures destroy the nascent nationalism she
ultimately comes to represent. Her death disrupts the axis of postcolonial re-
volt, effectively maintaining the circulation of contradictory discourses on
which the novel's symbolic structure is based. But while the proleptic charac-
ter of Glissant's conclusion proposes an effective awakening to alternative pos-
sibilities, both narrative and discourse suggest that any substantive change in
the hierarchies generated by contesting colonialism must be carried out on the
articulative ground of an immanent, interstitial ambivalence.
   The narrative thus effectively installs alterity and ambiguity as inalterable
features of the postcolonial identity structure; such a subject is shown to be




La Ldzarde / 6i


mediated both by a pluralized fragmentation of desire and by an ineluctable
inscription in the field of the Other. This double gesture re-figures the tradi-
tional desire of the postcolonial subject to achieve recognition from the colo-
nizing Other by displacing and usurping the Other's subjective space through
persistent acts of mimetic replication. Interpellated into an imaginary recogni-
tion of the real conditions of existence, this subject seems historically and cul-
turally doomed to the perpetual recuperation of the terms of its own misrecog-
nition, contributing materially to the ongoing dislocation of its own discursive
space. From this perspective, Mathieu's exhortation to the narrator of La
Ldzarde regarding the specific style and substance of the narrative discourse
are particularly apposite here: "Write a story.... Write it like a river. Slow. Like
the Lezarde. With rushing water, meanders, sometimes sluggish, sometimes
running freely, slowly gathering the earth from either bank" (174-75, 224).
Thus the narrative form can be seen to reflect the deliberate disjunctures and
articulative ambivalences of a fragmented post/colonial Lambrianne and its
subjects, made to face the creative uncertainties of approaching departmental-
ization. The discontinuous, fragmented nature of the historical and cultural
experience of colonization produces specificities of splitting and parallels of
opposition in this French Caribbean context, patterns which must be appro-
priated and resited in order to inscribe new terms for an alternate subjectivity.
Ultimately, if, in Tha l's words, "we turn to the past in order to know the
future" (144/86), then the complex characterizations and structured ambiva-
lences of La Ldzarde substantiate the assertion that the hierarchical assump-
tions persistently underguiding post/colonial authority in the French Carib-
bean can be effectively contested and countered only through the pluralities
and positionalities of a deliberately doubled discourse of difference.









S.)2


En attendant le bonheur
Creole Conjunctions and Cultural Survival


Tout ce qui touche a la femme noire est
  objet de controverse.
Maryse Conde, La Parole des femmes







Deriving a Discourse

In the case of feminine-centered narrative, the forces at work in the field of
postcolonial discourse assume a different character, reflecting the need to gen-
erate definitions different from a preexistent, overarching, masculine dis-
course which, particularly in a colonial context, had historically arrogated to
itself the primary role of defining parameters of signification, appropriation,
and cultural inscription. As far as a feminine Caribbean discourse is con-
cerned, the task of delineating a specific discursive space becomes doubly dif-
ficult, since the discourse must take into account issues of gender and culture,
as well as the double subjection by which colonialism exacerbates for women
the repressive hierarchies of its authoritarian patriarchal structures.
   In "Writing Like a Woman," Peggy Kamuf addresses the troubled terrain
that binds language, gender, and the re-presentation of identity. She states:
"Using language . . . we are all, more or less, in the position of a father, the
parent of mediation. . . . If, on the other hand, by 'feminist' one understands a
way of reading texts that points to the masks of truth with which phallocentrism
hides its fictions, then one place to begin such a reading is by looking behind
the mask of the proper name, the sign that secures our patriarchal heritage: the
father's name and the index of sexuality" (284, 286). This strategy of reading
articulated by Kamuf necessarily suggests the exposure of the implicit norms




En attendant le bonheur / 63


and stereotypes engendered by an adherence to a patriarchal discursive sys-
tem. Assumptions of stability and agency tend to be subverted by such a read-
ing, as the analysis seeks not to accept or repeat predetermined authoritarian
roles, but rather to displace these assumptions by revealing the prejudices of
their underlying premises. From the point of view of a feminized postcolonial
discourse, the articulation of a narrative strategy that will, in differential terms,
effectively contest the assumptions of authority already inherent in traditional
narration and exacerbated by the masculinist assertions of the colonial en-
counter will be the primary challenge faced by any elaboration of a hybrid
cultural identity. As Nelly Furman explains: "If the function of the feminist
endeavor is to unveil the workings of the patriarchal system of values and dis-
play the structures which control the social and cultural order, then we must
begin . . . by confronting the politics of language. . . . Language, from a post-
structuralist position, is not an empirical object but a structuring process; and
questions concerning women and literature will be broached differently ac-
cording to whether we apprehend language as a stable medium or a continu-
ous process" (198559-60, 64). As we shall see, it is by appropriating the ambi-
guity inherent in the relation between language and subjectivity that Maryse
Cond6's narratives initiate a subversion of the precepts of cultural, colonial,
and discursive patriarchy.
   Traditionally, the role of language in male-dominated discourses has been
to convey a certain "universality" of human experience and the transmutation
of this experience into literary representation. By overtly recognizing that the
colonial project was chiefly enabled by oral performance and written dis-
course, we can interrogate the points of conjunction between language and
colonialism, annexing new terms for a postcolonial feminine subjectivity at
precisely the point where its double difference demands recognition. This task
requires the simultaneous recognition and reformulation of habitual textual
inscriptions of both gender and language; as Furman continues, "The literary
works of male authors reflect chiefly a male view of life which is not necessarily
women's experience. . . . When literature is viewed as a representational art
whose function is to 'picture' life, what is ignored or pushed aside is the part
played by language" (1985:63). The problem of establishing the cultural plu-
ralities of creole subjectivity through a nonauthoritarian discourse of differ-
ence implies a site of multiple modernities, especially where language and
subjectivity encounter a postcolonial feminine-centered discourse that seeks
not to define itself in relation to male. A narrative strategy that paradoxically




64 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


emphasizes the anxieties that lie in establishing points of difference rather
than of similitude can translate the task of finding a place from which to speak
into the cultivation of sites of ongoing ambivalence and negotiation. It is
through such a consciously articulated discursive strategy, one that continu-
ously restages these issues of difference and hybridity, that a creolized culture
will seek to inscribe a specifically Caribbean sense of identity within the tex-
tual economy. By displacing authoritarian singularities of expression and in-
tention, these notions of cultural and subjective hybridity can be reflected in
the structure of the text.
   These conjunctions of language and difference, then, reflect both the au-
thoritarian assertions of the postcolonial encounter and the disjunctive disso-
nances of a doubled, creolized vision of regional realities, and ground the
complex colonization of the Caribbean woman. Initiating such a discourse of
difference necessarily interrogates questions of gender, history, and culture as
they are inscribed within a discursive framework; if language is the ground
upon which issues of identity construct the parameters of their operation, then
difference in language can become a primary arena for the inscription of cul-
tural identity. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin point out in
The Empire Writes Back: "All post-colonial societies realize their identity in
difference rather than in essence. They are constituted by their difference from
the metropolitan and it is in this relationship that identity both as a distancing
from the centre and as a means of self-assertion comes into being. . . . The
discourse of the post-colonial is therefore grounded on a struggle for power-
that power focused in the control of the metropolitan language" (167). This
contestation of authority, focusing as it does on binary language and differ-
ence, inaugurates the terms and tensions of the problematic inscription of the
creative undecidabilities and disjunctural patterns of Caribbean identity. In a
Caribbean context of creole creativity, then, the interconnectedness of lan-
guage, culture, and colonialism can determine the patterns of a postcolonial
narrative strategy that synthesizes key issues of contestation and ambivalence.
   Culturally speaking, this interconnectedness of the creole draws on a persis-
tent preoccupation with place and with origins that functions as a catalyst in
the search for Caribbean identity. The discussion of the regional history of
hybridity and erasure in Empire suggests a tendency to generate patterns of
desire and alienation grounded in fields of alterity that seek to establish a rela-
tionship of dependence with a mythical, unitary cultural (m)Other: "In a soci-
ety which bore the permanent traces of conflict, repression, immigration, and




En attendant le bonheur / 65


forced migration . . . it has in some cases been seen to be necessary to revive
that lost ancestral link before the Caribbean present can be understood, before
the islands become 'home"' (146-47). This insistent search for home, a nostal-
gic quest for the patterns and parallels of an elusive, long-lost linearity and
unicity-but one which must become an identity and a discourse grounded in
the creole authenticity of the Caribbean region-will lead Cond6's Veronica
Mercier on a circuitous journey of nostalgia and discovery through Europe
and Africa before she comes to terms with the innate potential of her own
cultural ambiguity.
   This notion of doubling disturbs traditional teleologies, engendering radi-
cal narrative and discursive strategies that inaugurate an identity structure
rooted in difference. The merging of the postcolonial dialectic with a feminist
perspective engenders doubled strategies of narrative emancipation, a deter-
mination to create a space that will permit and enhance the elaboration of a
paradigmatic postcolonial female "voice." This voice will be as strategic as it is
specific, conveying the modernities of the margin as it seeks, in Rachel Blau
DuPlessis's phrase, to "write beyond the ending": "Writing beyond the ending
means the transgressive invention of narrative strategies, strategies that express
critical dissent from dominant narrative. . . . [It] . . . produces a narrative that
denies or reconstructs seductive patterns of feeling that are culturally man-
dated, internally policed, hegemonically poised" (1985:5). These discursive
strategies ultimately write disjuncture into difference, ambiguity and anxiety
into a dialectic that renegotiates a subtle subversion of authoritarian patriar-
chal codes. The critical fusion of discourse, gender, and postcolonialism dis-
turbs the traditional boundaries of subjectivity and marginalization; the effec-
tive elaboration of a female Caribbean subject in all its postcolonial complexity
necessitates a multidimensional, interrogative narrative strategy that will cap-
ture the nuances of ambiguity and fragmentation that frame this doubly dis-
located identity. Traditional narrative practice is shot through with patriarchal
attributes and assumptions; as Evelyn O'Callaghan explains, "The practice of
fiction is inevitably loaded, often related to an epistemology that justifies patri-
archal and imperial assumptions" (1993:74). Thus the role of a differential
form and function in articulating a creolized feminocentric postcolonial voice
is rendered even more more important; its intervocality facilitates a vision of
Caribbean woman as Other whose relational interaction with her several
communities both shapes the structure of Cond6's narrative project and, ulti-
mately, determines the cultural identity of her protagonist.




66 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


En attendant le bonheur: Happiness In-between

Born in Guadeloupe in 1937, Maryse Cond6 has long been recognized as per-
haps the foremost contemporary woman writer of the francophone Caribbean.
With an oeuvre that includes ten novels, six plays, and assorted short stories,
she has also edited several critical collections and authored several volumes of
crticism. She has held prestigious professorships in the United States, won
numerous literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and a number of jour-
nals have published special issues devoted to her work. In her groundbreaking
career, Cond6 appears to have attained the sort of literary stature previously
reserved, perhaps, for writers like Cesaire and Glissant.
   A number of themes run consistently through Cond6's work, and it is
specifically her treatment of issues of identity given the hybrid nature of creole
culture that I wish to explore here. The regional vision that Cond6 has articu-
lated in several novels clearly imbricates discursive form with issues of identity,
using the past to interrogate the present and to choose future paths.
   Cond6's first novel, En attendant le bonheur,l remains one of the earliest
works to interrogate, in both thematic and discursive terms, the complex ques-
tions underlying the ambiguities of exile, identity, and cultural displacement
that mark the disparate material realities encountered by the francophone
Caribbean female subject. Adversely reviewed and roundly criticized upon its
first publication, the novel has been the subject of a fierce amount of contro-
versy, not least because of the apparent primacy accorded to sexual liberation
by the novel's activist protagonist, as well as the seemingly ambivalent position
taken by this protagonist toward both her ancestral homeland of Africa and the
culture of her own Caribbean. As Cond6 herself has stated in an interview
with Ann Armstrong Scarboro: "The Guadeloupeans and the Martinicans did
not like the picture of their society. The Africans objected to the image of
Africa. The Marxists did not like the denunciation of the evils of so-called
African Socialism. The militants objected to Veronica, the central character,
as a negative heroine, and the feminists hated her because she looked for her
liberation through men" (205). Yet it can be claimed that such a plethora of
criticism pointed, paradoxically perhaps, precisely toward the pluralities and
oppositions that create the creole conditions of possibility that are in fact the
novel's hallmark.
   The novel was recently reissued under the new title of En attendant le
bonheur. Herdmakhonon, the novel's original title, and, paradoxically, the




En attendant le bonheur / 6


corollary of its African resonances, has now been relegated to the status of a
subtitle. This revision of the binary cultural and subjective geopolitics framing
the novel's plot and protagonist appears to give new primacy to the prob-
lematics of inscribing a pluralized, differential feminine identity within a con-
text of francophonie and departmentalization. As Cond6 herself points out in
the preface, her narrative strategy entails deliberate discursive choices: "It oc-
curred to me to have the story narrated by a negative heroine. As the narrator,
Veronica is narcisisstic, selfish, indecisive, sometimes even spineless, but she
presents the drama. Her perspective is at first indifferent, but little by little she
finds herself drawn to the center of the action" (12). Similarly, the novel's analy-
sis of sociocultural alienation is also the product of the protagonist's mal a
l'aise: "By reducing the Caribbean, and especially Guadeloupe, to its 'negro-
bourgeois' circle, Veronica is committing a gross injustice regarding its people"
(13).
   This deceptively linear plot, then-one in reality constantly subverted and
undermined by the traces of an ongoing discursive displacement-traces the
concerns of a young Guadeloupean woman, Veronica Mercier,' who, suffer-
ing the angst of physical and psychological displacement, leaves France to
undertake a three-month sojourn in an unnamed African country in order to
"find herself." When this period, marked by both personal and political tur-
moil, comes to a close, she leaves Africa to return to Paris. From the outset, the
structure of the narrative is interesting on two levels. First, the very theme of
the novel underlines the common Caribbean issue of alienation, the ambiva-
lence of departmental subjects who must come to terms with the twin
geocultural poles of France and the West Indies. While the subjective di-
lemma of the Antillean caught between competing allegiances has long been
a central narrative theme in both the anglophone and francophone Carib-
bean, it is the cultural and political fact of departmentalization that gives
Veronica's situation its particular specificities. On the most immediate level,
we are confronted with a female protagonist who, caught up in the double
disjuncture that history has imposed upon the women of the region, is split
between the inability to recognize herself as a Caribbean subject and the de-
sire for subjective valorization which she hopes the sojourn to, and in, the
African (m)other will engender. She is re-presented as a subject who has inter-
nalized colonially driven stereotypes of race and class, just as her family has, on
a larger scale, internalized metropolitan discourses of racial superiority and
domination in their own bid for social advancement and recognition. Indeed,




68 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


it is in the conjunction of her position as a Guadeloupean bourgeoise and her
familial inscription as a ndgresse rouge that Veronica's inability to achieve so-
cial inscription and recognition may be said to find their patterns of origin.
   These patterns of alienation and misrecognition are produced through sub-
jection to the authoritarian linearities of a metropolitan discourse of colonial-
ism, as this subject, torn between Africa and the Caribbean, between self and
Other, race and place, seeks to surpass the binary paradoxes and ambiguities
undergirding the identity she is attempting to construct. Thus Veronica in-
scribes an alternative paradigm to the pattern of legitimacy through lacti-
fication that Frantz Fanon elaborates for the French Caribbean female subject
in Black Skin, White Masks: "For, in a word, the race must be whitened; every
woman in Martinique knows this, says it, repeats it. Whiten the race, save the
race" (47). In her turn, Veronica will run a gamut of ethnic possibilities, ulti-
mately seeking perhaps a symbolic corollary of whiteness through the achieve-
ment of social recognition for her bourgeois interstitiality, a pattern of desire
and alienation that colonialism and departmentalization have imposed on the
region. Indeed, it is her indecisiveness as a postcolonial female subject that
will determine both the pattern of her displacement in the domain of the
Other and the means by which she ultimately reappropriates her identity from
the field of its misprision.
   Second, and perhaps even more important, the fragmentation and ambigu-
ity that mark the subjectivity of this female Caribbean subject are inscribed in
the very discourse of the narrative. For in fact this work is marked by the some-
what unusual phenomenon of a nonspeaking protagonist. That is, the protago-
nist restricts her utterances to a continuous internal monologue; her discourse
never appears within the formal structures signifying direct speech.3 We will
address the parameters and implications of the choice of this construct shortly,
but for the moment we should note that the narrator, who must be seen as a
subject different from Veronica, never stops speaking, thereby emphasizing
the simultaneity of presence that paradoxically links her own inscription to
that of her counterpart. The internal monologue is a powerful narrative strat-
egy, carrying implications for the structure of the subject as well as that of the
discourse itself. This absence of direct dialogue that marks the text signifies an
interpellative framework that is symptomatic of alienation, since its implied
foreclosure of the rapport a l'autre tends to reinscribe the subject into the field
of the imaginary. The resulting map of misrecognition defines Veronica
through an ambivalent discursive site that incrementally retraces the triangu-




En attendant le bonheur / 69


lar trajectory of her attempts at subjective inscription, from Guadeloupe to
France, then from France to Africa and back. Importantly, however, whereas
the form of her communication is similar to dialogized speech, its function is
different, in that its aim is purely self-referential, and articulation with the
other remains ambiguous and unresolved.
   The disjunctive simultaneity that both joins and separates these two discur-
sive moments is of crucial importance in tracing Veronica's ultimate coming
to terms with the nature of her alienation. Her search for ancestors, her deter-
mination to re-place the past with the present, the Caribbean with Africa, ad-
dress a complex sense of otherness and lack-in-being which is re-presented by
her refusal of dialogue. Such a narrative strategy-one clearly grounded in
ambiguity and doubleness-holds particular implications for the question of
perspective; as Christopher Miller suggests in his reading of the novel, "On the
level of explicitly represented actions, everyone speaks but her; meanwhile
she alone thinks, and her internal reflections constitute the dominant point of
view" (1996:176). Miller, on the one hand, rightly reads this conjunction of
discourse with subjectivity as one empowering the narrator: "Her position is
one of power, a means of critique that allows the narrator to present Africa in a
certain light" (1996:178). On the other hand, as I shall argue, while indeed "the
reader can often infer what she has said" (1996:176), Veronica does not in fact
speak, thus casting light upon the displaced pluralities of her Caribbeanness.
Miller's incomplete accounting of the novelistic discourse tends to elide the
deliberate dualities undergirding both French Caribbean society as well as the
complex inscription of narrative voice(s). The indeterminacy and lack figuring
these voices mime the complex indeterminacy of the subject's interpellative
position, torn as she is between the conflicting subjective positions signified by
the interstitiality of the internal monologue and its implied fragmentation of
cultures; ultimately, when compelled to confront her alterity and to choose a
discursive position, Veronica, in a critical (non)move, opts for continuing this
internalized, dual-voiced form of narrative re-presentation.
   In En attendant le bonheur, then, the phenomenon of internal monologue
is clearly linked to creating definitions of cultural identity. In Transparent
Minds, Dorrit Cohn examines the contradictory structure of similar first-per-
son narratives and demonstrates that the form to which that adopted by Cond6
may be most closely assimilated, essentially an audience-directed discourse
combined with a silent self-address, points to a protagonist who "writes as if
[s]he were thinking, but thinks as if [s]he were addressing others . . . a form




70 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


filled with significance" (177). In the context of Cond6's narrative, the pres-
ence of internal monologue and the recurring inscription of its effect of com-
municative foreclosure upon the protagonist is made to signify the articulation
of a pervasive cultural ambivalence, her fragmented but simultaneous inscrip-
tion between France, the Caribbean, and Africa. In other words, re-presenting
the protagonist through internal monologue amounts to a conscious reflection
of her sense of displacement and duality, as her cultural fragmentation is
figured by the ambiguity of her discursive position. Given what Cohn calls
"the other-directedness of [t]his thought" (177), the resulting inability to dis-
cern the origin or addressee, or even the temporality of the protagonist's
double discourse, inscribes this subject into a sort of discursive neutrality in
which a subjective strategy that both denies and desires recognition of/by the
Other is made an integral element of the novel's discursive structure. This
overdetermination of subject and text by regional anxieties of cultural in-
fluence becomes a hallmark of the narrative discourse of En attendant le
bonheur.
   This initial refusal of cultural hybridity, reflective of the protagonist's need
to find African roots and ancestors to augment the absence of a sense of antil-
lanit6, or Caribbeanness, produces a conflict of subjectivity and culture that is
simultaneously mediated and measured by the multicultural origins underly-
ing the configuration of Caribbean social and cultural forms. The ambiguity
of the subjective discourse in En attendant le bonheur, the refusal of dialogic
self-affirmation combined with the "other-directedness" of the discourse, to-
gether represent the paradox of the absence of a firm interpellative position,
the critical instability of a protagonist caught between cultures, between dis-
courses, as she searches for a means of mediating her double displacement
from both her French and West Indian axes through the complexities of this
subjective division that drives her into a referential and symbolic union with
Africa. In its attempt to represent her doubly colonized position as a Caribbean
woman, exacerbated by the departmental doubleness that makes her a light-
skinned, rootless bourgeoise from a DOM in which the fragmented popu-
lation's sociopolitical allegiance-though as a group they are made up mainly
of the descendants of African blacks - is astygmatically split between metro-
pole and island home, this interweaving of identity, class, gender, and culture
effectively problematizes the primary issues of pluralism and hybridity in the
search for identity that impacts and overdetermines the French Caribbean
region. Cond6 has succeeded in re-presenting the myriad ambiguities of Car-




En attendant le bonheur / ,1


ibbean subjectivity through a complex signifying chain, embodying through
the subordinated female subject the cultural conflict that has marked the
region's history and the fragmenting effects of a colonial discourse of displace-
ment that persists in a variety of guises.
   Cond6's deliberate narrative strategy, then, suggests a pattern defined by the
authors of The Empire Writes Back as "a radical subversion of the meanings of
the master's tongue" (146); her protagonist's inability to communicate with her
interlocutors re-presents her feminine Caribbean subjectivity through a dislo-
cated discursive system whose inherent uncertainties and ambivalences sub-
vert preconceived notions of patriarchy and position. The representative possi-
bilities opened up by this constant renegotiation of the indices and registers
of identity suggest what Peggy Kamuf calls the textual "signature"; what she
defines, in her book Signature Pieces, as "a device repeatedly associated with a
subject" (3). By figuring this protagonist through the interstices of internal
monologue, the very form of the text becomes the emblem of her emerging
identity structure, rewriting the hybridities of her cultural alienation and divi-
sion by unceasingly interrogating the implications of their root context of neo-
colonialism.
   Vronica's nine-month stay in Africa-she describes her sdjour as lasting
"nine months . . . a pregnancy" (2o/42)-takes her through several stages of
subjective awareness. From her desire for recognition by the Other, through
her recognition of the futility of this synthesis and its eventual repudiation, she
grows increasingly aware of the untenability of her own position, of the mul-
tiple conflicts between her and the society through which she is seeking self-
affirmation. As Frangoise Lionnet points out in her chapter on this novel in her
book Autobiographical Voices, "The narrator's failure to act upon the insights
she gleans points to a passivity and a lack of will symptomatic of her colonial
background and ambiguous situation" (175). In the end, as we shall see, it is
this very ambiguity that figures not only her stay and her discourse but, ulti-
mately, her departure, the final act in this process of self-realization.
   This ambiguity is recuperated in the very oppositions that are inscribed in
the novel's title. For not only is this two-part structure-En attendant le bon-
heur (Hdrdmakhonon) - made up of a juxtaposition of French and West Afri-
can languages that underlines the paradoxical relationship between the sub-
ject and the object of her desire, but the present participle form of the verb in
the French title tends to stress the interminable, impossible aspect of the quest
itself, buttressed by the corollary of parentheses that symbolically marginalize




72 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


the field of the African Other. Such a reading suggests not only the prob-
lematics of cultural duality, but also the protagonist's ineluctable ambiva-
lence, signified by the implicit hierarchies of these dual languages.
   The novel opens with the protagonist's problematization of her own decen-
tered subjectivity. Through the device of the flashback, she succeeds in merg-
ing the ambiguity of her own subject position into the temporal and commu-
nicative uncertainty engendered by the internal monologue. Her ambiguity
relative to issues of history, culture, and her own cultural context emerges as
any fixity of locution is progressively eroded and made inconstant:

      Honestly! You'd think I'm going because it is the in thing to do. Africa
   is very much the thing to do lately.... Why am I doing this?
      "Purpose of visit?"
      The police officer really hits the nail on the head. . . . Surely from that
   part of the coast that produced my father's ancestors. . . . Purpose of visit?
   No, I'm not a trader. Not a missionary. Not even a tourist. Well, perhaps a
   tourist, but one of a new breed, searching out herself, not landscapes. (3/
   19-20)
Here, the protagonist succeeds in elaborating the main preoccupations of her
narrative: the special, personal nature of her voyage to Africa, the preponder-
ance of issues of cultural difference, her problematic relationship to her par-
ents and to her father in particular, and the prevalence of her own narcissism.
Further, with the significant absence of diacritical marks of communication
made clear from the outset, it is inarguable that this deliberately ambiguous
discourse is meant to reflect the iconoclastic ambiguity of the protagonist her-
self. Indeed, this symbolic cultural alienation is simultaneously recuperated
on the subjective level; as Susan Andrade points out: "Alienated both politi-
cally and sexually, she is able to perceive herself only through someone else"
(1993:222). As the narrator's point of view alternates between Africa and the
Caribbean, past and present, the self and the increasingly multivalent sites of
the Other, the instability of the narrative perspective constantly illuminates
both her own ambivalence and the recuperation of this indeterminacy by the
narrative voice.
   Indeed, the protagonist continually states and restates her lack of rooted-
ness, her sense of division and abandonment, and her need for a valid group of
ancestors who will generate a sense of self and of cultural particularity that will
give meaning and direction to her wandering. For example, early attempts at




En attendant le bonheur / 73


self-definition take place through the displaced signifier of the African society
to which she aspires, defining the Caribbean self through the African Other
while addressing its function as mediator of her hybrid subjectivity: "Don't
they know I don't care a damn for their town? I am not an ordinary tourist. I am
looking.... What am I looking for in this land of Africa?" (9/27). Interestingly,
it is through this figure of negative self-definition that the protagonist tacitly
avows Africa's mediatory role in defining her hybridity. It is this alterity that, as
Andrade suggests, grounds analeptically and proleptically her sense of exclu-
sion from both the Caribbean and the African spheres: "This obsession with
available and lost history, particularly with the void into which her Caribbean
ancestors have disappeared, dominates Veronica's thinking and prevents her
from understanding the specific condition of the African nation" (217-8). Exte-
rior to the society while yet appearing to be part of it, drawing from Africa
without giving anything in return, her relationship with la mere Afrique which
will ultimately undergo a radical change, permitting her to come to terms with
that which she had so long sought to escape.
   Shortly after her initial encounter with the minister of the interior, Ibra-
hima Sory-whose responsibility for internal state security will assume in-
creasing importance-with whom she will have a prolonged and pivotal affair
during her stay in Africa, the protagonist reinscribes the intersection of her
lack of local involvement both with his political recuperation of patriarchal
authority and with his additional role as mediator of her search for identity:

    He would never understand that the political person of Ibrahima Sory
    leaves me cold. And his role in the nation. And his family's. I didn't come
    to get mixed up in their quarrels and take sides. I came to find a cure.
    Ibrahima Sory, I know, will be the marabout's gree-gree. We'll exchange our
    childhoods and our past. Through him I shall at last be proud to be what I
    am.... I have already resumed hope. (42/71-72; emphasis mine)

These insistent denials of her involvement in the culture and politics of the
African milieu in which she finds herself become ever more frequent and
vehement, implying, as Freud has suggested in his essay "Negation," that the
true reality of the situation lies elsewhere, in the absolute necessity to the sub-
ject of that which is being denied: "The subject matter of a repressed image or
thought can make its way into consciousness on condition that it is denied.
Negation is a way of taking account of what is repressed" (1963:213-14). As
Sory's double role encounters the patriarchal authority implied by his recu-





74 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


peration of the father's role, he symbolically fetishizes her repressed object of
desire, and she already sees her future through him. Here, the simultaneity of
Veronica's denial and acknowledgment of her desire inexorably overdeter-
mines the increasing ambiguity of her position.
   By repeatedly characterizating herself as a tourist, a foreigner, Veronica
emphasizes that sense of division separating her, psychologically and cultur-
ally, from the suggestive parallels of Africa's immensity; she seeks the resolu-
tion of her apparently ambiguous cultural hybridity through the mediation of
Ibrahima Sory as the personification of an already consolidated African Other.
The outsider's desire for a historical sense of unity achieved through Sory re-
curs repeatedly throughout the text: "I got it into my head that this man would
reconcile my two selves. . . . He must help me find a cure. . . . I came to seek a
land inhabited by Blacks, not Negroes, even spiritual ones. In other words, I'm
looking for what remains of the past. I'm not interested in the present" (50, 51,
56/83, 84, 89). What this protagonist seeks through the conflation of past and
present, self and Other, Africa and the Caribbean, is a new subjective structure
that combines the elements from her succession of binary existences to pro-
duce a new hybridity. In an interview with Frangoise Pfaff, Maryse Cond6
herself emphasized her deliberate definition of this Caribbean protagonist
through signifiers of cultural division and ambiguity: "I had decided to draw a
negative character, my opposite: a person lacking will, energy and vitality, a
character who does not know exactly who she/he is. This was a self-portrait and
yet not a portrait. Some readers were shocked because they wanted to believe
... the myth that we, the people of the black world, were all one" (1993:88).
The diversity and cross-culturality of the Caribbean region, and the implicit
historical, social, and cultural differences between Africa and the Caribbean,
mark the boundaries of Veronica's trajectory of alienation. Resolving these
dualities is of critical importance to the discursive resolution of her dilemma;
Frangoise Lionnet calls her "the stereotypical mdtis, the one who embodies the
maledictions of miscegenation: the boundary crosser. She is the third term, the
excluded middle and the voice of the Antillean double bind" (1989:176).
What, then, in this complex cultural dialectic of continually intersecting
doubleness, is the underlying nature of the alterity through which she ulti-
mately constructs her identity?




En attendant le bonheur / 75


Ibrahima Sory, or Negres avec aieux

Sory, the minister of the interior, the "nigger with ancestors," object of Ver-
onica's dual desire, functions as a sort of mediator and catalyst in the delinea-
tion of Veronica's identity construction. The trajectory of their relationship
more or less parallels that of her growing recognition of the structures that
overdetermine her existence. He is a paradoxical personification of the figure
of Africa, a signifier that mediates both the subject's twin traces of exile and her
desire for unification through the African Other. Nor is it insignificant that
Africa's traditionally maternal role is marked in the novel through a masculine
figure. Indeed, Sory may be said to embody a subversion of Africa's traditional
discursive representation as "la mere Afrique," a symbolic structure that
reductively assimilates Africa to stereotypes of nurturing domesticity. The
hierarchical assumptions grounding this construct are now foreclosed as a re-
sult of the shift in gender ascription occurring within the sign. Further,
through the power and authority that devolve from his political standing, Sory
also re-presents the dominant paternalism that has figured Veronica's develop-
ment thus far and from whose delimiting grasp she must free herself. In other
words, Sory inscribes a critical doubling of the place of the Other, in that he is
an other whose desire cannot be appropriated; the double sign of his political
and personal masculinity distorts and subverts the supposed plenitude and
unity of Africa's alterity, which is in turn opposed to the African signifier's
traditionally nurturing articulation and generates a chiasmus that refigures the
intrinsic ambiguity of Veronica's desire.
   In addition, by elaborating the authoritarian discourses from which Ver-
onica remains alienated but yet demands recognition, he mediates the para-
doxical polyvalence and fragmentation of her desire. Any desire ascribed to
him, then, is in fact a displacement of the protagonist's desire, especially since
the narrative discourse always, and only, re-presents Sory from Veronica's
point of view. He is thus an irreducibly plural signifier, embodying vastly com-
plex cultural and psychological structures; Frangoise Lionnet describes him as
a figure in whom "are bound up complex unconscious processes in which the
split between Real and Symbolic is confirmed and binary Manichean posi-
tions prevail" (1989:172). This capacity of Sory's to oscillate between symbolic
and subjective re-presentations of "Africa" tends to reinforce his own role as a
mediator of desire and cultural alienation. In fact, it is virtually impossible not
to note the primary English homonym for his name (Sorry) that comes to




76 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


mind, which is certainly no coincidence, serving to underline the contradic-
tory authoritarianism through which he is inscribed, one that discursively re-
produces his position as a dis-placed signifier of colonial assimilation. As he
mediates Veronica's desire for cultural integration, these polysemic patterns
grounding Sory as subject provide a contrapuntal foil for Veronica's desire,
represented through the carnal exhibitions-denoting a parallel desire to ap-
propriate and re-cite the legitimacy of Sory's ethnic past as well-that link
metonymically Veronica to Sory himself. It is by recognizing the paradoxes,
pluralisms, and limitations of this desire that Veronica finally comes to terms
with her latent, interpellative hybridity.
   Upon closer examination, the trajectory of the Mercier-Sory relationship
is revealed as one inscribed not only in self-awareness but in constant self-
criticism and self-questioning. While Veronica appears from the outset to be
aware of the limitations and paradoxes of the sexual relationship, this ongo-
ing process of self-interrogation signals her growing recognition of her own
interstitiality, functioning in tandem with the foreclosure of dialogic commu-
nication to reframe the subject's cultural ambivalence in both narrative and
discursive terms. For example, as their first physical encounter is on the point
of consummation, Veronica demonstrates her awareness of the extent to
which this act will problematize her position: "I'm going to bed with a perfect
stranger.... This man who is about to take me does not know that I am a virgin
of sorts. . . . I now realize why he fascinates me. He hasn't been branded. ...
Tell me that you understand me, my nigger with ancestors. . . . Am I talking?
Or do I think I'm talking?" (36, 37, 38/64, 65, 66).
   This passage is an excellent example of the difference between monologic
and dialogic communication. The obscurity of the ostensibly other-directed
internal monologue is ultimately offset by the protagonist's interrogation of the
status of her own discourse, a conscious shift in register denoting a problemati-
zation that reinscribes the deliberate marginalization of her position. But,
given that this interrogation takes place in the same mode as the sequence it
questions, the inherent instability of the discursive position is even further
inscribed as a result of this interrogation. Such paradoxes clearly delineate the
discursive and subjective interstices between desire, alterity, culture, and iden-
tity. The physical side of the relationship is inscribed as a sort of allegory, her
virginal state representative of her lack of a cultural context as well as the
embryonic condition of her relationship with Africa as it is allegorized through




En attendant le bonheur /


Sory himself. Indeed, the admission that he is desirable "because he hasn't
been branded" amounts to a recognition of her own "adulterated" cultural
lineage. Yet, at the same time, the tentative and ambiguous aspect of this in-
scription is reflected in her problematization of the status of her own dis-
course, an act which reflects an awareness of the unsettled nature of both the
discursive and the interpellative fields. For in wondering whether she is indeed
speaking, a question posed through the inherently and deliberately circum-
scribed medium of her internal monologue, she redoubles and reinscribes the
troubled status of the narrative discourse, displacing even further her own
ambiguous interpellative position as it is represented through the conscious
displacement implied by this discursive strategy.
   This ambiguous otherness that situates the protagonist ultimately inscribes
a textual poetics of place, the doubled ambiguity of the alienation it articulates
re-presenting the ethnic and cultural creoleness whose polysemy is the mark of
her discursive positionality. As the narrative moves its subject in a trajectory
from absence to acceptance, Veronica's recognition that Sory's double, dis-
junctive inscription both as desired cultural symbol and as arbiter of physical
desire has effectively masked the latent potential of her own Caribbeanness
finally drives her toward a transformative resolution of her cultural pluralism.
   While Veronica's awareness of the need for alterity is consciously under-
taken and pursued, her simultaneous awareness of its limitations demonstrates
a deeper knowledge of the true nature of her estrangement. Alienated from
both the Caribbean and Africa, does she need, at bottom, "a certain idea" of
them both to effect this reconciliation with herself and her past? "If he doesn't
love me, if he doesn't let me love him, how can I return to my womb? How can
I be born again? Free of shame and hidden contempt? ... I'm convinced he
can save me. Reconcile me with myself, in other words my race. . . . Do I love
this man or a certain idea I have to have of Africa? What is this idea? That of an
Africa, of a black world that Europe did not reduce to a caricature of itself" (66,
67, 77/100, 103-4, 119; emphasis mine). Here, she appears to recognize the
reality that Sory is in fact mediating her ability to come to terms with herself as
other, signified by this need for uterine return. Clearly, then, the reconcilia-
tion that she seeks is really in order to engender a new discursive space from
the categories of past and present, allegory and reality, desire and ambiguity.
This desire to be "born again" draws on an attempt to merge with her own
projection of black linearity and legitimacy in order to achieve a new inscrip-




78 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tion within the field of the Other, to break new subjective ground by possess-
ing the unadulterated, uncaricatured signifier of "Africa," an act which will
determine the future by merging her with its idealized past.
   Veronica's dilemma is thus a complex and multifaceted one, signified by an
almost impossible mediation of a plethora of opposing signs within a single
social whole. As Ajok6 Mimiko-Bestman points out: "Veronica's dilemma is
one of reconciling the dialectic of past and present. . . but don't the two tem-
poral axes find their synthesis in Ibrahima Sory. .. ? She drifts between the two
opposing groups in this African village, between Hremakhonon and Saliou's
household" (1987:166). The tensions between Sory and Saliou, her neighbor,
simultaneously teacher-turned-activist, Sory's brother-in-law, and leader of the
opposition forces, tend to sum up the similarities and contradictions of the
alterity that Veronica must negotiate; these figures will parallel her growing
recognition of the mythical oneness of the signifier of "Africa." The twin axes
traced by these characters and their final, tragic encounter will assume a grow-
ing importance in her mediation of the dialectical relationship between Africa
and the Caribbean which she both desires and denies.
   Yet, for Veronica, love swiftly becomes equated to politics in the African
context: "I'm wandering from one continent to another, looking for my iden-
tity, dixit Ibrahima Sory. . . . If I understand correctly, making love in this
country comes down to making a political choice" (64, 69/1o, io6). She be-
comes increasingly preoccupied with parallels between desire and identity,
with whether she loves Sory, whether he loves her, and, most important, she
begins to question the efficacy of the metonymic relationship she has estab-
lished between him and the country he represents: "I begin to understand
where I went wrong. If I want to come to terms with myself, i.e. with them, i.e.
with us, I ought to return home" (71/110). The continued deliberate restriction
of her discourse to an internal monologue only serves to problematize even
further the role of the discursive process in the resolution of her relationships.
Yet, at the same time, this recognition of the metissage signified by her cultural
origin defines and particularizes the discourse of diversity that she embodies,
for, as Frangoise Lionnet suggests, "if... identity is a strategy, then mdtissage is
the fertile ground of our heterogeneous and heteronomous identities as post-
colonial subjects" (1989:8). It is by recognizing and valorizing this cultural and
subjective status as a metis that Veronica will ultimately resolve the divided
desires underlying her own ambiguity.




En attendant le bonheur / 79


   If love is assimilated to politics, then the pursuit of desire implies the taking
of sides; her neutrality cannot be maintained forever. The mythification
through which she had figured the Other dissolves; her primary narcissism
enters a secondary stage, gives way to a dialectical exchange. The womb of the
mother is that space to which one cannot return once having departed it; the
goal at recognition must be to reframe that which she herself represents.
Veronica must accept the separation from the Other in order to assume and
valorize her own identity, to engender a discursive space for her diversity and
ambiguity. Separation from the (m)other implies separation from its signifier,
Ibrahima Sory, as well.
   By deciding to abandon the Other, Veronica reverses the cultural codes
through which she has operated; the burgeoning political crisis which Sory, as
Minister of the Interior, must police, forces her finally to choose between
Saliou and Sory, a symbolic recognition of the "Africas" they stand for. Sud-
denly Sory appears in a different light, one significantly illuminated by Saliou:
"Well, Saliou was right. Ibrahima Sory is a feudal reactionary. . . . A cop. I
realize I'm dealing with a cop. I'm looking for salvation in the arms of a cop.
... Did I come to Africa for that? Will I find my identity in this role? To hell!
Let's forget about my identity. Isn't all this searching in vain? In vain" (88, 91/
130, 134; emphasis in the original). The significance of this new perception of
Sory as politician rather than as cultural object of desire occurs in terms di-
rectly mediated by Saliou, his subjective counterpart within a framework of
nationalism, and cannot be overstated. Her recognition that his inviolability is
politically grounded is critical to her own understanding of the complexes
inherent in her articulation of identity as a female Caribbean postcolonial
subject. For in perceiving Sory as a cop, the protagonist is now finally aware
not only of his impossible alterity but of her own as well. She also realizes that
his role with regard to her has been to interdict her identity; inhibiting rather
than mediating by virtue of the paternalism and authority bound up in his role
as minister, he has in fact impeded her accomplishment of recognition while
the elaboration of her own displaced desire must now confront its ineluctable
foreclosure, the imposition of circumscription, repression, and restraint rather
than reinscription and release. Indeed, she is also now able to infer that the
social whole for which he is the signifier has carried out a similar function with
regard to her interpellation; the myth of la mere Afrique was indeed just that,
an empty sign whose reductive codification by the Other had inevitably deter-




8o / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


mined her inability to withdraw from the misrecognition inherent in its discur-
sive space. And so she is now in fact able to categorize her own activity as a
role-a falsehood, a hollow construct antithetical to identity, a role doomed to
dissolution and which must now be abandoned. For this postcolonial female
subject, victim of a double subjugation that erases the very possibility of a place
of enunciation, the discursive figure of the internal monologue now becomes
a means of generating an alternative subject position from a framework of
marginality and exile.
   Meanwhile, the ongoing political tension marches toward its moment of
crisis. Oddly, the continuing strikes, demonstrations, and arrests seem to have
no perceptible effect on the trajectory of her relationship with Sory; she con-
tinues to either repress or ignore the likelihood of the latter's instigation of or
involvement in political oppression. But when she discovers that Sory has ap-
parently had her followed one evening, and that the safety of his own brother-
in-law, Saliou, the opposition leader, is being openly threatened by forces op-
erating under his aegis, things begin to take a different turn:

   This man is obnoxious. I am now fully aware of it. I'm the one who's
   fleeing the alienated of my native isle and I come to work on other alien-
   ations. That's it, isn't it? Yes it is.... I didn't find my ancestors. Three and
   a half centuries have separated me from them. They didn't recognize me
   any more than I recognized them. All I found was a man with ancestors
   who's guarding them jealously for himself and wouldn't dream of sharing
   them with me. . . . I'm an ambiguous animal, half fish, half bird, a new
   style of bat. A false sister. A false foreigner. It would have to start all over
   again from the beginning. I got off to a bad start in this country. I should
   have become interested. . . . Try to understand. (123, 133, 136-37/177, 189,
   193-94)
Veronica's increasing recognition of the tenuousness of her African inscription
forms the core of this extract, and, as we shall see, it effectively forms a turning
point in the direction of her trajectory.
   As her monologue becomes mediatory of subjective regeneration, her char-
acterization of Sory as "obnoxious" marks the beginning of the end. She has
finally achieved the realization that what separates them is difference rather
than similarity, and that this difference must in fact become the (hall)mark of
her own subjectivity in order for its full potential to be exploited. Interestingly
enough, she characterizes herself as a traveler from Europe, rather than the




En attendant le bonheur / 8i


Caribbean, inscribing herself geopoliticlly as departmental subject and situat-
ing herself squarely at the middle point of the historic relationship of triangular
exchange linking Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, and re-marking the in-
termediate and overdetermined nature of her social and cultural space. Her
position is now one of an exiled female departmental subject, a triple per-
sonification of the decentering effects of colonialism, class, and gender. This
compounding of her situation is what is in fact engendered by "other identities
... other alienations," as the multiplication and regeneration of her ambigu-
ous perspective inexorably reframes not only the form of her discourse but her
cultural location as well; she is now, literally, between worlds.
   Sory's insistent efforts to "guard them jealously for himself" amount to re-
pudiation of the subject by the (m)Other, an attempt to inscribe the separation
of cultures and of discourses which should force the subject into acceptance of
the laws of the symbolic Order. Veronica is able to reject Sory and Africa, but
he has no understanding of her doubleness, thus limiting his utility as a cul-
tural catalyst. For the paradox that ironically undergirds their relationship
inscribes Africa as cultural (m)Other to the Caribbean subject, while, at the
same time, colonial Europe inscribes itself as discursive (m)Other to the sub-
jects of both Africa and the Caribbean. The repudiation carried out against the
postcolonial African subject by the displaced departmental Caribbean Other
seeking cultural and political contextualization is simultaneously recuperated
and reproduced by this unwelcoming signifier for Africa against the European
(m)Otherness that Veronica simultaneously embodies. She must now recog-
nize this chiasmus and reappropriate the spaces of ambiguity and doubleness
that will allow her to refine and embellish the creole culture by which she is
ultimately framed.
   It is within this frame of reference that Veronica can finally acknowledge
the ambiguity of her position. This action does mark an important turning
point: while Frangoise Lionnet suggests that "Veronica reaches a new form of
knowledge, if only a negative one, still based in a Nietzschean form of anar-
chic and negative ressentiment" (1989:175), I would like to contend that the
negativity of her binary outlook has been successfully negotiated and re-
placed, allowing her to take the supplementary steps that will lead to her de-
parture. For it is in these terms that her final deployment of a contestatory
doubleness will take place.
   In fact, this gesture toward accession and acceptance takes place simulta-
neously on two discursive levels. On the one hand, in defining herself in the




82 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


previous extended excerpt as "an ambiguous animal . . . a false sister,"
Veronica uses this ambiguity in order to come to terms with the insufficiency
provided by the African Other and her own lack of commitment. This sisterly
role is also insufficient for the subject because of the paradox inherent within
the relationship; whereas Veronica would appear physically and culturally
able to exploit her ethnohistorical resemblance to her African counterparts,
this relationship is simultaneously limited in that the Other has not acceded to
her appropriation of alterity; her cultural sisterhood remains latent, unful-
filled, and false to the extent that the insubstantiality of the ground on which
this role was based has now been exposed.
   Similarly, the term "a false foreigner" assumes a parallel ambiguous stance,
although the apparent tautology it contains also marks the adverse of its sisterly
counterpart. She is a "false foreigner" through the paradoxes and contradic-
tions of the Guadeloupean culture from which she derives, producing her
alienation from this space through her departmental definition by both Africa
and the metropole, a cultural sign of the colonizing Other. The paradoxes and
pluralities within the terms "false sister" and "false foreigner" thus tend to can-
cel each other out, leaving the absence engendered by their mutual opposition
as the ultimate marker of her subjective interpellation; the place of her belong-
ing is still ultimately an open question. As an ambiguous subject, embodying
a paradoxical, polysemic rootlessness, functioning through a specific discur-
sive space that remains outside the linear strictures of metropolitan dialogism,
Veronica Mercier can now synthesize her divided desire, working through her
overdetermination to draw on, but yet remain separate from, the specific fields
of African and French subjectivity to create a new, third sphere of identity
beyond the boundaries of binary contestation. In mapping these contours,
however, she must also come to terms with the subjective corollaries that are
also specters of her intrinsic displacement, confronting her anxieties in the
paternal authority of the Mandingo marabout, the mulatto charms of De
Roseval, the metropolitan integrationism signaled by her white Parisian lover,
the aura of authenticity symbolized by her "nigger with ancestors," Sory, and,
finally, the critical threat posed by the looming confrontation with her histori-
cal counterpart, Marilisse.




En attendant le bonheur / 83


Veronica: Desire and Creole Culture

The role of desire in generating the ambiguity of her identity is of paramount
importance in explaining Veronica's relationship with the African Other.4 She
is painfully self-aware, and her words reflect an awareness at least of her subjec-
tive dilemma, although she may not yet have clearly grasped the means toward
its resolution: "Saliou is an African, a man from Africa, but not my Africa and
consequently does not crystallize the love I am seeking for myself through her"
(146/207). It is precisely both the depth and definition of this absent self-love
which she seeks through Africa that, once established, will point Veronica to
the road back to self-affirmation. But the origins of her lack of rootedness are
much farther back in her past, and it is this aspect of her identity structure that
we must now explore further.
   Veronica's depiction as a displaced mulatto bourgeois Guadeloupean
woman, born into a social and familial structure desiring to erase its social
inadequacy through assimilation to the white, upper-class stratum of island
society, is central to the resolution of the complexities of her own divided de-
sire. Within this doubly alienated world of the black bourgeoisie, then, Ver-
onica Mercier is the embodiment of the basic condition defining Caribbean
society; as the personification of a post/colonial hybridity, an icon of the
region's ethnic and cultural overdetermination by the twin axes framing its
ongoing encounter with colonialism, she is, in Homi Bhabha's classic phrase,
literally less than one but double, shunned by both ends of the spectrum,
unable to accomplish complete assimilation into or acceptance by either of
the groups she simultaneously embodies. The resulting inscription in both the
metropole and its Other is at the heart of her inability to locate or define a
place for her dual subjectivity. In addition, her family's insistence on bourgeois
class divisions tends to exacerbate her difference, imposing patterns of social
and cultural exclusion that, paradoxically, seem to define her place in this
neocolonial society. The function of these figures in the economy of the narra-
tive are of key importance in articluating Veronica's alterity.
   Veronica's predicament is in fact a cultural conundrum whose resolution
demands the recognition of the critical intersection of opposing patterns of
identity and difference. And indeed, the extent to which Veronica's dilemma
renders her paradigmatic of the society at large compels us to consider the
implicit link between individual and collective identity in the Caribbean
women she re-presents. These issues are cogently summed up by Leah Hewitt




84 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

in Autobiographical Tightropes: "But identity is that curious fiction that re-
quires absolute difference . . . while situating its subject in a preexisting signi-
fying chain of culture.... In Veronica's case, individual identity is intimately
connected to the problematic of collective identity of the Antilles" (175).
These issues of race, class, and gender converge to create a doubled subjective
counterpart in the text (another who is me), a fictionalized, tropological re-
presentation of the subject to whom the latter refers constantly as Marilisse.
This figure is a paradoxical one, the circumstances of her historicity embody-
ing in turn the conflicting and contradictory desires of the subject to both
subvert and submit to the cultural anxiety produced by colonial patterns of
patriarchal authority. In her desire to both recognize and to disavow the
ethnohistorical paradigm established by Marilisse, Veronica must face the
cultural paradoxes that have overdetermined her subjectivity and that in fact
endow her with a cultural hybridity whose potential she must now learn to
exploit.
   The unbidden series of associations that opens the novel is a point of con-
vergence for her anxieties of authority, emphasizing the extent to which her
lack of place is grounded in the surviving traces of her familial order: "The
police officer really hits the nail on the head. . . . Surely from that part of the
coast that produced my father's ancestors" (3/19-20). This metonymic slippage
from one authority figure to another, from one iconic re-presentation of alien-
ated cultural patriarchy to another mediated by the name of the father, encap-
sulates the axes of Veronica's alienation. But soon, by juxtaposing the two
neighboring French Caribbean departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique,
their women, who are in a sense a metonymic extension of herself, are soon
also made the objects of a comparison in which the issue of metissage renders
them symbolic of her own division and self-interrogation: "The French, and
consequently everyone else, have always ignored Guadeloupe in favor of Mar-
tinique. The Martinique women are said to have a higher proportion of mixed
blood. Hence, they are considered more beautiful. A whole lot of good that did
them. Why am I here?" (4/20). By reversing the code and opening up the sign,
Veronica's interrogation points inalterably to the primary role of metissage in
perpetuating stereotypical myths of Caribbean culture. But it is the scope and
substance of metissage that is really at issue here; she must work through the
implications of this doubleness to be able to recognize the extent to which the
complexity of her relationship with Africa is ineluctably bound up in and recu-




En attendant le bonheur / 85


perated by the very metissage that grounds her familial relations. The impor-
tance of the tensions and dualities intrinsic to this background grows increas-
ingly apparent as the text progresses.
   It is the amorphous link between this complex, contradictory familial struc-
ture of her native Guadeloupe-torn between the middle-class conformities
imposed by the metropole and the apparent ethnic linearities of its African
axis -and the singular, legitimizing lineage that she has sought through them
both, that marks the extent of Veronica's misreading of the unitary subjectivity
that she seeks. Her attempt to appropriate Sory's ancestors for herself, thereby
accomplishing a retroactive inscription in a racially recognizable civilization
with which, however, she can establish only distant ties, is in fact an act of overt
cultural possession whose innate illegitimacy is grounded in a desire not sim-
ply to know but to become the Other. The civilization of Africa is desirable
both because her family rejects its symbolism and because it provides an ap-
pearance of continuity and ethnic legitimacy; given this patina of perma-
nence, and with Sory as its iconic representation, he becomes desirable be-
cause of his enigmatic, unadulterated, "unbranded" difference. In seeking to
own this history and to recast it in the image of her own desire, Veronica's
cross-cultural encounter will ultimately reveal to her that the binary inscrip-
tion of difference remains essentially a difference from, and is thus an inad-
equate means of subjective survival; only an abnegation of this economy of
possession will prevent this subject from repeating the proprietary patterns of
the colonial encounter. Ultimately, the double problematic of difference and
the essential otherworldliness of both Africa and Europe must be resolved
through the fugitive complicities of her Caribbean heritage.
   The incessant discursive slippage that is integral to Cond6's narrative strat-
egy since it figures the ambivalence of Veronica's cultural inscription thus
incorporates not only the primary communicative ambiguity that is perhaps
the principal textual signature of both narrative and subject, but also a tempo-
ral elasticity that allows the narrator to accomplish necessary shifts of period,
register, and perspective. The sudden proleptic or analeptic changes that this
discursive elasticity permits result in moments of flashback or reverie that are
critical to Veronica's eventual recognition of the ultimate futility of this search
for ancestors. By using her imbrication with the African Other ultimately to
confront the alienations of her Caribbean past, she is eventually able to per-
ceive the formative subjective role of her bourgeois family origins, and to rec-




86 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ognize, in the social complexities of a multiracial and multicultural fran-
cophone Caribbean background, the ghosts that must be laid to rest so that she
can finally move beyond them.
   The exposure by degrees of the heterogeneities of her family history is thus
a necessary step in the fleshing out of a composite character who would ulti-
mately have to "find herself" among the complexities represented by the coun-
terpart. She will come to the key trope of patriarchal authority indirectly, ac-
knowledging through the peregrinations of her Aunt Paula-from a distant,
almost unacknowledged branch of the family-the artificiality of the family's
all-important veneer of bourgeois respectability: "To make a long story short, a
down-and-out white, determined to finish his days under the Caribbean sun,
married her on his death bed. The priest had threatened to withdraw the last
rites. She was left the lovely French name of Delahaye and enough to build a
hotel-restaurant on the public square at Sainte Anne. They never mentioned
her name. Black-out" (10/28). The arbitrary combinations of chance summed
up in this little vignette encapsulate the inescapability of metissage in the com-
plex patterns of Caribbean history. In the case ofVeronica's family, their acqui-
sition of property, and of a respectable French name to go with it, submerges
the important corollary of means while inadvertently acting as a paradigm of
the random creation of creole cultures. The fact that no family member ever
spoke of the inadvertent, almost illegitimate nature of these origins, of the
intersection of black with bdkd that locates her family's real roots-given the
duality of the pun on ethnicity and erasure inherent in the term "black-out"-
confirmed the primacy of appearance over reality, driving an alienation whose
simultaneous recognition and denial of its metropolitan axis produced ethnic
and cultural patterns whose origins were as indefinable as their effects were
endemic.
   At bottom, then, the duality of Veronica's position is figured by the para-
doxes of her past. She has inculcated the stereotypes, inadequacies, and class
prejudices of bourgeois social climbers who, she claims, prayed thusly: "We
give thanks to our Lord for having made us different from the other niggers.
And equal to the white man, our former master" (45/86). Indeed, it is as a result
of this sense of class inadequacy conjoined with metissage that she seems para-
doxically to claim the right to be a part of the Africa that she seeks to appropri-
ate, in a bid to achieve legitimacy: "I could have vibrated to the word of the
griot.... Instead, I have in my family tree a white man's sperm gone astray in
some black woman's womb. It didn't seem to disgust the sailors on the slave




En attendant le bonheur / 8


ships"(17/38). This alternation between the elusive affinities and differential
temporalities of genealogy suggests a subject separated from Africa, an ethnic
heritage inalterably marked by the notorious rape of African women during
the Middle Passage; this brutal inscription into Caribbean social reality em-
phasizes the ineluctable imposition of sociocultural origins in which the no-
tion of a unitary milieu is revealed as a chimera. Caught in the ambiguous
interstices of a polysemic indeterminacy, Veronica continually crosses bound-
aries of time and space to confront a collection of counterparts and ancestors
whose subjection to an overdetermined history may yet shape the ambitions of
her future.
   Thus the critical confrontation with the figure of Marilisse, representing the
complex tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas attending the black woman's
survival in a Caribbean context, will engender myriad subjective and textual
implications for Veronica's constant temporal oscillations between landscapes
and cultures in her quest for liberation. In a discursive conflation whose
resonances are both analeptic and proleptic, the historical derivation of this
haunting figure is inscribed through the dehumanizing scene of a slave auc-
tion, narrated in the first person: "They were all sitting around, hissing. 'Mari-
lisse! You're making yourself Marilisse!' Due to his forthcoming departure,
Sieur Cazeau, inhabitant of Cul-de-Sac, has put up for sale a young negro
girl of pleasant features named Marilisse. Good laundress. Can be taken on a
trial basis. . . . I was not doing a Marilisse. I was in love. That's all. A woman
in love, isn't she always a Marilisse? Let the Feminists stone me if they want
to!" (17-18/39). In its primary incarnation as counterpart, the figure of Mari-
lisse at once fulfills a plurality of roles, among which the primary function, as
we see here, is to serve as a cultural sounding board for a protagonist intrinsi-
cally unsure of her goals and motives. Through the tensions of temporal
disjuncture, Veronica is dis-placed backward through time to take the place of
a Marilisse who then voices her dis-location in the third person, in order to
mirror the polyvalent paradoxes of Veronica in the present. But in fact, this
complex contextualization of the figure of Marilisse provides but one of sev-
eral terms and conditions by which its impact on the subjectivity of the pro-
tagonist is iterated.
   On a primary level, then, through the social and cultural oppositions in-
scribed in this figural counterpart that is Marilisse-whose metier of laun-
dress-or blanchisseuse, in French-is far from coincidental and, indeed, cul-
turally and linguistically significant-the text opens up a modernist means of




88 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


evaluating Veronica's strategy of self-liberation through the blandishments of
an apparently uncomplicated desire, but one linked ineluctably to the field of
the Other. For historically, the name refers to the conditions of a real relation-
ship of concubinage between a slave woman and her white master, as Cond6
herself has indicated in a series of interviews with francophone cinema critic
Frangoise Pfaff: "I decided to use this historical character, Marilisse, a black
slave woman who lived with a white man and had children with him" (1993:
65). Importantly, while the social resonances of this relationship within the
black community would appear to border the fields of social betrayal and
personal prostitution, there are several levels of signification to this complex
relationship that might make it appear to be simply one of self-preservation or
even liberation. As a result, Veronica's already ambivalent subjective trajectory
is now rendered even more problematic. As Cond6 continues: "In this way I
sought to stress both Veronica's desire for liberation and her sense of submis-
sion. The trap for her is that she seeks self-liberation through a man" (65). But
in fact this simultaneity of liberation and submission frames a complex nexus
of contradictory concerns, one complicated even further by the ever present
figure of the colonized woman, and marked by the attempt to accomplish an
illusory self-liberation doubly grounded in terms of racial difference and social
hierarchy. In a supplementary intertextual and historical reference, she points
out that she is no Mayotte Capecia and has no desire to lighten the race either
symbolically or referentially.5 But in these terms, Veronica's act of self-defin-
ition, framed as it is within the conundrum initiated by Marilisse, remains
mired in a dilemma of Otherness whose metonymical, dependent relationship
to both subjective and colonial patterns of patriarchy effectively nullifies the
subject's goal well before it is even reached.
   Further, by raising the troubled issue of power-based racial relations within
a historical context of inequality, Cond6 is able to comment within the narra-
tive frame itself on the ultimate end of Veronica's relationship with Sory, this
self-reflexive turn giving first voice to the dilemma that Veronica faces by ac-
ceding to a desire grounded in the field of the Other. Through its implicit
factors of ethnic and cultural difference, the inescapable imbalance implicit
in these tensions of patriarchal power invalidates the solution proposed by
Marilisse to the conundrum of cultural conflict. Thus Veronica's liaison with
the son of the mulatto De Roseval family brings its own set of problems, their
ineradicable pattern of colonial imitation articulating its own set of critical
ambiguities: "The mansion was a fake, a mere copy of the Marins de St Sorlins




En attendant le bonheur / 89


mansion which had stood a few miles higher up only to be brought down in a
slave uprising. The light-skinned De Rosevals claimed descendance from the
Marins de St Sorlins. One of them had even attempted to prove it. All the
whites rose up against him. Pretentious bastard" (6). With the mansion as a
metonymic re-presentation of family legitimacy and respectability, grounded
in the interstices of mimesis, it is significant that its original paradigm is
brought down by a slave uprising, one of many events erased from a colonial
history written by the colonizer. Further, however, this episode illuminates the
intricacies of lineage wrought by the colonial encounter, and the inadequacy
of claims of legitimacy to the maintenance of a neocolonial social hierarchy.
Finally, the dual traces already at work in the narrative come together in the
final exclamation, a literally double-voiced remark that is a conflation of
Veronica's ongoing commentary through internal monologue, and her direct,
quoted appropriation of the perspective of the rich colonial whites whose so-
cial superiority is threatened by an outsider, a pretender.
   At the same time, however, she is perhaps not entirely disingenuous when
she claims that for her, the attraction of Jean-Marie, "this light-skinned mu-
latto with green eyes and the complexion of a young Oriental prince" (7/24),
goes beyond the superficialities of skin color. "Wasn't his color. I swear. That's
what they all said because, naturally, they could not think of anything else. No,
it was his freedom" (8/26). The social freedom to which she refers here stems
from her metonymic relation to Jean-Marie's exclusion from traditional racial
patterns and hierarchies, and her family's disapproval illuminates the plurali-
ties and paradoxes of the French Caribbean's black bourgeoisie's constant
struggle to achieve social inscription and metropolitan recognition. With
Jean-Michel, the white French "architect with his long hair and rust-colored
velvet suit" (14/34-5), she enters a relationship of sexual exchange of which she
claims that "he was reassured. I was satisfied. Deuce" (23/46). Here, despite her
professed longing for a sense of social and ethnic legitimacy, and the claims of
reprobation that followed her earlier amorous encounter, she ultimately pro-
fesses a critical blindness to race and its itinerant corollaries in her relationship
with Jean-Michel, calling this relationship a "purely an individual adventure.
With a man who for me was not a white man" (188/132). At this juncture, then,
her subjective trajectory appears to lead from an intersection of race with class,
to an attempted alignment with metropolitan legitimacy, while denying the
importance of its gender and racial components. These intersections of gen-
der, race, and desire are pursued and transformed with Sory's symbolic con-




90 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


junctions of ethnicity and history within the African "heart of darkness"; the
only firm constant, then, appears to be her paradoxical bent to achieve recog-
nition through varying signifiers of socialized masculinity. So the bases of her
relationships with the mulatto Jean-Marie De Roseval, and with the white Pa-
risian architect, Jean-Michel, become increasingly significant, pointing as
they do to a long-standing practice of subjective contestation through align-
ment with the masculinized, racialized other. Indeed, a disturbing parallel to
the checkered sexual/subjective history of Aunt Paula (Delahaye) is already
perceptible, one (re)traced by Veronica and which already serves as a primary
foil for the initial turn to africanitd of her rootless, composite character.
   To sum up, then, since the act of submission ultimately implied by Mari-
lisse's relationship with slavery-driven white patriarchy renders her in turn a
false sister, apparently betraying principles of social and cultural resistance,
this sign of bad faith impacts proleptically on Veronica, framing the tensions of
her split subjectivity in exactly the same terms. For Veronica, as her cultural
and historical heir presumptive, the relevant issues are now rendered even
thornier by the creolized impositions of a much more complex world, one in
which the barriers between self and Other, colonizer and colonized, are now
blurred, multiform, displaying instability and permeability instead of binarism
and linearity. As Veronica's journey toward a valorized hybridity continues, the
uncertainties that these comparisons elicit are continually plumbed and ex-
tended by the probing elasticities and ambiguities of the narrative framework.
In order to more fully exploit the potential implicit in this telling space of
uncertainty, the narrative will reveal an even more critical subjective confron-
tation, as the protagonist is led to interrogate the tensions and parameters gov-
erning her bourgeois childhood existence with the family at Saint-Claude.
   It is through this conscious and continuous self-questioning of her motives
that Veronica effectively demonstrates how much is at risk for her in this ven-
ture. The pluralities of the past are unremittingly present, constantly (re)con-
structing the narrative and subjective ambiguities of the protagonist. For ex-
ample, at her introduction to the president, Mwalimwana, when he greets her
as one of the children that Africa lost, she interjects an interstitial commentary,
a correction that immediately and irrevocably implicates both parties: "Sold,
Mwalimwana, sold. Not lost. Tegbessou got 400 pounds sterling per boat load"
(32/58). Such strategies decenter any fixed positions of guilt and innocence,
and alienation assumes a pervasive character encompassing the zones of
alterity traced by the creole conjunctions of Veronica's past and the dual de-




En attendant le bonheur / 91


sires of her present. The figure of Marilisse now assumes its complex affirm-
ation of the significance of alterity in the configuration of the protagonist's
subjectivity.
   Veronica's recognition of the importance of her own childhood in the
working out of her role in the growing political crisis speaks to the intractabil-
ity of social strata, and this becomes increasingly apparent with her progressive
revisitation of its boundaries. In describing these relationships to Ibrihama
Sory, she is simultaneously avowing them to herself: "Let me go on. I wanted
to escape from the family, the Mandingo marabout, my mother, the Black
bourgeoisie that made me, with its talk of glorifying the Race and its terrified
conviction of its inferiority. And then gradually I came around to thinking that
this form of escape was not valid, that it was hiding something else" (52/86).
This resolution to confront the origins of her alterity and what Sory derisorily
terms her "identity problem" results in the inscription of a remarkable se-
quence into the textual economy. Successive fragmented articulations of a
pervasive associative reaction finally give rise to a reincarnation of home, per-
mitting her to confront her elusive counterpart through a re-presentation of
the creolized past:

    What can Jean-Michel be doing at this moment? At home. The town
    seems so small, ridiculous! That's where I was born, however, and grew up.
    They show me the new district, the council flats that have replaced the
    huts made of soap cartons and corrugated iron; the motorways; the new
    hotels, and the wildlife park cut in two by an ice-cold river. I am sitting on
    a big grey rock, sucking my thumb. A dozen men and women are getting
    off the bus Bienfaisante Providence. They're beating the gros-ka. A couple
    undulates to the bonda and mimics the motions of making love. Mabo
    Julie is singing her head off. At the wheel, the Mandingo marabout sighs.
    (72/110-11)
    The flashback that this sequence constitutes allows the narrator to view
the social and infrastructural changes at work in her Caribbean departmental
home from the perspective of an existence amid the norms of the metropole,
such that the appearance of highways, hotels, and H.L.M.s that transform the
traditional, once familiar landscape, the mirrored reflection of metropolitan
patterns of development, does not immediately appear out of place. The heady
mixture of old and new, of French and Antillean cultures, subtly changes the
perception of the once-familiar landscape and puts into place that dichotomy





92 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

between past and present, known and unknown, self and Other, that
undergirds the creole parameters and hybridities of her difference. The return
to origins becomes a necessary confrontation, a crucial encounter between
what she once was and what she had now become that will mark and, ulti-
mately, help resolve her future. Through the interpolations of the maid, Mabo
Julie, a metonymic link to the paradoxical familial structure of her early child-
hood, and the paternal authority figure of the "mandingo marabout," whose
ineluctable difference is relentlessly and metonymically re-presented to her
through diverse authoritarian figures for Africa-first, through the immigra-
tion officer whose presence marks her arrival in Africa, and, most important,
through the ongoing enigma of Sory himself-both the alienated past and the
sense of alterity she desires of the African Other form forbidding patterns of
authority that must be confronted and overcome. In this sense, the passage of
time leads to a point of convergence for the subject's redefinition of her own
alterity. As the alienated Parisian adult watches the bourgeois Guadeloupean
child sitting on the rock, the imperative to negotiate between worlds of differ-
ence, the one grounded in patterns of colonial class structure and the other in
the ambiguities of ethnic alterity, both of which are simultaneously engen-
dered and imposed by the colonial (m)Other, becomes increasingly urgent.
For it is only by recognizing and coming to terms with the transformative po-
tential of her own dualities that Veronica will escape the concomitant corollar-
ies of her desire for cultural appropriation and begin her repudiation of the
conflation of sign and referent signified by Sory and the African Other.
   The preceding episodes are interspersed across the first two parts of the
novel, with Veronica drawing increasingly closer, as it were, to the final en-
counter between alternating spheres of subjectivity. Indeed, it is possible to
construct a parallel between the increasing intensity of her subjective di-
lemma and the growing tension of the local political situation, reinforcing
the novel's deliberate conflation of the patterns of passion and politics. With
the latter approaching its culmination and climax in part 3, she attempts to
escape by visiting a neighboring islet. But, through a process of metonymic
displacement, the boat trip reawakens a reminiscence of a similar journey to
Guadeloupe's neighboring isle of Marie-Galante, undertaken when she was a
child. However, this parallel temporality quickly announces itself as a simple
vehicle for a final engagement with the past, one which must ultimately be
faced if Veronica is to be liberated from the throes of her binary patterns of
desire and to find the means of claiming that tertiary subjective space which




En attendant le bonheur / 93


she still embodies. Reinscribing the temporal oscillation that has consistently
marked the discursive boundaries of her self-definition, the subject signals the
opening of this important flashback, finding it now increasingly difficult to
distinguish between past and present: "Is it the present? Or is it the past?" (127/
i8o). As the signifiers of her childhood slowly assume their position in the nar-
rative sequence unfolding to her inner consciousness, and Mabo Julie, Dr. and
Mme. Bageot, and the sights and smells of the five-hour trip become firmly
contextualized, she is soon able to recognize and affirm, with a note of relief
mingled, perhaps, with an apprehension that is signaled by verbal repetition,
the return and reanimation of the past: "It's the past. The past" (127/181). As she
makes her way among the onlookers for whom she now represents an object of
desire, given her arrival from the "grande ile of Guadeloupe," this episode
appears to mark the earliest trace of her latent, pervasive desire for otherness,
the primary instance of her unconscious revulsion toward her formative famil-
ial context.
   The family, of whose name she says "I had nothing to be jealous" (8/26),
usually spends this vacation at Saint-Claude, deftly and unforgettably de-
scribed by the narrator as the "mulatto stronghold." But the usual effusive wel-
come, habitually extended to them by their counterparts in other parts of the
island, does not occur here. Their exposure as the black bourgeoisie elicits
vacuousness and rejection, their unbelonging recognized immediately by that
true incarnation of creole mobility, the Bakra, or creole whites: "They were
looking for an excuse to parade themselves at Saint-Claude, the mulatto
stronghold where the Blacks used to walk on tiptoe, the Bakra having fled
higher up.... And believe me, it was total anonymity.... We were not intruders
at Saint-Claude. We simply did not exist.... It was here that everything began"
(128-29/182-83; emphasis mine). The exposure of these hierarchical patterns
of difference, made up of what Leah Hewitt calls "Veronica's chaotic recollec-
tions of a veiled racial inferiority in Guadeloupe" (1990:181), are of critical
importance. For it is at this point that the ineluctable oppositions and con-
vergences of Veronica's creole society emerge to engender that sense of ab-
sence and exclusion, that diffused displacement (the product of imposed anxi-
eties constructed upon artificial hierarchies of colonial authority) which had
brought Veronica to this symbolic juncture where both past and present are at
play in a bid for the predetermination of her prepossessing presence.
   The confrontation and disavowal that constitute the primary axes of this
narrative sequence in fact take place simultaneously on two separate levels.





94 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


On the one hand, the appearance in Saint-Claude of her "mandingo mar-
about" and his family constitutes a test, the ultimate proof of whether or not
the racial and social ascendancy to which they have aspired and which they
have practiced for so long is indeed real, its efficacy to be proven through their
acceptance or rejection by the last bastion of the Bakra, or mulatto bourgeoi-
sie, whose ultimate allegiance is to the ethnic exclusions of the metropole.
For the Merciers, this desire for acceptance is the sign of a subjective alien-
ation and cultural duality that, functioning as the corollary of departmental-
ization, pervades by extension the society at large. And in fact, on the face of it,
their attempt at integration is an abysmal failure. By simply "not existing,"
Veronica's family cannot join in with the objects of their social desire but
rather engender a prohibitive physical distance that emphasizes the difference
that is the basis of their demeaning rejection.
   Paradoxically, however, it is in the observation that "we were not intruders"
that Veronica signifies the thoroughgoing nature of this deception. For her, it
is the paradoxical capacity to be an intruder, to be perceived and recognized
herself as a marginal subject-a false foreigner and an unwanted one-that
signifies her distance from her family's values and ultimately imposes meaning
upon her social interaction. The erasure of this paradoxical potential for differ-
ence - since, to all intents and purposes, her family is effectively effaced by the
very group whose approbation they had sought-seems to mark a critical be-
ginning of sorts: "It was here that everything began." Since her subjectivity is
grounded in her desire to understand and come to terms with where her differ-
ence lies, this sojourn at Saint-Claude was a catalyst for her, the absence of a
meaningful marginality proving to be as problematic as the familial difference
by which she was already marked. For Veronica, the trauma of identity occurs
precisely at the point at which she is not an intruder, for the pain of nonexist-
ence that forces her confrontation with her own unresolved difference serves
to increase the intensity of her sense of disjuncture. Eventually, as we shall see,
it is the irresistible urgency of this innate sense of difference that will force
Veronica, when she does leave Africa, to return not to Guadeloupe but to
Paris.
   As this panoramic re-presentation slowly clarifies the parameters of her
present dilemma, she comes to realize that the critical connections of her
creole culture still constituted the inauguratory gesture of her persistent and
all-pervading alienation. And indeed, it is by confronting the dismissive deri-
sion of the Saint-Claude population that she will come to terms with these




En attendant le bonheur / 95


innate anxieties of cross-cultural desire and apply them diachronically to her
present attempt to appropriate the cultural values of Africa. In other words, her
original desire to be other, born of a lack drawn on the creole complexities of
familial metissage and social difference by the colonial (m)Other, constituted
in fact the origin of that desire to be other which had brought her to Africa,
with its long ethnic history and aura of cultural legitimacy. She had not suc-
ceeded in abandoning the symbolic authorities spawned in childhood; they
were still with her, still haunted her, and now must play their role in resolving
the conflict that, symbolically, both draws Veronica and Sory together and
simultaneously keeps them apart.
   The key, now, is to apply the differential temporalities of both past and
present in order to unlock a new vision of the future. This is a move that must
be performed by the protagonist herself, as she moves beyond these disabling
dualities into an alter/native position. As she waits at Heremakhonon for Sory's
return from the city, the last act of this interpellative drama begins: "The most
illogical thing is that once I get to Heremakhonon I don't know what to do with
myself.... I wait in other words. For when I become Marilisse" (149/209). The
importance of this self-deprecatory observation, equating her desire for Sory-
and, by inference, for the symbolic African structures he so effectively embod-
ies-to the moment when she becomes Marilisse, marks her final acknowl-
edgment of the subjective alienation that has determined her peripatetic
pattern from departmental to metropolitan domination to African politics,
from class conciousness to a cultural alterity that must now be abandoned. The
resolution of these latent, doubled forces of exile and liberation will prove to
have interesting and far-reaching consequences for Veronica as creole subject.
   Following the repression of the student-led uprising, the indeterminacy of
the political situation forces everyone to reexamine their personal position re-
garding the climactic events. She is at last aware of her role as interloper and
accepts its psychological implications of otherness: "I come here . . . to spoil
other identities. I'm the one who's fleeing the alienated of my native isle and I
come to work on other alienations" (133/189). Now she can acknowledge the
need for a new beginning: "I'd need to be someone else to make this investiga-
tion. To start again from the very beginning. To emerge again from my
mother's womb" (166/232). And it is in this context, just prior to the final cata-
lyst of the announcement of Saliou's death, that Veronica's inscription of a
differential alterity for herself takes place. In her newfound honesty, she re-
fuses the profferred political explanation: "I don't believe it. Saliou wasn't a




96 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


coward. Or else, and my intuition tells me that this must be the truth, they
killed him and chose to camouflage his death by suicide" (170/304). Further,
reason dictates a double responsibility for this personal and political tragedy,
forcing a final rejection of Sory and recognition of the results of her blindness
and inaction: "In a way nonetheless despicable and cruel, although bloodless,
I've helped to kill him" (175/312). In this unsparing articulation of her bloody
responsibility, facing and stating her complicity en toutes lettres, the subject
signals her need for a critical change in positionality; no longer does she seek
subjective rebirth by borrowing the structural symbolism of Africa, but rather
embraces a recognition of the innate multivalences and complexities of a cul-
ture of metissage whose location has always, for her, been elsewhere. Aban-
doning the twin axes of desire which had bisected the field in which she sought
to inscribe herself, this third issuance from "my mother's womb" marks the
inauguration of a new site of symbolic otherness, an escape from the binary
confines of a simple teleology of colonial difference.
   In fact, the subject is in the process of abandoning the divided desires of her
original alienation, adopting instead the principles of her own metis back-
ground as the most effective deployment of the self-assertion she has so long
sought. She is in fact an interstitial subject whose intrinsic pluralities have
become the distinguishing sign of a postcolonial neither/nor; outside the bi-
nary boundaries of the colonial self and Other, she can finally take advantage
of her own creative instability. Symbolically, it is the principled stance she has
witnessed in Oumou Hawa, Ibrahima Sory's sister and Saliou's wife, who
calmly but persistently makes her way between opposing political and per-
sonal axes, that has made Veronica see herself as a false sister and spurs her
recognition of courage. This initial but important moment of interstitiality will
ultimately point the way to the resolution of her own positionality. Indeed, as
the embodiment of an incipient hybridity, she repeatedly insists on the need
for lucidity: "I want to leave with my head clear. Fully conscious of what I'm
doing. It's nothing rash. It's not a spur-of-the-moment decision. I've under-
stood. Understood. I must leave if I want to maintain a semblance of respect"
(173/240-41). This desire for clearheadedness is an important correlative to her
subjective restitution and symbolic rebirth, signaled by her reiterated and itali-
cized voicing of "understood"; her deliberate objectivity and distance have
finally been catalyzed.
   Ultimately, the arc of African politics obliges her to make a personal deci-
sion; she is forced to confront her own desire and alterity, and, in so doing, to




En attendant le bonheur / 9


forsake the space of the Other: "My ancestors, my ancestors via Ibrahima Sory
are playing a dirty trick on me. A very dirty trick. By imprisoning Saliou they
are trying to force me to hate them" (160/224). Here, it is not simply that the
African context would always remain other, but also that the insufficiency of
the African Other was always already a reflection of her own, and that the
impossible basis of her desire to become the Other was the issue that had finally
to be addressed and resolved. Her imminent departure signifies the inaugural
gesture of her renegotiation of this intrinsic, interstitial migrancy.
   As she simultaneously approaches both the end of the narrative and a new
subjective beginning, she is able to pass judgement on the episode just ended
from the newfound perspective of a self-generated space: "And here I am. Face
to face with myself. Trapped. . . . One day I'll have to break the silence. This
mistake, this tragic mistake I couldn't help making, being what I am. My an-
cestors led me on. I looked for myself in the wrong place" (176/244; emphasis
mine). Face-to-face with herself, ineluctably but creatively trapped, she can
now construct a strategy of survival that will confront the difficulty she faces
in integrating her pluralism into a positionality of her difference. Yet, signifi-
cantly, her discourse continues to the end as internal monologue, and her
acknowledgment of this configuration and of its continuation - "one day I'll
have to break the silence"-suggests its role as an alternative framework for
inscribing female creole subjectivity. By acknowledging the latent polysemy of
her Caribbean otherness, whose pluralized displacement is made the over-
arching sign of a differential cultural idiom, she finally succeeds in appropriat-
ing her hybridity as a modernist site of creole subjectivity, and in allowing a
transformative, gender-inflected economy of discursive difference to emerge
within that Caribbean space. And it is in the coming political performativity
inherent in the irruption of this postcolonial moment that the significance of
Veronica's departure for Paris and resistance symbolically lies.

Prerogatives of Place
Finally, what we have witnessed, in effect, is the transformation of the inter-
pellative trajectory of the subject of En attendant le bonheur: from a frag-
mented female subject from Guadeloupe's black bourgeoisie-a ndgresse
rouge who is less than one but intrinsically, insistently double-in a frag-
mented postcolonial society marked by mimetism and metissage, whose Afri-
can sojourn takes her through the singular veil of Glissantian Reversion, to a
recognition and assumption of a valorized, contextualized pluralism that is the




98 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


positional embodiment of a creole culture. Indeed, Veronica's predicament is
largely paradigmatic of a sort of subjective dis-ease that afflicts the female pro-
tagonists of Caribbean literature, marked by an intrinsic inability to find a
place in their societies, a predicament usually exacerbated by strong feelings of
abnormality and patterns of aberration. These pervasive cultural and subjec-
tive disjunctures are partly the product of a postcolonial culture, and define
what Marie-Denise Shelton calls "the contradictions and tensions characteris-
tic of feminine existence in the Caribbean" (1990:352). By confronting and
contesting the dilemma of displacement that, as Shelton sees it, accuses these
women of "belonging nowhere, of being deprived of identity" (351), Veronica
succeeds in supplanting the stereotype and engenders a differential discourse
that effectively counters preceding paradigms of dysfunctional self-awareness.
   This postcolonial narrative's visible, vigorous insistence upon retrieving or
inventing lost homelands, as Elleke Boehmer argues, accomplishes the con-
struction of creole identity through what she calls "the conversion of apparent
deficiencies into definitions of self" (1995:117). In these terms, the subjective
strategy outlined by Cond6 is articulated in tandem with the formal narrative
structure, constructing a discursive dyad that specifically seeks to reflect a cer-
tain political and historical vision that would mark Veronica ineluctably as
both product and symbol of a hybrid Caribbean culture. This "condition of
placelessness," this "experience of cultural schizophrenia," in Boehmer's
words, is ultimately translated into a "restorative dream" (117), allowing the
subject to pursue the resolution of her alienation in a context that symbolizes
the difference innate in her own sense of exile, while embodying her subtle
difference from the practices commonly overdetermining the cultural back-
ground of her Caribbean counterparts.
   It is important to note that her trajectory from alienation to self-awareness
has itself been mapped through discourse-specifically, by an iconic re-pre-
sentation of her interstitial ethnocultural pluralism through the doubleness
and foreclosure implied by internal monologue. It is this distance and separa-
tion from any recognition of a valid interpellative space from which to speak
that creates the conditions of possibility through which the subject seeks to
come to terms with the diversity that she embodies. Maryse Cond6 suggested
such an interpretation in an interview with Ina Cesaire: "All I saw in my
people was an absolute imitation of the western life-style, an admiration of its
values, in other words, a total assimilation. Since the Caribbean, during that
period, rarely called into question the cultural images which had been im-




En attendant le bonheur / 99


posed on it by its dependence, even when they claimed to be free of them.
... Veronica is nothing but a mirror who reflects the two sides.... One can see
in her a series of conflicts, of contradictions which many Caribbean women
certainly are familiar with, even if they do not always wish to acknowledge
them" (1979:125-6, 128). In these terms, the subject of the narrative may be
read as an interrogation of the disabling dualities that have historically figured
the construction of a feminine Caribbean identity structure. By making
Veronica the discursive mirror of the dichotomies of departmentalization, and
forcing her into a discursive contestation and avowal of the innate contradic-
tions and pluralities marking the emerging postcolonial culture, Cond6's view
of the disparate social and cultural patterns that ground this community is
recognized and recuperated. Further, as Susan Andrade argues, the character-
ization of Veronica operates on several levels to subvert a range of stereotypes
concerning the black woman: "Cond6 counters two of the symbols telescoped
into the negatively charged stereotype of 'the black woman': the white percep-
tion of her as sexually uncontrollable and the black male perception of her as
a sexual/racial betrayer" (1993:218). It is by inscribing Veronica as a multivalent
cultural and subjective sign, then, that this myriad of assumptions can be effec-
tively confronted and transformed. The reinscription of these complex pat-
terns of alienation as strategies of subjective possibility through the rigors of a
postcolonial discourse of difference is precisely the goal of this deliberately
polysemic narrative.
   The novel's culmination with Veronica's departure from Africa for Paris,
rather than her native Caribbean, also marks a conscious strategy whose para-
doxical import is intended to reinscribe her into the paradoxical space of exile
from which her sense of cultural displacement had originally sprung. Indeed,
the importance of this choice of the metropole in locating an alter/native dis-
cursive site for the hybrid differential subjectivity embodied by Veronica is not
to be overlooked; in the same interview, Cond6 insists upon it: "I think that
Veronica's flight is a very brave departure. She could have stayed in the arms of
her Minister, certainly with regrets, but going on in this way. She is brave
enough to break it off, to leave, to go somewhere where she can think about
her whole adventure, and eventually to draw a lesson from it. So I think that
there is a self-evaluation . . . and courage!" (128-29). Through this prise de
conscience implicit in the direction of her departure, Veronica announces the
strategization of the differential discourse that she has adopted as the sign of
her self-definition. Her departure for France does not constitute an embrace of




100 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


French culture as such, but rather the contestatory gesture of a subject forced
to confront and come to terms with the original site of its alienation and dis-
placement. The double vision produced by her position as both native and
outsider works to consolidate her newfound hybrid Caribbean heredity. In-
deed, following her attempt to resolve the dilemma of her cultural identity
through a double displacement into the field of the Other, first to France and
then to Africa, the persistence of the internal monologue suggests the appro-
priation of difference as a form of discursive and cultural positionality. Yet it is
through this discourse that she is also able to crucially confront her idealized
image of Africa, a task which, as Suzanne Crosta writes, "Cond6 feels is impor-
tant . . . especially . . . in the light of personal and cultural definitions"
(1999:172). Further, by writing in French while inscribing difference through
the use of internal monologue, Veronica confronts and contests the historical
tool of the colonizing Other, displacing linear colonial discourses to trace and
relocate both center and peripheries in order to effect a transformation of per-
spective, a metamorphosis of method. Veronica's search for a valid self-image
maps an interpellative triangle whose operative poles are Guadeloupe, France,
and Africa, and this deliberate recuperation of the early triangular trade by
which slaves were originally brought to the New World underlines the trans-
formative reinscription of this historical path in the construction of a regional
postcolonial perspective that adequately articulates the axes both of the subject
and of its larger sociopolitical context.
   By reworking the sense of cultural marginality that a hegemonic colonial
discourse seeks to impose, Veronica's text effectively subverts its strategy,
reframing the terms and teleologies within which difference is mapped and
located. The terms of this alternative re-presentation re-place the cultural
nightmare of perpetual unbelonging by underlining the possibility of engag-
ing subjectivity through polysemic patterns of cultural and discursive articula-
tion. This critique of the traditional roles imposed upon Caribbean femininity
draws on alternative inscriptions of ethnic and cultural positionality to extend
and transform the inherited boundaries of Caribbean identity. Both narrative
and subject appropriate new terms for asserting female postcolonial agency
without reinscribing the received hierarchies of a colonial perspective that
alienates the articulative possibilities of the female "I"; ultimately, what is en-
gendered is an autonomous discourse that, by transforming hierarchies of
alienation and integration, positionality and place, self and Other, revises the
terms of isolation, double displacement, and dis-ease that have beset the
boundaries of Caribbean womanhood.









3


L'Isoli Soleil/Soufrieres
Textual Creolization and Cultural Identity


Eia pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien invent6
pour ceux qui n'ont jamais rien explore
pour ceux qui'n'ont jamais rien dompt6
insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde
Aime Cesaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal






Drawing the Double

As we have seen thus far, the discursive articulation of resistance in a depart-
mental context tends to employ narrative strategies that exploit an ambiva-
lence inherent in the process of departmentalization itself. These narrative
forms expose and extend shifting temporalities and teleologies that effectively
displace and subvert the neocolonial hierarchies imposed upon the depart-
mental subject, translating them into a plural site that continually contests its
inherited liminality and marginalization. For the French-speaking Caribbean,
this discursive contestation forms the basis of a framework that, even as it
elaborates a poetics of difference, also inscribes the regional resonances of the
postcolonial. Daniel Maximin, a writer born in Guadeloupe in 1947, and
whose background includes prose, poetry, and work in radio, and who for sev-
eral years has been charge of the Direction regional des affaires culturelles de la
Guadeloupe, would successfully appropriate these ambiguities and omissions
implicit in the colonial histories of the region. His work is in the vanguard of
those attempts to articulate the multiple modernities of the postcolonial Carib-
bean through a supple narrative whose structural slippages and thematic com-
plexity simultaneously embody and reflect the oppositional multiplicities of a
creole culture. As we examine the discursive disjunctures and insistent pat-
terns of pluralism that characterize his novels L'Isoli Soleil and Soufrieres,1 we




102 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


shall see that even as he articulates the diverse cultural and historical patterns
of his native Guadeloupe, his narrative discourse reflects a larger creole
textuality of resistance that shapes and defines a postcolonial practice of mi-
grant modernity, inscribing a counterdiscourse that successfully contests the
historical obsession with origins and resolutions that marks the Caribbean re-
gion.
   Language is critically important in the colonial relationship, since it is the
primary means by which the oral and discursive domination of the colonized
is put into practice, and its relocation in narrative would prove to be equally
critical for defining postcolonial difference. We have seen, for example, that
for Maximin's artistic prelector and predecessor Edouard Glissant, the dy-
namic discontinuities of poetic expression play a predominant role in creating
new patterns of material representation. As Glissant writes in L'Intention
poetique, "In the expression of being, language will no longer be pure obstacle
and pure accomplishment; it will also include, in the most contradictory way,
principles of possession and connection . . . as though it were already the lan-
guage of a language" (46). These complex poetics of prose elaborated by
Glissant prepare the fertile ground of the discursive heterogeneity that will be
intrinsic to the articulation of an adequately differential postcolonial condi-
tion.
   At the same time, however, the double disjunctures of colonial discourses,
generating their own language of catachresis and ambiguity, can create com-
plex patterns of domination and containment where the hierarchies of
language and culture become the inescapable instruments of an inimical
authoritarianism. As Frantz Fanon states in Black Skin, White Masks: "Every
colonized people . . . every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has
been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds
itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the
culture of the mother country" (i8). Language, in other words, in conjunction
with the apparently monolithic discursive system of colonialism, erects a bi-
nary logic of domination that demands to be confronted and appropriated if it
is to be successfully subverted and countered. These narratives of contestation,
while tracing the trajectory of the Caribbean experience, simultaneously ex-
ploit the linguistic and discursive ambivalences of the colonial encounter to
articulate the doubling of culture and subjectivity that must undergird the
alternative temporality of the postcolonial condition. And it is precisely this
question of language, coincident with an innovative interrogation of the au-




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 103


thoritarian implications of linear narration, that sets Maximin's work apart
from most nationalist narratives that have preceded it.
   Maximin's narrative practice, by contrast, offers tacit acknowledgment of
the fact that the discursive complexities of the colonial encounter are of cardi-
nal importance in fashioning a framework for the articulation of issues of cul-
tural identity in a postcolonial context. Responding to the oppositions embed-
ded in the texts of colonialism on their own terms does nothing to dismantle
these hierarchies of signification; as Benita Parry argues, "A reverse discourse
replicating and therefore reinstalling the linguistic polarities devised by a
dominant centre to exclude and act against the categorized, does not liberate
the 'other' from a colonized condition. .. . the founding concepts of the prob-
lematic must be refused" (1987:28). Dislocating the focus of discursive articu-
lation from assumptions of colonialist sovereignty to the deliberate dissymme-
tries of postcolonial discourse reveals the displacement and repression, the
anxiety and apprehension that are the ground both of colonial authority and of
its attendant narratives, and, as Homi Bhabha points out, generates a new hy-
bridity from the instability and ambivalence of the colonial encounter which
"enables a form of subversion.. . that turns the discursive conditions of domi-
nance into the grounds of intervention" (1986:173). By acknowledging and
appropriating the doubleness of the historical and cultural experience, writing
the alternative temporalities of its difference in postcolonial terms turns
colonialist domination into new categories of subaltern representation. The
principles of creole performance are translated from the linguistic to the narra-
tive level, generating a form of textuality whose multiple patterns and layers
draw deliberate designs of doubleness in order to re-present the complexities
of the postcolonial condition. Figures drawn on the ineluctably creole culture
of the Caribbean colonial experience are ultimately exposed, translated, and
exploded in Maximin's signifying network of postcolonial identity.
   To achieve this novelistic representation of Caribbean culture, the primary
patterns traced by these teleologies of difference appropriate a postcolonial
praxis of resistance to enact the complexities of its contestation in primarily
discursive terms, grounding its enunciation of alternative teleologies of culture
on those patterns of division that disrupt the apparent authority of cultural
representation. As Bhabha has suggested, "In signifying the present, some-
thing comes to be repeated, relocated, and translated in the name of a tradi-
tion. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical
identity of culture as a homogenising, unifying force" (1989:128, 130). The




104 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


translation of colonial ambivalence into conditions of postcolonial possibility
entails subverting this artificial authority through complex, differential strate-
gies of representation. If, as Ashis Nandy contends, "the liberation ultimately
ha[s] to begin from the colonized and end with the colonizers ... the oppressor
too is caught in the culture of oppression" (1983:63), the latent cultural ambi-
guity of the colonial encounter instantiates a new register of postcolonial plu-
ralism as an agential site of collective identification. Figures of dislocation and
doubling at work within the narrative structure reflect the persistent pluralities
and conjunctions of the colonial encounter, drawing patterns of creole pro-
duction that signify a postcolonial problematization of the canonical confines
of colonialism.
   Any shift toward the initiation of a transformational temporality of differ-
ence must resite the original rupture, translating the traces of the original pat-
terns of alienation and disjuncture. In a 1986 interview published in Les
Nouvelles du sud, Maximin himself notes the inscription of this paradigm as an
integral part of his discursive framework: "When one is dominated and one
wishes to escape, one must take up the master's arms, and defend oneself with
them" (41). Such a reappropriation of the discursive tools of colonial domina-
tion ultimately aims at creating a discontinuous creole subjectivity which
draws on the uncanny doubleness of this differential discourse to develop alter-
native modes of authentication. By translating this experience from the sub-
liminal realm to the performative, deliberately seeking to reflect the pluralities
of history and culture, the discourse of authors like Maximin, argues Ronnie
Scharfman, "defines the simultaneity of . . . a double form of resistance"
(1995:126), averting the destructive divisions of a recuperative nationalism by
locating the communal culture and the performance of its shifting polarities in
a variety of sites.
   The ambiguities and polarities of colonial authority must be exploded, ex-
posed, turned inside out in order to resite these temporalities and teleologies as
a hybrid heterogeneity. It is by relocating the diegetic traces of the colonial
encounter in a new performative framework that the complex inscription of a
creole discourse of doubleness will be accomplished.


L'Isold Soleil: The Caribbean's Historical Hybridity

Overtly and even obsessively metafictional, a novel that constitutes the
(hi)storied rewriting of a Caribbean discourse, Maximin's L'Isold Soleil works




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 105


principally through the re-presentation of key contemporary and historical
events as it attempts to inscribe some of the dualities and paradoxes that
ground the fragmentation and pluralism of the Guadeloupean postcolonial
experience. While the book ostensibly traces the trajectory of its protagonist
Marie-Gabriel's attempt to write the complex history of her family's existence
in Guadeloupe, the author's interrogation and exploitation of the very notion
of a writing project draws insistently on patterns of self-referentiality, inter-
textuality, and repetition that permit the translation and relocation of various
topoi of a differential postcolonialism, in which the epistolary dialogue be-
tween Marie-Gabriel and her friend Adrien, and their respective writing
projects, become the privileged signs of the contact, communication, and cre-
ativity that must ground the discursive (re)definition of this diasporic creole
culture. Through a remarkably decentered discourse whose hybrid inter-
vocality comprises fictional narrative, letters, notebooks, proverbs, poems, and
historical documents, Maximin succeeds in displacing Caribbean marginal-
ity, rewriting stories of history and identity already written, and exploding the
traditional vision of regional fragmentation and difference into a doubled
performative site of cultural contestation and subjectivity. The deliberate self-
reflexivity of this creole counterpoetics relocates the linear authorities of a
Guadeloupean identity whose boundaries have been largely shaped and
defined by the discourse of the metropole; Maximin's formal dialogue be-
tween history and literature deliberately and repeatedly doubles figures of dis-
course and character, voice and perspective in order to (re)invent both the past
and the future of an interstitial, interactive community.
   It is important to recognize that Maximin's contestation of prior narratives
of colonial authority constitutes a major re-vision of binary boundaries of
exclusion and erasure, articulating through its very form the complexities of
its subject matter, and generating in the process a regional antipoetics of
nonauthoritarian contestation. As John Erickson rightly argues, "Maximin's
L'Isold soleil . . . takes as its subject the rewriting of a history of his home
islands; it seeks to wrest from the occupier the history of Guadeloupe"
(1992:120). And Maximin himself, in his 1986 interview, addressed precisely
this discursive privileging of the historical framework: "Our dominator was our
historian . . . we did not control our history much less the telling of it" (38).
Indeed, this is borne out by the primary role ascribed to representational rep-
etition and structural displacement in the narrative, as the differences and
affinities, the parallels and paradoxes intrinsic to the construction of a creole




io6 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


hybridity from the antinomies of colonial anxiety begin to take shape. His de-
liberate discursive conflation generates what Clarisse Zimra has called "a diz-
zying narrative space, the better to underline the collaborative, dialogical and
tentative nature of all writing" (1999:191). Through this careful and consistent
re-inscription of recurring characters, related events, and overlapping perspec-
tives, the discontinuities and contradictions that have been the bane of French
Caribbean colonial history emerge and are translated into innovative sites and
signs of subjectivity, rendering this postcolonial society-one whose intrinsic
ambiguity is figured by the doubleness of its departmental status -the product
of the dualities of its colonial encounter. It is a place of community and of
change where its indigenous heritage joined with the cultures of Africa and
Asia and the metropolitan culture of the colonizer to be transformed into an
uncommon site of innovative modernity.
   It is Maximin's thesis that this plurality is the essence of the regional Carib-
bean experience, and of the Guadeloupean experience in particular. For him,
the Caribbeanness of the Guadeloupean identity is beyond dispute: "Thus
one is Guadeloupean, and beyond that, West Indian.... I wanted to affirm this
Guadeloupean, Caribbean identity as a fact, not to interrogate it" (1986:35-
36). Maximin's thesis, then, is based on a revisionist rehistoricizing of key lieux
de memoire in the cultural trajectory of both Guadeloupe and the larger Carib-
bean. The imaginative use of language is critical to this discursive refiguring,
rendering the novel, in Maximin's words, "one which shows from beginning to
end the memory of music and song" (1986:50). It is this insistence on discourse
and the pluralized inscription of discursive form that has provoked a negative
reaction to his work in some quarters, notably on the part of the well-known
critic Bernadette Cailler. In her book-length study of Glissant, she describes
Maximin's novel as one that diverges sharply from the Glissantian principle
that conflates discourse and history: "What the author does not accomplish,
and what needs to be for the novel to work, is precisely the interaction between
poetry and history.... While this is the work of a gifted intellectual, it is not the
work of a Caribbean poet" (1988:174-75). Yet I would argue that it is precisely
this intersection between discursive form and historical fact that forms the core
of Maximin's work. By insisting on a figural, rather than a linear or literal,
approach to the task of (re)writing, Maximin reilluminates and reinvigorates
events effaced in the continuum of colonial history by the discursive domina-
tion of the colonizer.
   One of the most striking aspects of Maximin's discourse is his insistence on




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / io


the ineluctable presence of the Other; interestingly a primary sign of his ap-
propriation of this site of alterity is his extensive use of the second-person
singular. Indeed, following a brief opening prologue, tu is the first word in
the abridged first section, titled "Desirades," and thus in the body of the
novel proper, and as such constitutes a recuperation of the intertextuality and
intervocality from which the novel derives the power and urgency of its per-
spective. By conflating the pluralized title, "Desirades"-the name of a small
island of mainly Breton settlers off the coast of Guadeloupe-with ddsir, these
initial textual traces of fragmentation, desire, and multiplicity come to play an
early but key role in locating and shaping the direction taken by the discourse.
The shifting presence of the novel's several narrators serves to accentuate this
plurality, and as they address alternately both the reader and each other, the
burgeoning network of signification generated by these discourses recuperates
the polymorphous hybridity of Caribbean creolization. Maximin's attempt to
inscribe a future for the region through recourse to its past is reflected in this
ongoing construction of Marie-Gabriel's writing project, in which the collabo-
rative constitution of her cultural identity is linked to this continual discursive
dialogue between past and present, self and Other, grounded in a critical rela-
tional tension between text and form. The protean character of language, at
both the narrative and subjective levels, in Maximin's textual creation of cul-
tural identity is of paramount importance, entailing a (re)negotiation of key
colonialist terrain. As Ronnie Scharfman writes, "Constituting an identity for
oneself in language must not represent either a stagnant, repetitive, reverential
regression, nor a substitutive, identifying, internalized parental superego"
(1992:237). The novel manages to avoid these subjective excesses while pro-
ducing meaning through complex processes of both reading and writing, en-
gendering an identity for Marie-Gabriel and, by extension, for the creole cul-
ture she signifies, out of the turbulence of textual praxis.
   The retelling of the 1962 plane disaster that opens the novel puts into place
the intricate, extensive symbolic network that ties the historical experience of
a liminally postcolonial Guadeloupe to the larger francophone world gener-
ated and governed by the metropole. The deaths of the anticolonial activists,
among them Marie-Gabriel's father, that this event engenders foreground the
struggle for autonomy and set in motion the poetics of place figured by the
exchange of letters between Marie-Gabriel and her cousin, Adrien; the direct
address by Marie-Gabriel both to her younger self and, by extension, to her
reader-interlocutor voiced by the tu dis-places the burden of signification to




io8 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


areas of textual consumption as well as its production, and immediately
creolizes the narrative site by emphasizing the political and cultural (dis)-
continuities between colonial past and departmental present, self and Other,
author and reader, center and periphery. For if, as Scharfman argues, literary
creolization entails an "organizing, structuring principle" that "blur[s] the
oppositions between writer, story-teller, reader public" (1995:133), then Max-
imin's dissolution of colonial and narrative authority deliberately places post-
colonial textuality within a context of cultural identity and subjective libera-
tion.
   Further, Marie-Gabriel's discovery of her eighteenth-century ancestor
Angela's ring in the mango tree she is climbing on her seventeenth birthday
provides a prefigurative glimpse of the important symbolic role to be played by
historical objects in the novel: "Moonlight shimmers on beads of blood mixed
with champagne set in the ring you discover in that hole where your rage came
crashing down, a tiny ring placed in that hole two centuries ago, to be forgot-
ten. You read the name ANGELA clearly engraved as if it conveyed property
rights from the one who gave it to the one who wore it" (5/13). The determining
role to be played by the past over both character and event in the present is
clearly delineated here. The encounter symbolized by the ring found by
Marie-Gabriel, as Erickson suggests, points to a "transformation of symbols
effectuated in and through the Other's language, and directed towards the
(re)inscription by Antillean writers of their own history" (1992:121); as it medi-
ates discursive communication between her past and present selves, immedi-
ately doubling the language of the postcolonial site, it prefigures the even
larger symbolic role to be essayed by her ancestor Jonathan's notebook in the
formulation of a new future.
   The exposure of these unwritten histories of resistance and contestation
helps to displace persistent myths of uniform subjection created by colonial
univocality. Marie-Gabriel's undertaking of this writing project, of this novel
within a novel that is the product of so many hands and voices, engenders a
differential cultural temporality by subverting and displacing the very dis-
courses that made the colonial project possible. It is this insistence on
reflectivity and doubling that allows the text to inscribe an explosive, creolized
Caribbean "I," multiply positioned and continuously self-generating. As
Clarisse Zimra puts it: "A text arranged on the page even as it is projected in
the imagination, since the novel to be written is the one which is being read. A
volcanic 'I' erupts from the writing in L'isold soleil" (1992:266). Ultimately, the




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 109


novel's self-referential, creatively fragmented discursive framework will be
constructed from an amalgam of writing notebooks.
   Marie-Gabriel's initial task will be to (re)construct the lost notebook of her
father, Louis-Gabriel; in this text, forever lost with his demise in the 1962 plane
crash, was located the entire history of her Caribbean island(s) written through
the (hi)story of his life. Marie-Gabriel's simulacrum of her father's journal,
which will eventually become the novel L'Isold Soleil, eventually encounters
and intertextually incorporates the revolutionary notebook of her ancestor,
Jonathan, the journal of her mother, Simea, and the writing notebook used by
her friend Adrien to take up with her issues of writing itself as they crop up
during the invention of the novel. In this way, as Maximin's interviewer puts it,
"we realize that the history of the island and the region are systematically dis-
played" (1986:37), but, even more important, the novel is inscribed as writing
that takes writing as its subject in order to dis-place prevalent patterns of colo-
nial discourse: "You will open the drawers of our confiscated history; drawers of
heroism and cowardice, of hunger, fear and love. You will bring back to
memory what was testified and what was told, making truth serve the imagina-
tion and not the opposite" (1o/18).
   In order to further emphasize the deleterious role of this colonial presence
and the contemporary constructions of the creole this imbrication has pro-
duced, she then enjoins her younger self, at the end of this first section: "You
will write to free yourself from paternalism, from the law of the return of the
prodigal fathers and children, and from everything that tries to go back to it-
self" (11/19). These complex figures inscribe the necessity of a nonlogocentric,
nonpatriarchal discourse to this novel project of communal self-definition, as
well as the determining role of difference and pluralism and the integral part to
be played by the textual uncovering of a history of resistance. At the same time,
her warning coda -"However YOU will take care to never write I. When love
is uprooted there's nothing but YOU and THEY to declare" (11/19) - ensures a
discourse written in the name of the many rather than the one; by consistently
doubling the formal constituents of the narrative discourse, Maximin's deliber-
ately plural perspective negotiates the name of a collective, collaborative
identification that succeeds in elaborating a strategy of selfhood for the emer-
gent community whose history and future he is attempting to reinvent.
   To help trace these trajectories from a historic as well as a symbolic perspec-
tive, Maximin then shifts the narrative register to one of omniscient narration
and puts into place as his protagonists two twins, Georges and Jonathan; the




11o / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


offspring of an eighteenth-century mulatto woman, Miss Bea, they are the di-
rect ancestors of Marie-Gabriel. Georges's impaired vision, and Jonathan's
light skin and green eyes, function together with the metissage of their heritage
to symbolically represent the ethnohistorical creolization of the colonial en-
counter through its cultural and discursive pluralism. Not only are they on
occasion mistaken for mulattoes-Jonathan, for example, is taken for such by
the vicar who ultimately baptises him (31/25) -in addition, Georges's expertise
on the violin and Jonathan's ability to read inscribe them on the cusp of an
artistic creativity that plays a critical role in engendering postcolonial subjec-
tivity. An insistence on transgressing boundaries, particularly of the kind that
marks Jonathan's identitarian struggle, amounts in effect to an overturning
and reformulation of the status quo, recuperated in the discursive contestation
traced by the novel itself.
   For example, in section 2, titled "Jonathan's Notebook," writing, and its
corollaries of fragmentation and displacement, are clearly primary in mediat-
ing the translation to the postcolonial. When we first encounter Jonathan, he
is in the library at the Les Flamboyants plantation house, in the process of
reading a long, italicized extract from the Droit public des esclaves, an extract
that he tears from the text and later pastes into his secret notebook. This act of
discursive appropriation and textual collage-an act of performative doubling
that frames Jonathan as a progenitor of Guadeloupean and Antillean libera-
tion-refracts and reframes proleptically the terms of both Maximin's and
Marie-Gabriel's identitarian writing projects undertaken 150 years later; it
functions in tandem with Jonathan's secretive discourse to engender an initia-
tory subversion, articulating alternative topoi of identity that bridge both past
and present, and whose scriptive terms are effectively different from those im-
posed and disseminated by the master's discourse.
   A short time later, Jonathan secretly shoots Elisa, the daughter of his
mother's master, following the drunken attack on the plantation that occasions
the rape and murder of his seven-year-old sister Angela by a group of colonial
soldiers in search of two maroon slaves. More than a simple act of vengeance,
this moment of sacrifice marks a parallel site of liberation on the ideological
level, making possible a moment of marronnage that reinforces the notion of
history as a protean force of translation and communication-punctuated by
his symbolic planting of Angela's ring in the trunk of the mango tree, the ring
retrieved by Marie-Gabriel centuries later at the beginning of the book-and




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / ii


leaves Jonathan free to initiate his own site of rebellion by himself joining a
group of maroons, or runaway slaves.
   The subsequent incorporation of the twins as autonomous subjects into the
retelling of the epic episode of eighteenth-century Guadeloupean slave resis-
tance to Napoleon's invading forces, led by the unheralded local hero Louis
Delgres-whose name finds an echo in Marie-Gabriel's prior naming of her
father, "You'll call him Louis-Gabriel: Louis after Delgres, incinerated in our
memory, and Gabriel like your grandfather" (1/9)-valorizes Jonathan's sev-
enteen years with the maroons as it simultaneously instantiates a performative
site of discursive contestation, punctuated by a commentary made up of creole
proverbs that generates a cultural counterpoint to Napoleonic efforts at the
reinstallation of metropolitan domination and a discursive and ideological dis-
possession at the hands of the Other. From this perspective, Jonathan's linguis-
tic ability and knowledge of the whites become a paradigm for a differential
identitarian form of discursive contestation: "During seventeen years of freely
chosen marooning, Jonathan was able to act as interpreter and coordinator,
because he had learned several languages with his master, and was skilled at
analyzing the whites' treatises and reports that fell into the maroons' posses-
sion" (49/53). The deliberate terms and conditions of Maximin's discourse al-
low it to compound the complexity of the notion of writing as a postcolonial
praxis of resistance and recuperation.
   Within the context of his own personal as well as the more general political
background, the systematic program of pillage and revolt that Jonathan carries
out against the slave society that subjugates him may also be read as resistance,
the symbolic articulation of a figurative as well as a textual hybridity. As he
seeks to inscribe his own trace upon the society through the institution of vio-
lence and terror, the metissage of his background effectively symbolizes both
the need for a differential form of expression that goes beyond traditional
boundaries and the culmination of the resistance carried out by Delgres seen
from a more creolized perspective, and this duality institutes the social and
cultural ambivalence that his ethnic and political creolit6 represent.
   As Georges and Jonathan meet their deaths through anticolonial struggle,
the omniscient narrative that recounts this moment of Caribbean resistance is
symbolically punctuated by a series of proverbs linking these acts to an indig-
enous network of cultural authenticity. While on the one hand these activities
are meant to produce a valued sense of freedom, forged through struggle and




112 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


self-affirmation, they simultaneously give rise to a critical doubleness of per-
spective whose practical paradoxes find perhaps their most forceful expression,
in a further change of register, in the letter written to Jonathan by his brother
Georges: "We reveal ourselves in the unnatural shades of our secret desires.
... So thirsty to show that we know how to live and how to die, we go forward
wearing a mask because the eyes of others have smashed the mirror of our
brothers" (42-43, 37). Georges's articulation of the ambiguity and misappre-
hension permeating the structures of the social imaginary is effectively
grounded in the space of the double displacement between the mask and the
mirror, and acts as a harbinger of the binary oppositions bridging the roles of
colonizer and colonized. This smashing of the image of the counterpart by the
defining gaze of the Other has its roots in the desire and alienation of the
colonial encounter, and the mask now marks an attempt, as Erickson suggests,
"to counter this magisterial discourse that imposes upon the Antillean people
the European Other's account and the Other's project for the future"
(1992:126). Maximin's relocation and contestation of these canonical concepts
of identity redefine the implications of a communal presence in the colonial
project and, by deriving new paradigms and patterns of identity from acts of
colonial resistance, establish a framework for the integration of hybrid sites of
cultural and historical signification.
   Perhaps the primary figure in this discursive and historical excavation is
the reinscription of the 1802 Matouba massacre in Guadeloupe. In an epi-
sode that deliberately uncovers the untold history of resistance that figures a
Guadeloupe discursively subjected to the interests of the colonizer, Maximin
recreates the circumstances that had led up to Guadeloupe's submission to
assimilation and Martinique's occupation by the British between 1794 and
1802-an act instigated by the Martinican planters to forestall the implemen-
tation of the abolition of slavery and the induction of the former slaves into
French citizenship mandated by the Republic on 4 February 1794. When Na-
poleon dispatched his squadrons, led by Leclerc and Richepance, to reestab-
lish the metropolitan rule of law, they were met by a nationalist group led by
the mulatto governor, Magloire Pelage, commandant at Pointe-a-Pitre and of
the entire region of Grande Terre, and the military officers Ignace and
Delgres. This group's insistence upon destroying themselves rather than sub-
mit to Napoleon's edict on the reimposition of slavery-and the armada he
sent out to enforce it-is a key event of national resistance to colonial authority
deliberately erased from colonial histories, and its symbolic significance as a




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 113


site of identitarian independence cannot be overstated. Faced with an all but
ineluctable defeat, the Guadeloupean resistance forces, led by Louis Delgres
-a Martinican colonel who had settled in Guadeloupe-retreated to the
Matouba heights on 8 May 1802, whence they threw themselves into the sea
rather than surrender to the superior forces of the emperor.2 While the im-
portance of this act lies in its referential and symbolic resistance to imperial
authority and to the inhumanity of slavery, its discursive recuperation renders
it a strategic site of creolized identity construction both for the French islands
and for the Caribbean at large. The participation of Georges and Jonathan in
Maximin's re-citation of this occulted history is made an integral part of this act
of discursive re-construction. Georges, who early on becomes secretary to
Ignace, is blinded during the fray and dies with some fifty other survivors of a
massacre on the Place de la Victoire when the ship on which they are eventu-
ally imprisoned is deliberately blown up in the harbor, and Jonathan meets his
death fighting Richepance's troops alongside some five hundred other com-
batants, in an explosion caused by Delgres's deliberate mining of the
d'Anglemont plantation at Matouba. By re-citing these events as an integral
part of the novel, Maximin endows them with an overwhelming cultural im-
portance, inscribing through this discursive conflation of fiction and fact a
framework for resistance and cultural identity that wrenches a symbolic vic-
tory from the jaws of defeat: "Guadeloupean resistance is certainly defeated,
but a glorious, dignified defeat" (1986:37). This detailed integration of real and
fictive characters with the unveiling of an indigenous history joins with the
nonlinear, creatively fragmented discursive framework to interrogate the in-
herited bases, biases, and assumptions of Caribbean postcolonial history and
subjectivity. Through this modernist decentering of narrative discourse and
colonial history, Maximin clears the way for inscribing the conjunctions of a
creolized Caribbean poetics, enacting new paradigms of postcolonial possibil-
ity. By exploding the principles of patriarchal linear narrative within a
historicized context of Caribbean cultural performance, the novel connotes a
metaphoric resiting of the discourse of the Other in order to inscribe new
perspectives on the colonial encounter. Maximin's rewriting of historical
events already written reveals the fragmentation and exclusion that have made
this culture a reflection of the myriad influences underpinning its formation.
   Thus the narrative also incorporates into the retold story of the revolt the
characters of Miss Bea and Jonathan's mysterious younger sister, Ti-Carole,
and implicates them, the "highly reputed old black woman who was always




114 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


accompanied by a little girl with Yoruba braids" (59/63), in the death of Riche-
pance, Napoleon's military commander; Miss Bea receives from him in return
a letter detailing the cruelty of the whites toward the black slaves, which she
secretly copies into Jonathan's notebook before passing it on to the Societe des
Amis des Noirs as a tool in the abolition struggle.
   As Ti-Carole eventually learns to read and write from the same notebook
(68/63), the role of discourse and fragmentation, repetition and doubling as
talismanic icons of identitarian reconstruction is insistently and increasingly
enhanced, emphasizing through the central, inescapable role given to writing
and discursive appropriation the critical importance of Marie-Gabriel's writ-
ing project in the present for the (re)generation of identity from the traces of
the past. Miss Bea perishes in the great Caribbean earthquake of 1843 that
destroyed the entire city of Pointe-a-Pitre and decimated the neighboring is-
lands of Antigua and St. Kitts, but the lineage of the family is tangentially
traced through the repeated birth of twin sons and the symbolic repetition of
the number seven as denotative sign of ages and time spans. In addition,
Jonathan's notebook is continually passed on-Ti-Carole uses its secret texts in
the lessons she gives in French dictation (68/63), and her granddaughter,
Louise, will receive the notebook from her as a gift at age seven (77/72). Ti-
Carole's sons are significantly given the names Ignace and Louis, and are born
after a seven-month gestation in the same year that Basse-Terre is destroyed by
fire. All three perish in the earthquake that leveled Pointe-a-Pitre on 25 March
1897-"the seventh fury of Shango since 1802" (79/75) -but Ti-Carole's grand-
daughter, Louise, survives by holding on to Jonathan's notebook, having
sneaked outside early that morning to bury it at the foot of the silk-cotton tree.
While the text reminds us that the eruption of Mt. Pelee in Martinique came
almost exactly one hundred years to the day after the insurrection of May 1802,
Louise, in turn, also gives birth to the twin sons Jean-Louis (named after her
husband in an additional incidence of doubling) and Louis-Gabriel in 1917,
thus perpetuating, as the text indicates, the initials of Georges and Jonathan as
well as the historical memory of Louis Delgres. Louis-Gabriel, having sneaked
off to listen to a Haitian orchestra's rehearsal, will by pure chance be the sole
survivor of a hurricane that will kill his parents and brother in 1928, and grows
up to be the father of Marie-Gabriel, a jazz musician and, perhaps even more
important, one "specializing in improvisation" (81/77).
   Contrary to the Derridean position taken by Chris Bongie, whose claim
that "for Maximin, the affirmation of an ancestral identity can only be a . ..




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 115


gesture that further distances us from it, and propels us ever deeper into a ...
culturalized present" (1994:629) appears blind to these (re)inscriptions of his-
tory, I argue that through the construction of the preceding genealogical chro-
nology, fictive though it might be, and particularly through the diachronic
inscription of repetition, coincidence, and difference, Maximin's discourse
engenders a creole poetics of Caribbean difference that sets the parameters for
future articulations of nonocculted identity. To this end, our mise en valeur of
the importance of anagrammatic transposition in Maximin's discursive and
cultural exegesis underlines the significance of symbols of doubling and rep-
etition as they come to assume an archetypal force in the text, reiterating and
re-presenting a new creole temporality of difference that bridges both past and
future post/colonial discursive subjects.
   It is, in fact, the very basis of the discursive context through which the Car-
ibbean has historically been defined that Maximin effectively interrogates and
relocates. He uncovers the unwritten history of the region by inserting into the
narrative untold accounts of indigenous uprisings and the violence and brutal-
ity perpetrated against them, massacres which were the corollaries of colonial
conquest and the revolts that were the hallmark of resistance. By locating and
rewriting these postcolonial sites, Maximin's reinscription of these efforts at
self-definition signifies the creation of a postcolonial counterdiscourse where
resistance is grounded in the resonances of the creole, mapping a new space
for identity which supplants the historical authority of the master's discourse.
As Erickson points out, "Marie-Gabriel's/Maximin's rewriting of history in-
volves not only a break from colonialist history. . . but from patriarchal history
and the dominant male narrative as well" (127).
   The deliberate disjunctures of this discourse thus accomplish the instan-
tiation of a double time of difference. On the one hand, Maximin's institution
of an alternative regional temporality demonstrates narratologically that since
historical discourse itself is predicated on narrative structures, it is thus subject
to the same undecidabilities as other forms of narration. As Hayden White
argues, "This value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events
arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, full-
ness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary"
(1981:23). The result of Maximin's deliberate conflation and subversion of his-
tory and fiction is thus to undermine the imaginary authoritarian linearities
promulgated by the colonizer, to expose the misrepresentations inherent in
the colonial monopoly of discourse, and to offer an alternative to this form of




u16 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


discursive hegemony. Second, by confronting the discursive assumptions of
colonialism with the repressed figures of its Other, he succeeds in inscribing
the pluralisms of a postcolonial alterity as a framework for cultural autonomy.
   Maximin's incorporation of eleven Guadeloupean creole proverbs into the
already complex discursive fragment called "Jonathan's Notebook" provides
another striking aspect of narrative creolization. Inscribed as a subsection of
the "Notebook" titled "Eleven Proverbs," enclosed in parentheses, written in
capitals, and sequentially set off from the rest of the text, they symbolically
punctuate and comment upon his extended account of nineteenth-century
Guadeloupean resistance to French hegemony, which is itself enclosed
within quotation marks. In short, both text and proverbs assume the function
of an embedded narrative, a separate discourse commenting upon the struc-
tural and thematic assumptions underlying the encounter with metropolitan
colonialism and culture. The strategic positioning of these proverbs in the text
functions not only as a sign of oraliture, inscribing the oral trace of an indig-
enous collective memory, but also as a hybrid site of narrative transformation
and difference. The syncopated structure of these alternative ideologies en-
genders a supplementary space, such that in the interval between their itera-
tion there ultimately appears that alternate temporality of creole hybridity
which is the mark of his postcolonial praxis. Through the discursive content
of the proverbs themselves, "WHERE THERE ARE BONES, WHERE THERE ARE
DOGS. . . . COAL IS NOT FLOUR, FLOUR IS NOT COAL" (40-41/45, 46, 52), the
narrative articulates a symbolic level of creole cultural signification that
opens up new sites and possibilities from the desiderata of the colonial en-
counter between Africa and Europe. Most important, however, the addition
of a twelfth proverb as a specific counterpoint both to the subtitle and to
Jonathan's interaction with the Guadeloupean national leader Delgres em-
bodies this supplementarity and functions both analeptically and proleptically
as a thematic inscription of the role played by exile and resistance in the com-
munity of cultural identity: "Go to the village where you don't have a house,
but take your roof with you" (56/52). The bracelet a proverbes that Jonathan
passes to Delgres, the last of twelve he has carved, while whispering to him the
proverb whose meaning is hidden in the bracelet's form, just before the final
battle (51/56), is eventually recuperated by this final phrase; its simultaneous
fusion of the discursive and the creole herald the inscription of emergent para-
digms of nationness by tilling the new terrain of identity and culture. These
analeptic and proleptic cultural references disturb the linearities of colonial




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / ii


diegesis; simultaneously, their inscription of resistance and contestation en-
hances the significance of historically marginalized discourses and subjects as
creative sites of dislocation, difference, and identitarian definition.


Doubling the Frame

A short central section that mediates between both halves of the novel, itself
also titled "L'Isol6 Soleil," establishes a multiplicity of structural and thematic
linkages between the twin writing projects of author and narrator. The section
begins with a letter to Marie-Gabriel, "the chosen sister," from her friend
Adrien, in Paris, who finds Marie-Gabriel "getting ready to rewrite the account
of the epic of Louis Delgres, so fascinating to our poets and historians" (81/85),
the same epic, in fact, that we have just read. By thus deliberately breaking the
narrative line, commenting on and taking stock of Marie-Gabriel's work-in-
progress through the already read, the narrator's self-reflexive turn emphasizes
the critical role of writing in this project, and her inclusion of Adrien's corre-
spondence recuperates the repeated additions to Jonathan's notebook that we
see at work in the narrative itself. At the end of this section, the metafictional
structure of this novel that continually comments on its own ongoing construc-
tion has been clearly established, and Marie-Gabriel's response points out to
Adrien that "the real pleasure of letters for me is when we can reread them
together, with our eyes and voices in correspondence" (104/107), thus drawing
on similar patterns of discursive linearity to refer proleptically to the novel
itself as finished product. As the exchange of letters bracketing this section
traces the novel's construction by conflating the absent epistolary object with
the fragmentary extracts of these twin notebooks, the large central fragment
comprising Adrien's "Writing Notebook," framed by these scripts, assumes in-
creasing importance. Not coincidentally, it is narrated in the first person, and
comprises thirteen numbered subfragments that echo, structurally and the-
matically, through the presence of a last, supplementary addition, the com-
mentary included in the "Eleven Proverbs" (become twelve) of "Jonathan's
Notebook." In their turn, these subfragments allow the narrator to speak,
through the missives of Adrien, of desires and paradoxes underlying his cul-
tural inscription in Guadeloupe since childhood. In these sequential sub-
fragments, with titles like "Project, Africa, M.-G.," "Colonized Body," and
"Project for a Novel," he chronicles a subjective trajectory of alienation: from
romanticized schoolboy notions of an Africa that is "the absent mother of my




u18 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


childhood" (88/92), to racism at a Parisian lycee. This racism, intriguingly, is
less disconcerting than the displacements of home, and not least because of
the important role ultimately ascribed to his double: "Paris did less to alienate
me than the Antilles of my childhood. Because the sun hid from me the
shadow of my double, who grew up without disturbing my solitude, until the
moment when I was uprooted" (93/96). The cultural and discursive binaries of
this section make it a point of convergence for the tropes and figures of an
articulative creoleness, and make writing the medium that enacts the double-
voiced re-vision of the colonial encounter.
   This passage, then, marks an important interrogation of the twin axes of
colonialism and desire. As Adrien addresses the pervasive nature of alienation
and doubling, repetition and pluralism in the colonial context, it is in this
moment that the conjunction between colonialism and ambivalence is simul-
taneously appropriated and interrogated through the incorporation of the
counterpart, an other of the complex, fragmented colonial ego: "My double
has been settled inside me since I was a child..... he protected me from
alienation in a white world. ... So what I did was to colonize my double... . I
internalized the combat as a basic confrontation between my body and my
conscience, my desires and my image; even when I am completely engaged in
playing a role ... according to my wishes or the wishes of others, I have always
been able to keep silently sheltered behind the shield of my double that quality
that remains essential for achieving real autonomy some day" (94-95, 97-98).
Maximin's transposition of the ambivalence of colonial authority into alternat-
ing layers of autonomy and duality, through the multiple misprisions of the
colonial relation, interrogates and relocates the entire colonial undertaking
from the perspective of differential patterns of desire, recognition, and repres-
sion. For by colonizing his colonially engendered double-another who is
me-to protect himself against white-engendered alienation, Adrien reverses
and appropriates colonial patterns of power, inverting and translating this ges-
ture into a hybrid metaphor of resistance, a resiting and reinvestiture of colo-
nial paradigms of division that simultaneously animate the complex intersec-
tions of the colonial experience. Indeed, it is by intervening in the binary
relation between recognition and alienation, through the dislocation of psy-
choanalytic structures that have traditionally been bound up with the patterns
and corollaries of colonial authority, that Adrien subverts the ambivalence in-
trinsic to a colonial discourse in order to appropriate the paradoxical possibility




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 119


of autonomy from the ineluctable positional slippage between colonizer and
colonized.
   As a subversive attack upon the authority of colonial discourse, Adrien's
gesture evokes the inversions that we see at work in Homi Bhabha's paradigm
of colonial mimicry. This appropriation of the ambivalence that is inscribed
within colonial hierarchies functions through key strategies of doubling and
temporal disarticulation, in that the articulation of a simulacrum of colonial
power allows difference as the not-quite-Other to become visible. As Bhabha
writes, "Mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a
process of disavowal. Mimicry is thus the sign of a double articulation .. .
which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power" (1994:86). It is through
the transformative tension implicit in the slippage of the sign that the repeti-
tion and recolonization of the double discloses the signature of ambivalence;
within such a framework, as Bhabha continues, this discursive act of differen-
tial repetition "articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical
difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority" (88).
The resulting alienation of colonial desire reinscribes the colonial subject as
the product of a critical doubling, subverting the dominant discourse by re-
vealing and resiting its structural modalities. The originary discourses of the
colonial encounter are thus constantly revisited, resisted, and reversed
through the inscription of an alternative set of hierarchies that explode these
assumptions of colonial authority from within.
   The ambivalence at work in this moment of translation also uses the uncer-
tainties intrinsic to these doubled hierarchies of the colonial encounter to
redraw certain constructs of the Lacanian model of the mirror stage. While in
this context subjective definition by means of a fictional construct is at once
definitive of alienation, it is in the distance and the ambiguity simultaneously
linking and separating the subject and its reflection that subversion of this
ambivalence is made possible. In the colonial context of confrontation be-
tween Adrien's desire and his image, between his desire-already the desire of
the Other-and the reflection of alterity from which he expediently fashions a
latent autonomy, the possibility of postcolonial subjectivity takes shape from
the assimilation and appropriation of the Other. The specular space opened
up between the fictional coherence of the image and the simultaneous dis-
juncture of its appropriation, generated by this recolonizing but transformative
gesture whose constant axes are artifice and alterity, translates colonial polari-




120 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ties of self and Other into a hybrid sign of creolization whose selective shield
recolonizes the double into a framework that remains similar yet is also criti-
cally different from its original site.
   Maximin's goal, then, is to redraw the boundaries of the postcolonial condi-
tion by interrogating and contesting the traditional teleologies of colonial pat-
terns and structures, instantiating a praxis that Clarisse Zimra aptly calls "the
desire to rewrite Caribbean history from within" (1992:268). He achieves this
by exposing colonialism's hierarchical patterns of duality and exclusion, sub-
verting and displacing the dominant discourse of the colonizer's desire, and
replacing the linear binarisms of the already written by appropriating and
resiting the very boundaries of the colonizer's language in which he must
write. Thus he rearticulates colonialism's anxious, ambivalent authority
through a hybrid poetics of difference. In the penultimate twelfth section of
Adrien's "Writing Notebook," titled "Genealogy," the structural and thematic
preamble to the later section "Simea's Journal" takes shape. Indeed, the text
inscribes not only the named and symbolic counterparts of both Simea and
Adrien, but also, through the family's departure for France during the eruption
of the Soufriere volcano in 1956, the sequel to L'Isold Soleil that bears the
volcano's name. Through the demise of her friend and namesake, and that of
her only brother, Adrien, in French Guiana in 1943, Simea is made the central
figure in the complex network of doubled figures that grounds the remainder
of the novel, allowing the narrative to trace a subjective and thematic geneal-
ogy that will culminate with the appearance of the author himself at the
novel's end.
   Thus the novel puts into place an alternative vision of the Caribbean cul-
tural subject, contesting the terms of colonial history even as it constructs a
framework for a creolized Caribbean subjectivity; as Zimra states, "Maximin
locates this birth of Caribbean awareness in the present" (1992:275). Both
Marie-Gabriel and her mother, we are told in the novel's opening pages, have
read and reread Suzanne Cesaire's poem that appeared in the last issue of
Tropiques, published in the very month of Marie-Gabriel's birth; the marginal
notes and annotations that are the mark of their own textual (re)construction
of Caribbean subjectivity constitute an intertextual framework that again
stages (re)writing as the core of the relational aesthetics that the novel seeks to
inscribe.
   The thirteenth and final section of this notebook, titled "Identity," inscribes
the postcolonial imbrication of language and identity in anagrammatic form:




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 121


"I wanted to be SOLEIL / SUN / I played with words. I found ISOLE / LONE"
(102/105). The principles of re-placement, re-citation, doubling, and transposi-
tion intrinsic to the figure of the anagram are of key importance in the wider
web of signification woven by the text, and provide in fact a remarkable alle-
gory of the novel's overall strategy of appropriation and reinvention. The pro-
tean intricacies of translation and recreation, of change and metamorphosis
signified by this process recuperate, on a symbolic level, the goal of (re)con-
structing an occulted identity from the palimpsest of a dominant colonial dis-
course. As Erickson points out, "Its repetitive use within the novel transforms it
into an allegory for the strategy of the novel itself (Maximin's), as well as the
novel within a novel (Marie-Gabriel's) and the search by both author and char-
acter to recast past events into a new configuration, a new history of the
Antilles" (1992:122-23). These hybrid patterns of change shift the locus of the
(re)writing strategy from the colonial margin to the postcolonial center as they
instigate a creolized process of discursive and subjective performance that
(re)defines the Caribbean logos.
   With the opening of part 4, the narrative undergoes a stunning structural
and discursive reversal. To this point, as Marie-Gabriel concurrently addresses
the reader as well as her younger self, using the death of her father, Louis-
Gabriel, to contextualize discursive acts yet to come, the critical importance of
writing has effectively bridged the autoreferential economy of the narrative's
doubled temporality: "With natural colors close at hand you'll blacken all the
pages whitened by his ashes" (10/18). Following the ruminations of this central,
intermediary section, the alternative articulations of sections 4 and 5, "Simea's
Journal" and "Mother's Song," inscribe, so to speak, a discursive balancing act
to the historical set pieces of sections i and 2. Set in early twentieth-century
Paris, and working now from a perceptibly feminine perspective which simul-
taneously dismantles the authoritarian discursive and historical precepts that
are the corollary of colonialism, these sections set up a narrative order whose
persistent principles of discursive contestation and dislocation firmly establish
the deliberate difference of postcolonial identity and culture. (Re)writing cul-
ture and subjectivity from the gendered perspective of the subjected allows the
(re)creation of pluralized discursive sites; as Ronnie Scharfman suggests, "He
[Maximin] thereby stages the writing issue as one of generation and engender-
ing, but not one bound by the constraints of gender" (1992:236).
   In "Simea's Journal," then, in a major shift of voice and perspective, the
first-person narrative constructs an (auto)biography of the generation of Pari-




122 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


sian Antilleans of the 1930s and 1940s, taking negritude and the Cahier as its
discursive toile de fond. By fragmenting the individual characters of Marie-
Gabriel's mother's name, Simea, and assimilating them to an assortment of
artifacts drawn on an intertextual and intercultural framework, it generates a
vision of synthesis and intersection that (re)defines francophone culture from
a persistently extrahexagonal perspective. These discursive lieux de mdmoire
include Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer, Breton's Clair de terre, Eluard's
Capitale de la douleur, the negritude journal Ldgitime Defense, and Cesaire's
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. While each letter of the name is simulta-
neously present in the title to which it corresponds, the intertextual crosstalk of
these various discourses allows the first-person female Antillean narrator-
and, by extension, the myriad counterparts in whose name she speaks - rebirth
and self-definition by symbolizing the myriad influences, or metissage, of her
cultural exposure, generating contestation and constitution as the ground of
her own defining moment.
   The pain of Simea's pregnancy by a French architecture student and the
subsequent forced abortion become the engendering events that make her
cultural identity the product of the creole concatenations of the colonial rela-
tionship, constituting it through the figure of the aborted child she addresses
in the second person, and through an affiliative discourse of loss and recre-
ation. As Scharfman points out, "Simea's journal is her attempt to deconstruct
the hold these poetic voices have over her at the same time that she constructs
her own text out of them. The verbal violence of this section is . . . an active
response of revolt against the violence to which she has been subjected"
(1992:239).
   Indeed, on a more complex level of signification, the narrative uses Simea's
condition to engender identity out of subjection, addressing the aborted fetus
through a combination of the second-person singular and the first-person plu-
ral and so inscribing herself and, metonymically, her Guadeloupean home-
land as products of colonial miscegenation: "My whole land devastated, my
vagina pummeled. Your corpse ripped out of my ruins; and now, isolation and
darkness" (112/113). It is clear that this recuperated hybridization, this harmoni-
zation of voices, emphasizes the metissage and pluralism of creolization as the
enabling gestures of a postcolonial identity firmly inscribed on the symbolic
and the narrative levels. Through the address to her aborted offspring, Simea
effectively not only reconstructs the identity of this lost creole child but engen-
ders an identity for all the victims of colonial and cultural oppression. The




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 123


second-person address of Simea also revalorizes the role of the feminine voice
in Antillean history as it simultaneously enlarges on an earlier observation by
Marie-Gabriel: "If we listen to our poets and revolutionaries, our novelists and
their historians, the only function of black women is to give birth to our he-
roes" (105/108). Simea's journal is thus a prise de la parole on behalf of those
who cannot speak for themselves, a deliberate slippage from subjectivity to
solidarity that reinvents identities even as it recuperates key discourses of the
negritude movement in contemporary Paris: "I need the hand of a woman,
sun-woman, black sun, good nigger black, good maroon nigger for my self
defense, my legitimate defense" (115/117). As the names and discourses of Lero,
Menil, Damas, and Cesaire repeat and circulate, their symbolic power seems
to converge in a single remarkable moment of direct intertextual address:
"Give me back my black poets, give me back my black doll, Damas. . . . And
give back to me Cesaire, of all the Wills offered in the Notebook that I've just
learned by heart" (119/120). By appropriating and rewriting the terms of the
French Caribbean discursive heritage, Maximin engages with and transforms
the already written; such discourses also encounter the intertextual inscription
of phrases that appear, remarkably, to echo themes and images from other
writers working in the present. When Adrien, in his letter to Marie-Gabriel,
points out that "to be born into real life we must by a second birth uproot
ourselves from their paternal womb" (82/86), his words appear to echo those of
Maryse Cond6's protagonist Veronica, in En Attendant le bonheur, who voy-
ages to Africa in order to fulfill her own wish to return to her "maternal womb."
This network of textual references reinforces the impact of these works as icons
of interstitial identity, analeptic and proleptic markers in a literary and cultural
landscape of creole authenticity.
   Section 5, "Mother's Song," functions as a re-presentation of the disjunc-
tures and anomalies underscoring colonial alienation. Importantly, it opens
with a critically differential reinscription of the twelfth proverb from "Jona-
than's Notebook," but this time playing on the symbolism of toit/toi to rein-
scribe identity: "You traveled toward yourself; toward the village where you
didn't have a house" (147/150; emphasis mine). By marking this site as one of
textual and temporal transformation, this phrase re-cites and rephrases the
symbolic resurgence of this critically important figure, successfully reorient-
ing, particularly at this juncture in the narrative, the critical interaction be-
tween culture and resistance by doubling and modifying the discursive frame-
work, and reminding us that, with their displacement to the metropole in 1956,




124 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Simea and Louis-Gabriel "didn't forget to take the island in their luggage,
dreams, and daily meals" (101/104). Further, this phrase deliberately exploits an
intrinsic phonic ambiguity in the text in order to emphasize the significance of
the differential identity it inscribes, signaling Marie-Gabriel's (re)construction
of the identity of both self and counterpart through writing.
   Then, switching to the second person, a strategy which clearly reflects a
fundamental displacement of identity, Marie-Gabriel recreates her mother's
story, inscribing the second notebook she was found holding at the beginning
of the novel, while inventing her identity through the second-person address.
This interweaving of the analeptic and the proleptic joins with the ambiguity
of alienation and intimacy inscribed in the second-person address to culmi-
nate in the account of Simea's return from Paris, her death in labor in 1945 and
the simultaneous (re)birth of Marie-Gabriel as a discursive figure, and, implic-
itly, her symbolic liberation from paternal paradigms of colonial authority and
textuality. The deliberate instability of the narrative perspective works through
the reinscription of a plethora of discursive figures already at work within the
narrative, to show that writing as a project of self-constitution may ultimately
be read as symbolic of the novel's entire narrative strategy. Marie-Gabriel is
symbolically reinscribed here as the mother of her mother's text, the latter
simultaneously her interlocutor and discursive progenitor of her daughter's
textuality. In the symbolic circularity of these texts and subjects there lies a
world of creolized displacement.
   By extending the parameters of displacement, Marie-Gabriel's narrative re-
reads and extends the doubling of the discursive frame signified by the twins to
the discontinuities of France's wartime occupation of Guadeloupe and Mar-
tinique: "And yet the twins, Martinique and Guadeloupe, almost became the
center of resistance of the Free French Movement" (148/151). The spirit of
survival that is the corollary of this period is summed up by the eventual reap-
pearance of Jonathan's notebook; along with such icons of cultural affirmation
as Cesaire's Tropiques and his Cahier, it eventually symbolizes the extent to
which resistance to the discourse of the colonial encounter by appropriating
and resiting its boundaries is ineluctably bound up with issues of transforma-
tion and hybridity. An extract from Simea's letter to the Cesaires makes this
clear: "We will recreate the poetry of the Antilles, blues sculpted in stone, our
cry of pebbles polished by the sea. Yes, let us make our insults into diamonds"
(157/159). As the narrator proceeds to interweave figures from the African-
American struggle of the late twentieth century with transformational meta-




L'Isoli Soleil/Soufrieres / 12


phors drawn on the improvisational jazz played by her father, Louis-Gabriel,
she again reinscribes the strategy of repetition and transposition that is at the
basis of the project whose birth we are witnessing.
   This fragment culminates in a critical encounter: Louis-Gabriel's reading
of the well-known article by Suzanne Cesaire, "Qu'est-ce que le Martini-
quais?" in an issue of the periodical Tropiques, placed symbolically beside two
textual icons of the negritude movement's contribution to Caribbean iden-
tity-Leon-Gontran Damas's Pigments, and Aim6 Cesaire's Cahier published
in the periodical Volontds. Louis-Gabriel's perusal of the April 1942 article in
Tropiques quickly becomes, more precisely, his reading of Simea's marginal
annotation of it, her first-person gloss of the dicta enunciated by Cesaire: "It's
up to us to invent a future, without expecting much from the African past and
the European present. I think that identification is the enemy of identity. We
shouldn't first look for someone to identify with before we act. . . . Don't
all Antilleans belong to one civilization? . . . I am necessarily Antillean, and
Guadeloupean only by accident!" (191/192-93; emphasis in the original). Criti-
cally, here, the value that attaches to this identitarian declaration occurs in
Louis-Gabriel's reading of Simea's gloss rather than in Cesaire's text itself,
drawing together the web of signification elaborated by improvisational jazz,
principles of discursive translation and transformation, and his reading of this
text that responds to Suzanne Cesaire within the journal itself. Together, these
patterns engender Marie-Gabriel's ongoing writing project to literally (re)in-
vent identity, articulating new patterns of creole cultural authenticity. The
future will be grounded and located not by the implied sameness and fixity of
a single historical identification-echoing Glissant's description of the prac-
tice of Reversion from the Discours antillais, and contravening the openness of
the multivocal writing project that refracts an identity in movement-or of the
traditionally accepted cultural axes of this displaced and transplanted soci-
ety-neither in the African past nor in the European present-but in a site of
exchange and transition that is more than either or both, less than either one,
but, significantly, symbolically double. The initiatory declaration of a plural-
ized, common regional Caribbean identity that is articulated here derives its
importance from the place and context of its enunciation.
   As Louis-Gabriel's ruminations continue, they are ultimately engendered
from the ancestral traces of the letter addressed by Georges to Jonathan, "a
letter he had learned by heart, sent in 1802, by a certain Georges to his brother,
Jonathan. Louis-Gabriel offered himself the pleasure of believing that this




126 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Georges was one of his ancestors, because he was a fine violinist and composer
of merengues" (192/193). With the reinscription of the second of the creole
proverbs punctuating the uprising of 1802, and taught to him and his twin
brother, Jean-Louis, by their mother, Louise, the repetition and improvisation
of creolization and jazz are now generative of this incipient, interstitial iden-
tity. Already a coda and commentary to the Delgres uprising two hundred
years before, this key phrase, "Coal is not flour, flour is not coal" (193/192), now
serves to bracket the trajectory of the family history being traced from past to
present by Marie-Gabriel, and to underscore once again the important role
played by symbolic and iconic repetition in the text. For as the divisions
marked by this proverb usher in an extract from a letter written by Georges to
Jonathan and entered in the latter's notebook, a talisman passed down through
the family from generation to generation and which Louis-Gabriel keeps al-
ways in his possession, the re-citation of this fragment, learned by heart by
Louis-Gabriel although remaining dimly understood by him, describes and
defines the dangerous dichotomies that strew the path toward identitarian au-
thenticity: "Freedmen live in dread of being like trumpet-tree leaves, green on
top and white underneath ... a sort of supplement of humanity, which makes
us endlessly give the whites proof of our merits, or their iniquity" (192/193-94).
This symbolic resurgence of Georges's letter, which by being read across time
by both Jonathan and Louis-Gabriel-and, presumably, by the family mem-
bers in between-continuously redoubles its resonances by deferring its desti-
nation, engages the difficulties of self-definition and the risks of purely dialec-
tical aproaches to cultural subjectivity. It is through these repeated moments
of almost imperceptible difference that the cycle of repetition allows the open-
ing up of a strategic discursive space, ultimately engendering new sites of dif-
ference and identity marked by the aggregate symbolic assemblage contained
by Marie-Gabriel's writing project.
   This continuous, insistent exchange and redoubling of letters and proverbs,
fragments and meanings, symbols and subjective positions reassert the undeni-
able primacy of cultural translation and its corollary of diversity in a creolized
context of difference: "Observe your identical portrait and see how it is so
exactly false compared to the image . . . that image . . . that can only come to
your eyes from the mirror of the eyes of the other" (258/258-59). It is the trans-
lation of that doubled displacement from the mirror into a differential dis-
course of contestation which ultimately formulates and locates postcolonial
identity within the region; an identity which, as the narrator insists, must




L'Isoli Soleil/Soufrieres / 12


reflect the plurality of the regional subject as a site of identitarian inscription:
"Of course, here in the Antilles, we're first of all blacks, but then we are blacks
of America, and Europeanized blacks of America. Our authenticity must be
based on respect for our triple origins" (224/225). By underscoring the inelucta-
bility of these multiple subject positions that are the region's inheritance, the
narrator's textual recuperation of the experience of fragmentation becomes
the defining sign of the text's discourse of difference.
   Ultimately, it is the ambiguity and pluralism that inescapably undergird the
postcolonial process that Maximin seeks to underscore in this narrative. The
continuous alternation between epistolary discourse and third-person narra-
tion in "Thus Exile Departs," the novel's sixth and final section, positions this
postcolonial praxis under an overarching sign of protean possibilities. The sec-
tion comprises a series of letters exchanged between Antoine, Adrien, and
Marie-Gabriel; its headings count down, in reverse, from fourteen to one, the
end of the novel in fact simultaneously constituting a beginning, as the text's
final act takes us back to the threshold of the writing project we have just read.
Not only do these fourteen subsections double the symbolic number seven
that has recurred at several critical moments in the text, they revise and re-
echo the thirteen subfragments of Adrien's "Writing Notebook" that Marie-
Gabriel has already incorporated into part 3; the poetic, supplementary, inter-
ventionist coda, signed by Daniel, the author himself, sums up the differential
space of the community in whose name this project has been accomplished.
   Maximin's contestatory counterdiscourse re-marks this (non)ending by re-
cuperating an economy of epistolary exchange for an ending that brings the
text full circle, introducing characters and repeating proverbs and phrases al-
ready encountered to engender new metonymies of signification from the con-
tiguity of old and new, past, present, and future. Letter number 12, signed by
Eve, ends with an iconic reinscription of Jonathan's bracelet: "For tonight,
lone sun slips on my wrist the bracelet of Jonathan" (262/261), while letter
number 1o, signed by Adrien, evokes Jonathan's notebook through its refer-
ence to the journal kept by his descendant, Louis-Gabriel-the very journal
Marie-Gabriel awaits when the novel opens-and announces its inscription of
an intersubjective, affiliative articulation of nationness through its re-place-
ment of a traditional salutation by the phrase "Beginning of my history" (264/
263); the stories of Adrien, of Louis-Gabriel, and of us all are re-cited and relo-
cated by our textual encounter with these ongoing moments of recreation and
reiteration.




128 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


   The ineluctable multivalency of cross-cultural identity for the postcolo-
nial Caribbean subject is continuously reaffirmed in the narrative discourse
through the continuous (re)invention and repetition of episodes and identities
already read. In a letter to Adrien signed "Aime-Gabriel" (M-Gabriel), the
narrator speaks of her intention to reformulate in her novel the scene of Elisa's
death: "I'm going to change the episode in my novel where I describe the
death of Master Alliot's daughter Elisa; I got the idea from one of the projects
in your Writing Notebook (the death of the little Elisa before the eyes of
Genevieve and Jenny, her two little slave companions)" (269/269), thus re-
calling both Adrien's version of this episode under the heading "Project for a
Novel" (98-99/101-2), and its earlier appearance, in a slightly different guise,
in "Jonathan's Notebook"; as metafiction is made to follow fictional history, "J
... the young slave, will now be the one who shoots her" (37). And in a letter
to Antoine, Adrien speaks of receiving from Marie-Gabriel Georges's letter to
Jonathan from the latter's notebook: "Marie-Gabriel sent me her letter from
Georges to Jonathan, the maroon of 1802; she wants to add it to her novel" (282/
280). This is a remarkabe double citation of the original letter in this subse-
quent letter, which itself refers to a novelistic episode (not yet) already written,
in the text whose coming creation we continue to witness.
   Indeed, the associative, dialogic identitarian principle underlying the en-
tire project is reiterated by Antoine: "First of all, the language: discoveries,
turns of phrase, associations of words-ideas, but all so natural as if flowing from
the source . . . the precision of historical documentation, a clear departure
from common knowledge (major events) in order to show us the form of the
chronicle. . . . It's above all the exiled sun that I read between your lines, the
search for a dialogue between writings, even more than the accomplishment of
your writing alone" (272-74/271-73; emphasis mine). It is by reading between
the lines that this decentering of writing and history will achieve the inscrip-
tion of a cultural identity that constitutes the communal experience through
the discursive re-presentation of its intrinsic pluralism. Through these con-
stant realignments and revisions of the narrative site, Maximin's principle of
allegorical and anagrammatical dis-placement engenders the identitarian plu-
ralism that both undergirds and is re-produced by these discursive intersec-
tions, thus ascribing to them a primordial value in his re-construction of cul-
tural authenticity. For if, indeed, as Peter Brooks argues, "repetition always
takes place in the realm of the symbolic-in the transference, in language-
where the affects and figures of the past are confronted in symbolic form"




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 129


(1984:124), then it is in the nature of this discursive repetition and translation
that textual strategies of representation are (re)defined and, in so doing, initiate
new signs and acts of a collaborative cultural difference. The economy of ex-
change and transformation from which the novel takes its title enacts
performatively its own authority while interrogating the discursive and cul-
tural production that has preceded it.
   As this insistent process of doubling and substitution ultimately joins the
character of Angela to the American Black Power activist Angela Davis, based
on a brief stopover she made in Guadeloupe in 1969, and Guadeloupe's
Georges and Jonathan to California's Soledad Brothers, George and Jonathan
Jackson, these temporal intersections of resistance and revolt continue to
widen and redefine the context of regional identity through its pan-American
points of reference and recall the narrator's concept of Caribbean identity as
the product of an ongoing cultural interaction between the transplanted
blacks of the Americas. Yet the commonality of their experience, the incessant
repetitions of struggle against and subversion of a hierarchical discourse of
history written by the Other, is what informs this re-vision of the borders of
identity and desire: "We have to pirate history and writing, stick our hooks into
their culture across the expanse of our three continents" (274/273). Having
recounted the deaths of George and Jonathan in Letter 3, Marie-Gabriel
makes a final discursive gesture to Angela in the re-citation of the original
version of Jonathan's twelfth proverb; here, in its third iteration, it effectively
joins toi and toit, past, present, and future, the Caribbean and the Americas,
into a single identitarian sign of community and contestation: "Don't ever
forget my bracelet: travel to the village where you don't have a house, but
always take your roof with you" (280/279). End as beginning, the novel as days
of future passed; above all, as Daniel points out in the first/last letter which he
signs with his own name, finally adding his own voice to the chorus of episto-
lary communication: "No outcome, certainly no ending" (282/281); the delib-
erate displacement of the sutures and slippages of the narrative process render
the end of this self-reflexive project also the beginning of a new era of writing
and identity.
   This text engages both the institution and the transformation of the post-
colonial condition, generating agency from the resonances of a preterite colo-
nial temporality; both discourse and characters "refuse the chronological lin-
earity of ready-made narratives by the ancestors," as Zimra writes, preferring
instead to generate a creative framework that "delights in multiple Caribbean




130 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


intertextualities, openly as well as obliquely" (1999:193). Maximin re-presents
Guadeloupe subject to colonial domination as a Guadeloupe become object
of a profane desire, its struggle for affirmation that draws on the traces of its
discontinuous history confronting the colonialist's desire for recognition, and
generating in turn the multiplicity and intertextuality that form the crux of a
discursive context of resistance.3 His foregrounding of writing as a primary
constituent of postcolonial praxis recognizes the important role of discourse in
the contestation of colonial overdetermination, as the novel's conflation of
fragmentation and pluralism instantiates temporalities that ultimately pro-
ceed of their own volition: "Desire will open our mouths to continue our story
with the book closed" (282/280).
   This work, then, articulates a counterdiscourse that effectively challenges
the ineluctable continuity of the unitary colonial voice in working through the
ambiguities of postcolonial identity: "From the debris of synthesis in fragments
of a plural, isle and wing, Ile and aile, he and she, it is us, ddsirades outstretched
close together in the agreement between names, music, and acts, an alliance
of dreams and awakenings" (283/281). This counterdiscourse validates the
complexities of Caribbean identity by grounding it in the attendant corollaries
of a Caribbean history regained; in the larger symbolic order, its accomplish-
ment, as Frangoise Lionnet succinctly puts it, of "a means of cultural represen-
tation that can do justice to the heterogeneities of the present and to the absent
categories of the past" (1995:40), serves to organize the complex re-location,
identification, and refashioning of the borders of a regional culture in which
its present dualities refract those of its past as well as its future intricacies.


Soufrieres: Exploding the Encounter

Similar principles are also at work in Maximin's second novel, Soufrieres. Os-
tensibly a narrative centered on the real, in that it takes as its point of departure
the threatened eruption of Guadeloupe's Soufriere volcano in 1976, this work
evokes the evacuations, departures, and spirit of endurance occasioned by the
looming crisis. Maximin addresses similar themes of writing, vocality, and cre-
ativity in this work, in which the unstable temporalities and teleologies of a
contemporary reality all but constitute a sequel to L'Isold Soleil. Significantly,
however, the trajectory of the action of Soufrieres is completed before the
manuscript of L'Isold Soleil has been written. However, such an assertion
should by no means be read as implying that the action of Soufrieres is tempo-




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 131


rally located within the framework of its predecessor. Indeed, given the critical
metafictional cast of L'Isold Soleil, we should perhaps remind ouselves that its
script was given over to the composition and consolidation of the writing
project which would eventually become the published novel. Both novels may
together be construed as a discursive and thematic whole, then, which ex-
plains their exegetical joining here; at the same time, enough parallels and
differences emerge between both works that even given the reappearance of
several of the main characters, Soufrieres remains a narrative whose treatment
of issues of culture and identity construction centers on a sense of survival, a
context of contestation tempered by recurring resonances of modernism in the
novel's discursive praxis.
   Among those characters who make their reappearance, perhaps the most
important are Marie-Gabriel and her friend Adrien. Having survived the com-
plex devices and desires involved in generating cultural identity by rewriting
both its past and its present, they find this existence threatened by the immi-
nent eruption of the Soufriere volcano and the certainty of its disrupting even
the limited cultural autonomy they have been able to put into discursive prac-
tice. By putting their physical and cultural courage to the test, the volcano
forces them to come to terms with the fragility of their existence, the ineluc-
table resurgence of arbitrary patterns of authoritarian power, and to take stock
of the resources that inform their resistance to its power of erasure.
   As we have seen previously in L'Isold soleil, a complex network of inter-
textual references grounds the modernist thrust of Maximin's narrative dis-
course. If, however, L'Isold Soleil is to be seen as more than simply "a pointedly
revisionist history of Guadeloupe," as Chris Bongie puts it (1998:355), and if
Maximin's intertextual framework is indeed critical to the construction of a
Caribbean framework for creolization, then we must see the primary context
of its operation as instilling patterns of re-citation and transformation, rather
than the deliberately subversive space-clearing gesture through which, as
Simon Gikandi puts it, "the modern Caribbean writer seeks to rework Euro-
pean forms and genres to rename the experience of the 'other' American"
(1992:20). Rather, Maximin's textual strategy is one that deliberately absorbs
and reworks aesthetic and historical discourses to inscribe and valorize the
nuances and multiplicities of Caribbean creolization.
   This interplay between discursive form and cultural expression takes shape
early in the novel, as Antoine, Marie-Gabriel's husband, stages rehearsals for a
play. A quick series of important intertextual references, including Simone




132 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Schwarz-Bart's La Mulatresse Solitude, Aim6 Cesaire's Une Saison au Congo,
and Wole Soyinka's The Dance of the Forest, erects a network of thematic and
contextual parallels that serves both to situate the novel in a context of cultural
and discursive resistance, and, more precisely, to clarify the symbolic reso-
nance of the impending volcanic eruption. Antoine's play, La Danse de la
femme-volcan, which, we are told, takes its title from Soyinka's play, traces the
teleology of the volcanic voice, eventually mediating its theme of rebirth
through a remarkable representational event which, as in its precursor, is
placed almost exactly at the novel's center. The articulation of both identity
and resistance are thus predicated upon a set of discursive enunciations
grounded in the complex contours of Caribbean and diasporic culture.
   In fact, one might reasonably claim that a plethora of textual references and
discursive appropriation permeates the novel. Early on, Antoine cites an ex-
change from a purportedly drunken conversation he had at four o'clock one
morning in 1952 with the Guianese poet Leon Damas: "A poem is useful; it is
as strong and as fragile as grafitti on a big, big wall. And I answered him, I agree
with you; when the poem is good, one no longer sees the wall, one sees the
graffiti" (20). A scant three pages later, he appropriates and transforms this
metaphor in conversation with Marie-Gabriel to draw a survival metaphor
based on lines of life and death: "Life against death is like graffiti against a wall.
If life survives, you don't see the wall any more, you see the graffiti" (23).
Through both content and form, this translation serves to reinforce the narra-
tive link between writing and transformation, identity construction and cul-
tural survival, and is in turn reinforced by the revelation that Marie-Gabriel is
herself crucially engaged in the final stages of creating the novel that will be-
come L'Isoli Soleil.
   Indeed, the potentially eruptive Soufriere is itself also made evocative of
writing, as shortly thereafter their friend Rosan re-cites the structural disjunc-
ture and thematic tension both of Marie-Gabriel's novel-to-be and Antoine's
play with the revelation of his own fragmented, disjointed response to the
volcano's threat: he presents Gerty-already encountered, as we shall see, in
L'Isoli Soleil-with a notebook titled "Volcano Trial: Defense Notes." The
reproduction of this two-page extract within the body of the text, its differential
text and type made up of notes, clippings, and comments on a series of dates
tracing a variety of local, regional, and global seismic and political events,
draws on the structure of the first novel and the state of tension (and, implicitly,
of latent renewal) elaborated by the imminent eruption to construct the con-




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 133


tours of a cultural defense whose strategy is a creative fragmentation and re-
constitution of that which threatens it most. This continuous disjuncture,
reflection, and recuperation of the construction of Soufrieres itself ultimately
constitutes a differential means of resistance to these potential sites of eruption
and erasure.
   Within the tensions and teleologies of Soufrieres qua novel, the deliberate
textual practice of fragmentation and dislocation, re-citation and transforma-
tion is an integral part of Maximin's agenda of discursive renaissance. Contrary
to the position taken by Bongie, who somehow seems to see the author's
project as an innately regressive one, "stressing the ungroundedness of the
modernist project in the wake of which he is writing, and fictiveness of the
identities, past and future, he is (re)constructing" (1998:358), I argue that
Maximin is firmly inscribed in articulating a concrete poetics of creolization,
a performative tour de force that reframes and relocates the terms and param-
eters both of Caribbean creole discourse and its corollary of cultural identity.
For example, we soon become aware that there are multivalent layers of
signification continually being generated by this complex representation of
resistance. The primary inscription of characters and events takes place in
section i under the symbolic rubric of a "Caribbean Parade," a resiting,
through textual appropriation, re-placement, and exposition, of the plural
resonances left behind by the colonial encounter. It is here that the narrative
expands upon the eruptive possibilities of the Soufriere to shape a space for a
creole Caribbean identity through the tensions evoked by volcanic destruction
and the ongoing discursive constructions being undertaken by Adrien,
Antoine, and Marie-Gabriel.
   However, section 2, "The Jungle," opens with a letter to Marie-Gabriel from
Adrien, now located in Paris. His missive and its postscript underline the sym-
bolic importance of the work of the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose con-
temporary rehabilitation of Caribbean themes in the plastic arts was a strong
source of artistic inspiration in the period. These two section titles echo paint-
ing titles from his work and allow a deeper contextualization of the narrative to
occur, such that it appears in fact to be "the intense secret dialogue between
the signs of the painting and the pages on the table: his letter to Marie-Gabriel,
and the poem he had just written. . . . For Lam, for her, for himself and others,
renewed this night after so many months through the form and color of words"
(73). It is not without significance that a number of Lam's artistic works create
an intertextual framework for Maximin's discourse; not only do his paintings




134 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


name the novel's first two sections, they also provide cover illustrations for the
Seuil editions of both L'Isoli Soleil and Soufrieres, since La Marcheuse des Iles
and La Rumeur de la terre adorn the respective covers. Also, no doubt not
coincidentally, what is probably the Cuban artist's most famous work, The
Jungle (1942)-a painting that has been described as "a visual companion
piece to Cesaire's Notebook"4-found an uncanny titular and thematic echo
in an essay by the same name, published by Pierre Mabille in the January 1945
issue of Tropiques, the journal edited by the Cesaires and Ren6 Menil that
provides a counterpoint to the project of Cesairean intertextuality in which
Maximin is engaged. It is the symbolic substance of this influential artist's
work that crafts new artistic concepts of Caribbeanness through this inter-
textual network to coincide with the culturally critical and creative period of
the 1940s and 1950s in the region, and accounts for Maximin's discursive ap-
propriation and metafictional reinscription of his work. Indeed, the phrases
that appear as possibilities for Adrien's poem's title - la Rumeur de la terre; Les
Freres; L'Oiseau du possible; Defile antillais; Chant des osmoses; Apostrophe'
apocalypse (73)-are quickly recognizable as being in large part titles drawn
from Lam's work to be given to the novel's various sections. If, then, this
metafictional fragmentation and reintegration of the novelistic framework
through the poetic intersections and artistic resonances of one of its intra-
diegetic elements signify the author's inscription of the contours of a concrete
creole pluralism, conflating art, history, and discourse to engender an alternate
set of modalities for articulating Caribbeanness, the tension between erasure
and resistance is ultimately elaborated in the differential discursive temporal-
ity articulated by the Soufriere and the contestation that it both constitutes and
commands. This sort of textual creolization or discursive doubleness creates a
polyvocality that simultaneously decenters and determines the deliberately
multivalent forms adopted by resistance in the text.
   Indeed, the question of resistance is one that Maximin broaches both the-
matically and textually in Soufrieres. By virtue of the volcano's imminent erup-
tion, the characters populating this figurative Guadeloupe are forced to come
to terms with the possibility of their impending extinction, and to choose be-
tween submission to erasure of their cultural identity, or through their resis-
tance, a creolization of perspective and performance that seizes on the plural-
ism and paradox of the cultural experience to write a new formula for the
shifting boundaries of survival in the Caribbean postcolonial context. Again,
such a reading is strikingly at odds with the position taken by Bongie, where




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 135


the lack of agency he insistently perceives in Maximin's discourse is directly
traced to what he terms the author's lack of engagement, his production of text
as simply "a rhetorical inventio"; as Bongie writes, "The creolized subject finds
her- or himself in a textual and geographical space that is at a definitive, and
defining, remove from any and all cultural points of departure or ideological
points of arrival: the origin and the telos can be present only as insubstantial
yet eroticized traces, in the Derridean sense of the word" (1998:358). The re-
markable lack of authorial rootedness in the Caribbean landscape that such a
reading presupposes may indeed be suggested by Maximin's endless play of
sign and countersign; but while it may be possible to read Maximin's incessant
fragmentation, repetition, and doubling as paradigmatic of a purely Derridean
deconstructive turn, I would like to suggest that an implied engendering of
Caribbean agency is a critical component of Maximin's creolized discourse.
   Drawing on the conflation of differential historical and aesthetic practices,
this discourse opens new paths of discursive and subjective possibility from the
intersections of postcolonial discourse and the concrete context of its praxis.
His works, then, are discursive performances that appropriate and transform
various resonances of Caribbeanness in order to redraw the boundaries fram-
ing a composite creole subject. The deliberate intervocality of Maximin's text
reinforces the importance within this network of an infinite modification and
renewal of the colonial trace. As his narrative glosses itself in continuous cycles
of regeneration and re-citation, the strategies undertaken by both text and sub-
ject constitute continuous moments of rebirth and contestation such that for
Maximin, writing new solutions ultimately keeps the historical threat of era-
sure at bay. This issue of choice, of a rebirth that preempts the volcanic erup-
tion, is what undergirds the temporality of survival for Maximin; as Mireille
Rosello writes of a key moment in L'Isold Soleil, "It is perhaps in this distinc-
tion that the originality and the subersion of his work lies: the gift . . . is a
symbolic gift, which reintroduces the idea of choice, and thus the existence of
liberty at the heart of a terrifying universe (1992:58). Thus both character and
text arrive at a sense of self-liberation that is simultaneously disruptive of an
authoritarian discursive domination, constituting contestation from a discon-
tinuous creole temporality whose uncanny differential doubleness of vision
and voice generates paradigms of creative possibility even as it confronts the
risk of its own dissolution.
   Yet another aspect of the novel's persistent regeneration of signs of double-
ness and hybridity retraces the patterns and principles of dcriture feminine at




136 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


work in parts 4 and 5 of L'Isold Soleil; by separating the engendering of text
from the double patriarchies of colonialism and discourse, Maximin avoids
reinscribing their hierarchies of domination and alienation. Here, such delib-
erate dissymetries are accomplished by linking the volcano, and its critically
symbolic role in the generation of a Guadeloupean identity, to images of fe-
male fecundity. Early on, in an extract from the play La Danse de la femme-
volcan, the figure of the woman is yoked to that of the Soufriere: "But in the
midst of the calm, a young woman emerges.... It is the young queen of the isle
of Karukera, the Soufriere, dressed in earth, air, and fire. The greenery ap-
plauds. The savannah's body shudders beneath her feet" (37-38). At this point,
as the cycle of rebirth and continuity is re-presented through this dramatic text
within a text-appropriating and re-citing the terms of Soyinka's original, writ-
ten and performed to mark Nigeria's accession to independence in i96o-this
performative doubling allows the discourse to reinscribe the critical duality of
the Soufriere, poised between destruction and the corollaries of recovery and
renewal. It is at this juncture that the pluralization of the novel's title becomes
self-evident, as it recuperates the multivalent identitarian possibilities signified
by the presence of the volcano and its imminent eruption. For if, as Simea's
rejoinder to Suzanne Cesaire succinctly puts it in L'Isold Soleil, "identification
is the enemy of identity" (191/192), such an insistence on the possibilities of
pluralism that are to be preferred over the chimera of unitary origin inscribes
a double echo both of Glissant's injunction against Reversion (1981:30-32) and
his valorization of rhizome over root in the articulation of identity's intrinsic
multiplicity (1990:157-58). The principle of pluralism is thus multiply and
intertextually inscribed, tracing a trajectory across texts and contexts to ground
the several creole discourses of Caribbean identity.
   But even this discursive gesture (re)naming the narrative's postcolonial
praxis gives way to deeper resonances of cultural complexity as Angela's
daughter Elisa falls ill. As Angela sings to this child, the descendant and name-
sake of an early victim of L'Isold Soleil's re-citing of the violent eruptions of the
plantation era, the song becomes one which incorporates numerous linguistic
and cultural characteristics, the whole more than the some of its parts, criti-
cally doubled, and "which was drawn from both a childlike romance and an
old blues tune, neither creole nor French" (97). This creolization of both dis-
course-through the song-and character-through the symbiosis of singer
and listener-is grounded in an ineluctably feminized economy, so that its
openness and capacity for regeneration together trace metonymic patterns of




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / i3i


creole postcolonialism. This economy of female fecundity ultimately contex-
tualizes Maximin's polysemic textuality, his empowerment of the feminine
axis allowing a transformative creativity of survival to emerge from the rup-
turing of the Soufriere.
   But perhaps the most remarkable section of the novel is the one titled
"Murmuring of the Earth" (Rumeur de la terre), significantly positioned al-
most exactly at its center. Here, recapitulating the structural strategy of its pre-
decessor, the narrative shifts register to the first person, engendering through
the mimetic self-reflexivity inscribed in this central fragment (we will recall
both the thematic and the structural self-reflexivity of the central fragment of
L'Isold Soleil, and that Lam's Rumeur de la terre provides this text's cover illus-
tration) a discursive site that mines the symbolism of title and theme even as it
allows the Soufriere itself to be given voice: "I am a mouth of fiery flesh, but I
have no language of disclosure. My dimensions are so spacious that I can speak
through other bodies, and with a single gaze peer into all the recesses of my
huge house. and my word is earth" (141). Simultaneously, through a series of
polyphonic fragments that oscillate between third- and first-person narration,
each of which begins with a temporal notation that, journal-like, marks the
methodical, unhurried passing of the hours of the day, the island's crisis ap-
proaches its zenith. This complex strategy of mimetic re-presentation permits
the inscription of a creole polyvocality that embodies much of the hybrid
postcolonial culture of Guadeloupe, a culture caught in the very act of self-
generation even as it contests the liminality imposed by the authoritarian am-
biguities and hierarchies of a persistent, pervasive departmentalization.
   Indeed, in its double role as salvation and threat, the volcano inscribes the
imminent possibility of an explosive identity politics, tracing a translational,
recuperative space for itself even as it articulates an ironic re-presentation of
the people in whose name it elaborates this transformative perspective: "Death
definitely holds no attraction for these people; they consistently seek survival
in every evil, with neither remorse or atonement. They are not fleeing me, they
are fleeing death" (150). When Rosan's pregnant wife, Gerty, confidante in
Paris of Marie-Gabriel's mother, Simea-herself engendered and encoun-
tered in an earlier text-gives birth to a daughter who shares the latter's name,
in the midst of an eruption of rock and ash, surrounded by Marie-Gabriel and
the familial elder, Man-Yaya, and metonymically inseparable from the former's
fragmented manuscript, the event becomes "the double invention of a mother
and child" (159), a dual fecundity of textuality and subjectivity that signifies the




138 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ineluctable imbrication of the postcolonial future with the colonial past: "A
new and living Simea, born from Gerty's desire to have a child one day from
that Simda of Marie-Gabriel's 'Simda's journal'. . . placed in a cradle next to a
bed of manuscript pages, themselves written with as much blood, flesh, love
and ripping apart as had to be ... searching word by word for the reason of her
name" (16o-6i; emphasis mine). The symbolic relation between the birth of
the child and that of the text position writing, birth, and eruption metonym-
ically in a symbolic explosion of creolized feminine plurality. At the same
time, the search for the name, for the sources of identity, makes this inter-
connectedness of history, discourse, and character indicate a voyage of cultural
survival and self-discovery.
   Far from framing a zone of Derridean unrepresentability, then, the inter-
sectional space mapped by these two novels opens up new sites of discursive
and subjective possibility, illuminating in their multiple points of convergence
the temporalities and teleologies of a Caribbean creole discourse of difference
whose analeptic and proleptic properties are yet to be fully articulated.
Significantly, the novel's opening is marked by three points of suspension, fol-
lowed by the reinscription of the very last line of L'Isold Soleil, a letter signed,
we will recall, by Daniel himself: ". . . and the leaf flies off at the risk of losing
its green" (9). This issue of interconnectedness and intervocality itself is criti-
cal to the novel's inscription of self-generation; in fact, its phoenixlike re-cita-
tions of character, theme, and structure draw on its self-referential base to reit-
erate its formal standing as a historically-grounded discursive construct. To this
end, there are two narratives simultaneously in progress in Soufrieres, as well as
the play La Danse de la femme-volcan and intermittent supplementary sites of
intervocal commentary. For Soufrieres is in fact a work in progress, an ongoing
creation that Adrien refashions even as we continue to read it and watch its
construction of cultural identity take shape. The repeated use of the second
person that occurs in the text-and which, as in L'Isold Soleil, opens it-is in
fact Adrien addressing a series of realizations and conclusions to himself.
These extracts from his notebook and letters gloss the primary site of writing,
rendering its postcolonial praxis a signifying network of change, invention, and
polyvocality. This sensation of an interlocking, infinitely discursive pluralism
is buttressed by Marie-Gabriel's discovery of her mother Simea's journal, a
work that is at the center both of the creolized cultural polysemy of Soufrieres
and of the work that thematically and chronologically precedes it. The sup-
posed referentiality of this fictional discursive construct compounds and




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 139


undergirds the interstitial complexity of such sites of resistance, where plural-
ism and paradox tend to render linearities of signification liminal at best.
   These themes are encoded as a differential discourse near the end of the
novel, when Elisa, significantly driven to articulate her autonomy for the first
time, inscribes her hybrid subjectivity by evoking and resiting Aim6 Cesaire's
poetic elaboration of the inherent instability of the volcano itself: "There are
volcanos that die away. There are volcanos that survive" (249). This
reinscription of a Cesairean discourse brings the wheel of doubling and
intertextuality full circle, as his phrase completes and anchors an arc of
signification in which the polysemic strata of the novels have continuously
reiterated and re-cited Cesaire in order to ground the ineluctably composite,
fragmented, but contestatory world of the Caribbean experience. Thus the
novel's final section, "Flights of Possibility" (L'Oiseau du possible), functions
as a coda revalorizing the inventiveness of this discursive polyvocality; suppos-
edly narrated in the first person by the vocal embodiment of Marie-Gabriel's
notebook, its protean possibilities of discursive transformation and metamor-
phosis are given pride of place: "For, between the past of exodus and the com-
ing genesis, you chose to risk your own metamorphosis by synthesizing our
wanderings" (253). Addressing itself directly to Marie-Gabriel here, the text
highlights her own transformation through the creative, risk-taking act of writ-
ing, placing in tandem the twin axes articulated throughout the text by the
Soufriere. At the novel's end, Elisa, in a critical gesture-symbolically clutch-
ing under one arm a Wifredo Lam painting and the records made by Marie-
Gabriel's father as key icons of cultural creolization-glosses the final page of
Marie-Gabriel's text in front of the burning house by transforming the
Cesairean poem "Oiseaux" taken from his volume Ferrements, whose begin-
ning, "l'exil s'en va ainsi" (thus exile departs), consciously echoes the title of
the final section of L'Isold Soleil. This final rewriting constitutes, in its deliber-
ate circularity of endings and beginnings, both the re-citation of the entire
novelistic structure and the basis of an economy of protean performativity for
this creole postcolonial culture. In this novel, survival is a conscious act of will,
discursively constructed out of repeated resonances of refusal and remem-
brance.
   Finally, as a conclusive, convulsive event, we are told at the novel's very end
of the destruction of Les Flamboyants plantation house by fire. The house has
long been a symbol of cultural and historical continuity, being also the loca-
tion of young Elisa's death at the hands of Jonathan during the opening pages




140 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


of L'Isold Soleil. What possible narrative or symbolic purpose could now be
served, we may well ask, by its destruction at this final juncture? I would like to
suggest that, far from being an inexplicable event, the climactic burning of Les
Flamboyants serves a specific purpose: namely, to deliberately and brutally
sever our ties with the symbolic icons of past and present generated by Max-
imin's narrative strategy. With the conclusion of Soufrieres-which moment,
in turn, marks the completion of L'Isold Soleil by Marie-Gabriel-such icons
are no longer necessary; indeed, it might be argued that they are now quite
superfluous, given the proleptic perspective of Maximin's prose. With the task
and the trace of writing now come full circle to mark the intersections of past
and present, self and Other, discourse and subjectivity, a framework of future
possibilities has been constructed on discursive ground, and with the threat of
eruption and erasure rendered moot, the Soufriere volcano, interstitially
double voiced, assumes its role as a modernist metaphor of creole aesthetics.
In a Caribbean context of discursive performance, dominated, as Simon
Gikandi argues, by "a certain anxiety about endings which is also an anxiety
about new cultural beginnings" (1992:226), this symbolic and referential
conflagration becomes a microcosm of the textual strategy, disrupting our as-
sumptions of historical continuity even as it inaugurates new moments and
metaphors of creolized subjectivity through discourse.
   Maximin's narrative discourse, then, articulates complex, discourse-driven
positionalities of creolized difference for the postcolonial Caribbean subject,
primarily by inscribing identity through multiple narrative sites and strategies
that simultaneously reflect and realize the pluralism undergirding regional
experience; in the concluding words of Marie-Gabriel's narrating notebook, "I
have always trusted in the suns of our history" (277). In the complexities of
form, play, and dddoublement and the subtle pluralities of voice that re-present
the relational aspect of this domien culture, Maximin constructs the discursive
framework of a hybrid temporality, distilling from its doubleness the archetype
of a differential identity that is demonstrably the product of the Caribbean's
ethnic and cultural synthesis. Maximin successfully contests the authoritarian
assumptions implicit in a traditionalist, colonially imposed narrative structure,
recognizing that it is precisely at this juncture -that of discourse and subjectiv-
ity-that the critical choice between continuing historic patterns of imperial
domination and articulating a cultural subject that is the embodiment of dif-
ference is to be made. As Edward Said indicates: "Conventional narrative is
... central to imperialism's appropriative and dominative attributes. Narrative




L'Isold Soleil/Soufrieres / 141


itself is the representation of power.... To tell a simple national story therefore
is to repeat, extend, and also to engender new forms of imperialism. . . . A new
system of mobile relationships must replace the hierarchies inherited from
imperialism" (1993:273-74). By disarticulating these hierarchies of power,
Maximin's narratives ultimately construct a new foundation for the articula-
tion of identity in a postcolonial setting of interstitial pluralism and difference.
His contestation of the discursive linearities of colonial authority enables the
elaboration of a new order of resistance and recognition that rewrites the tradi-
tional teleologies of the margin into key strategies of identity and liberation. In
this context of cultural hybridity, the polysemy of the post/colonial moment
suggests a set of modernities that announce a resolute heterogeneity; as Fran-
goise Lionnet suggests, "If mdtissage and indeterminacy are indeed synony-
mous metaphors for our postmodern condition . . . multiplicity flourishes
when the shackles of homogeneity and rigidity are broken" (1989:17-18).
   In sum, Maximin's principal achievement is perhaps the plural articulation
of a communal voice, one which deliberately draws up a framework for the
future through discourse: "I have never considered my island as a hell in
which I must bury my memories and my imagination" (277). By repeatedly
and insistently crossing discursive, spatial, and temporal boundaries, and by
blurring the static categories of genre and gender, Maximin's fusion of re-
citation and performance, of fiction and history, of subjectivity and com-
munity creates a composite cultural force of resistance and renewal. The de-
liberate disjunctures of these regional narratives interrogate the inherited
discursive dynamic of colonial dispossession-through its functional dyad of
history and textuality-while they simultaneously map the multiple metamor-
phoses of the creole Caribbean postcolonial subject, shaped by a context of
contestation whose inventiveness is the necessary precursor to an alter/native
identity that effectively escapes the intrinsic constraints of the written.









s 4


L'Autre qui danse
The Modalities and Multiplicities of Metissage


Ce sont deux hommes de chair et d'os; il y en a un qui lit et un autre qui danse;
je n'y vois pas autre chose.
Alfred de Musset, On ne badine pas avec l'amour, act 2, scene 5







Hybridity and Hierarchy

The pluralities that we shall be exploring in this chapter engage a form of
positionality that contests the basic essentialism grounding traditional perspec-
tives on race and culture. The schismatic categorizations of self and Other that
provided the basis for schemes of colonial expansion found their justification
in the theories of scientific racism that pervaded the nineteenth century. By
constructing a pseudoscientific rationale for insisting upon racial difference,
the concept of the hybrid emerged at the bottom of this hierarchical frame-
work, its dualities coming to be perceived as intrinsically degenerative. In
other words, the manipulation of categories of opposites had the effect of elid-
ing any framework for intersection in order to preserve and protect the purity
of racial paradigms, their corollaries of hierarchical difference and colonial
expansion, and, last but not least, to avoid the possibility of racial extinction.
Instances of interracial mixing were eventually conjoined with the evils of
immigration to create a network of fears and phobias, a mountain of mon-
strosities whose ultimate expression of essentialism was the simultaneous ap-
prehension and repression of the racialized Other.
   In a postcolonial context, however, the resonances implicit in the term
"metissage" tend to open up and assume added significance. Indeed, the very
semantic instability of the root term "metis" points us toward the possibility of




L'Autre qui danse / 143


new sites of cultural signification. A diachronic, cross-cultural glance at the
varied uses of the term reveals variety rather than uniformity; in the French
colonial context alone, as Frangoise Lionnet has shown, the terminological
resonances are continually transmuted as one travels from Canada, to Senegal,
to the Indian Ocean, to the Caribbean. The fact that this constant metamor-
phosis remains contextually tied to a series of colonial sites allows Lionnet to
conclude that "the very notion of metissage, then, is something culturally
specific" (1989:13). The implications raised by this phenomenon of cultural
specificities of difference are precisely the area we must explore in order to
define the point where hybridity is transformed from biological monstrosity
into an articulative discourse of alternative subjectivity.
   In a specifically Caribbean context, this site of overlapping discourses
marks a creative instability, a paradoxical indeterminacy that reflects and em-
bodies the ambiguous geopolitical realities of the region. The complex struc-
tures of Caribbean society, encompassing as they do polyvalent issues of race,
politics, history, and culture, point to the emergence of a community marked
and striated by the traces of diverse indigenous and colonial practices, whose
origins lie in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the New World.
   More fundamentally, what is at issue here is the intrinsic ambiguity of the
term "creole" itself, given its key role in the construction and maintenance of
a formal contextualization of cultural metissage that will successfully contest
the dominant hegemonies of the colonial encounter. As a form of decolo-
nization, metissage functions on the discursive level to destabilize the "nor-
malizing" mastery of authoritarian discourses, elaborating through the subtle
ambiguities of its intervocalic structure an alternative to the strictures of the
colonial double bind. By interrogating the fixed set of assumptions that have
historically governed the conceptual singularities of ethnic and cultural
"representability," these overlapping domains of difference ultimately renego-
tiate the intersubjective and collective nexus of values and constituencies that
underlie our vision of self and Other, producing an affiliative engagement
with the ambiguities of experience that help to define these polymorphous
communities in the (post)modern world.
   The creative ambivalence that locates this new world of creolized possibili-
ties can serve as an apt figure for the metis subject herself, whose identitarian
experience of multiple subject positions tropes and transforms the customary
boundary between racial and cultural categories. This capacity to confound
the strictures of an either/or division in fact engages a critical transformation of




1 44 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


these categories to the contradictory negations of neither/nor, exposing colon-
ialism's false opposition of cultural traits and its unsettling relocation of these
anxieties of cultural difference, but at the same time opening up strategic new
vistas of social and cultural production. Such a double gesture goes beyond
initiatory concepts of cultural division and makes of the mulatta a polyvalent
sign which, as Hortense Spillers points out, "has no personhood, but locates in
the flesh a site of cultural and political maneuver" (1987:183). This strategic
location of the categories of the creole in the interstices of signification is a
signal, transformative contingency whose sundry implications must now be
mapped and explored.
   It is perhaps not only appropriate but critically important that the post-
colonial subject produced by this plurality of cultural universes inscribes the
trace of her or his difference in the space of this very "in-betweenness" from
which its interstitial identity seeks to emerge. For if, at bottom, as Henry Louis
Gates Jr. argues, "every black canonical text is . . . 'two-toned' or 'double-
voiced"' (1984:3), these instances of intrinsic intervocality define the principal
space within which alternative models of identity may be elaborated, models
which themselves may also (re)trace internal patterns of oppositionality across
the site of the collective.
   Between the subjective and cultural divisions engendered by metropolitan
domination of the DOM-TOM, and the discrepancies and disparities of exile
within the domain of the metropole itself, the pluralisms of the imagined in-
terstitial community are simultaneously contested and resited by the double
displacements that mediate between Subject and (m)Other, between oppos-
ing dualities of alterity and autonomy. The key question of identity formation
within a context of cultural and communal pluralism opens up critical issues
of discourse and modernity, given that, as Stuart Hall suggests in his Introduc-
tion to Questions of Cultural Identity, "identities are never unified and, in late
modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but mul-
tiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, dis-
courses, practices and positions" (1996:4). It is this intrinsic complexity that
undergirds issues of identity in global contexts of multiculturalism and post-
colonialism that must, in turn, necessarily inform the narrative interrogation
of a creolized cultural pluralism.
   The attempt to create, and to define, new paradigms of social and national
identity must confront these critical antinomies of difference. Creole identity
patterns will draw on these polysemic patterns of positionality to generate new




L'Autre qui danse / 145


codes of cultural inscription, mapping a critical intersection between multi-
plicity and postcolonial articulations of alterity; as Hall continues, "Identities
are constructed through, not outside, difference" (1996:4). In this way, issues of
globalization and fragmentation are resited and reinscribed; by demystifying
the ambiguities of the present, they expose the binary artificiality of borders
and boundaries that impose the antithetical strictures of an either/or contrari-
ety. As a way of contesting what Frangoise Lionnet calls "this discord between
a particular idealized racialized identity and the realities of the postcolonial
world" (1995:96), novelists like Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie open up the frag-
mented and discontinuous world of the subaltern subject. By sketching through
the pluralisms and ambiguities of its multivalent modernities new, discursive
solutions to the alternating codas of dependency and dislocation, these ex-
tremes which have historically demarcated the conflictual, emblematic space
of metissage now set as a strategic site of subjective renegotiation.


L'Autre qui danse: Exile and Identity

Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie, a professor of classics at the Martinique campus of
the Universite des Antilles et de la Guyane, published her novel L'Autre qui
danse in 1989,1 after growing up in both France and Martinique and returning
to her homeland of Martinique after completing her studies in classics at the
Sorbonne. Although the more "successful" of the two metis sisters whose sub-
jective strategies are explored in her novel traces a similar formative path-
Matildana is in fact a graduate student at the Sorbonne-Rehvana appears to
reject such alliances in her search for cultural "authenticity," and it is precisely
this question of the multivalency and malleability of boundaries and identities
that the novel sets out to interrogate. Indeed, the novel itself articulates an
important evaluation of the (im)possibilities of interstitial identity for the in-
habitants of the DOM-TOMS as they appear through the symbolic prism of exile
and metissage.
   On a primary level, Rehvana-the sister whose ultimate death by way of a
(re)turn to a self-imposed exile in Martinique to (re)integrate herself into an
Antillean tradition and way of life provides the basic armature of the plot-is a
woman whose lack of rootedness in the Parisian society where she has lived
since early childhood drives her to behavioral and psychological extremes
even before her turn to tradition. She traces a subjective trajectory whose com-
plexities and contradictions incarnate, in Richard Burton's words, "that condi-




146 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tion of doubleness and dichotomy to the utmost limits of its capacity to con-
fuse, torment and fecundate" (1992:186).
   Her peripatetic search for identity is inscribed in her nominal inscription in
the root reve; thus "Reve-ana's" unsettled handle on la vie quotidienne com-
bines with an overwhelming sense of fragmentation and dependence, visible
as early as the uncanny plurality of narrative voices discernible in the novel's
aptly named "Promonologue," to engender a desire for integration and au-
thenticity that she seeks to fulfill through a number of convoluted and contra-
dictory encounters. In this brief but critical opening section, the text initially
locates her as being subject to an ongoing subjective and discursive fragmenta-
tion; she speaks but has no interlocutor, receives no response and is quite evi-
dently separated from any localizable milieu and from the Others who inhabit
it. "She is perfectly willing to be his wife, she wants to be one of them, but not
at this price! . . . 'I don't wish to be marked!' . . . But I am awake; their drug has
no effect on me. . . . However, Rehvana is far from the horrifying discovery she
has just made" (11-13). Through this series of short, staccatto, almost aggressive
phrases, shifting imperceptibly from free indirect discourse, to direct speech,
to internal monologue, to omniscient narration, Rehvana's fragmented
positionality and interstitial, unlocalizable perspective are highlighted. Fur-
ther, since this episode chronologically follows her escape from the the Fils
d'Agar-an extremist cult of displaced Antilleans whose questionable attempts
to erase the traces of their francitd can be summed up by their abortive attempt
to blow up the Centre Pompidou-and since the moment of her imprison-
ment at their hands will be recounted later, this temporal displacement of the
discourse serves only to deepen the sense of estrangement that reader and
character must both now share.
   In Postcolonial Representations, Frangoise Lionnet suggests in a nuanced
reading of L'Autre qui danse that strategic and subjective alternatives to the
master narratives of Caribbean colonialism are what novelists like Dracius-
Pinalie "offer through their implicit critique of the passivity of their heroines."
At the same time, however, it should be noted that what the oppositional cast-
ing of Rehvana and Matildana accomplishes, at least in part, is "a new way of
denouncing the illusion through which the return to the past and physical
suffering can play a mediating role in the search for authenticity" (1995:91). In
this way, it can be seen that Rehvana's characteristics of passivity and malaise
are symptomatic of her insistence upon an illusory absolute, alienating her in
succession from her counterparts, beginning with the group of mainly




L'Autre qui danse / 14i


Martinican mulattoes who should constitute an initial site of metropolitan
affiliation for her alterity. Yet her refusal of this identitarian refuge increases
exponentially, articulated through insistent feelings and moments of displace-
ment that are themselves formulated in the centripetal terms of free indirect
discourse: "My God! How she would love to be elsewhere! She would like to
scream at them that she was not in her place" (20). The centrality of this idea
of place, with its corollaries of subjective location and definition, draws on the
geographic and cultural difference between France and Martinique to con-
struct a world within a world, a space of apparent belonging which itself main-
tains its separateness from the larger cultural spaces that surround it, a sense
of difference that is ultimately the product of a double dis-location from the
communal institutions of Paris and Fort-de-France.
   The critical textual inscription of the increasingly ubiquitous ndgropolitain,
the immigrant who remains marginalized from both the departmental and the
metropolitan worlds, re-presents these inscriptions of exile and subjectivity.
Those like Rehvana's boyfriend, Jeremie, have only tenuous connections to
what is now only the land of their parents' birth and form a doubly disjoined
category of their own; "born in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, of immigrant
Guadeloupean parents, he [Jeremie] can only perceive the Antilles through
the beat, Malavoi and Kassav, codfish fritters and punch, and Guadeloupe and
Martinique meant nothing to him but a pleasant folklore, none of which he
denied, but he displays his beautiful black skin with no complexes or bitterness
through the streets of Paris and the corridors of the HEC" (30). Here, the
somewhat ironic tone of distanciation that reduces cultural authenticity in
exile to folkloric traces of food and music simultaneously subjects Jeremie and
his counterparts to the transitive terrain of intersubjectivity, dispersing them
into an identitarian void that becomes the dominant designation of their differ-
ence.
   In these terms that evoke the critical paradoxes of cultural adaptation, the
vacating of paradigms of collectivity and collaboration construct a forgetting of
the terms of blackness, one that denies Jeremie even the stigmata of identity
and removes him from the patent possibilities of recognition. "Jeremie had
never known either fear or shame because of his deep black skin, nor any
personal disgust when looking into the mirror, nor any lowering of his curly black
head before the world, nor rage, nor resentment, nor feelings of injustice, by all
appearances, nor an irrational camouflaging of the smells of the hold and exile
which neither oceans nor centuries had washed out of his skin" (31; emphasis




148 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


mine). This relationship to the mirror recalls Jacques Lacan's notion of alien-
ation inscribed in the mirror stage; it marks the subject's intrinsic alienation
from itself, deriving mastery and unification from an illusory external image:
"The mirror stage is a drama . . . which manufactures for the subject . . . the
succession of the phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image. . . to
the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with
its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development" (1977:4). What is
striking, however, is the absence of these alienating structures from Jeremie's
overt psychic makeup; indeed, despite his overdetermination by patterns of
cultural alterity, he appears to reflect nothing recognizable, whether positive
or negative, into the mirror at all. Literally caught in the interstices of opposing
cultural systems, Jeremie represents the unnameable impossibility of cultural
location, that point of intersection between the dominant and the
marginalized where subjectivity is effectively erased; he is a victim of the
fictions and realities of a doubled social inscription that renders him fully nei-
ther self nor Other. Instead of the initial category of ineluctable duality pro-
duced by the subject's identification with the (m)Other-a paradigm of metro-
politan misrecognition, in the postcolonial context, that produces a subjective
fragmentation which may, as we shall see, be much more applicable to Reh-
vana -his innocuous sense of self seems to have neither other nor counterpart
through which to accomplish his self-definition. Jeremie's critical lack of a
self-image, of a stable subject position that is the product of a functioning
cultural constituency, ultimately revokes his cultural potential, rendering him
an unavailing subjective site that is in excess of the sum of the "parts" of differ-
ence. This prevents Rehvana, in her turn, from participating through or with
him in a meaningful, foundational sociocultural framework that will endow
her with subjective and agential significance, and that she can feasibly call her
own.
   The problem of double cultural displacement that Jeremie "successfully"
confronts is one that must be faced by all ndgropolitains: the binary oppositions
that stem from continuing to integrate oneself into and functioning within a
dominant metropolitan French culture, while maintaining an identitarian
inscription in the differential, communal culture represented by the poly-
semic space of the DOM-TOM. Born and raised in Paris, the son of 6migr6 mu-
latto parents from Guadeloupe, Jeremie has known only the metropolitan cul-
ture of the city; the reality of his parents' homeland remains a distant,
inaccessible dream, made present only on the discursive level, through verbal-




L'Autre qui danse / 149


ized reminiscences and iconic traces of a displaced cultural production. Nei-
ther totally French nor completely Antillean, Jeremie is a curiously vacuous
hybrid; theoretically, perhaps, one might expect him either to partake in the
great French phantasm of assimilation, becoming a subject who consciously
articulates the mantra "nos ancetres, les Gaulois," or to acknowledge and act
upon the disjunctures of his difference. But paradoxically, both the place and
situation of his birth-although of Antillean extraction, he is also literally a
Parisian born to French nationals-appear to interact disjunctively with the
inherited double displacements of an 6migr6 belonger now internally exiled
from the periphery to the center.
   Jeremie appears to re-present rather the absurdities and absences of the
neither/nor; his tenuous links to an unknown culture to which he can yet lay
claim, combined with his seemingly untroubled assimilation into French
metropolitan culture, represent something less than the sum of these unequal
parts, a space of in-betweenness whose transparency is ultimately, at bottom,
more conflictual than commensurable. Interestingly, it is Rehvana who sees
most clearly through the veneer: "In any case, Jeremie, you just can't under-
stand this kind of thing; the only thing that interests you is to conduct your
pathetic little assimilated life, and be swallowed and digested; so you can't
even see that you are nothing but a whitewashed blackman, socialized and
shameful" (27). It is this paradoxical lack of conflict by which Jeremie is
figured, the critical absence of slippage between his self-projection and the
image he perceives in the mirror, that renders him almost but not quite Other,
an inadequate approximation of the authoritarian anxieties of the metropoli-
tan culture in which he participates.
   Thus, then, her affiliation with the Fils d'Agar; the displaced, deceptive
family structure that the closed composition of the group re-presents is meant
to (re)construct for Rehvana the sense of authenticity, affiliation, and accep-
tance to which she somehow still remains a stranger. Yet her choice of this
alternative space of subjective inscription turns out to be a singularly unimagi-
native one. Marginalized itself, the group employs a conflictual strategy that
effectively places its members on the borderlines even of the multiple
identitarian modalities of the metropole; an association with the members of
the Fils d'Agar can do no more than exacerbate Rehvana's already acute sense
of alienation.
   The impossibility of the Ebonis-Vrais-Fils-d'Agar serving as an adequate
sheltering space for Rehvana's fragmented subjectivity has more to do with the




150 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


double displacement of the group within the metropolitan social structure
than with her own sociocultural dualities and insufficiencies. For example, the
primary symbolic paradox that emerges from the group's inception is the insis-
tent slippage between who its members are and what they seek to represent.
Despite their claims to radicalism and cultural purity, ostensibly authentic
representatives of African identity, the Ebonis are in fact displaced Antilleans;
"Diop, Abdoulaye, Babacar and the others-whose Christian names were
Jean-Loup, Marc and Thierry" (30)-progressively proceed to alienate both
metropolitan whites and those Africans in whose name they articulate terrorist
strategies of cultural contestation.
   Interestingly, within the nominal framework of the Ebonis is a complex
construct that locates both the referential blackness that ebony traditionally
inhabits, as well as phonetic traces of groups of runaway slaves, in particular
the "Boni," or Aluku maroons, who successfully contested the tyrannies of
slavery in British, French, and Dutch Guiana (now, respectively, Guyana, "la
Guyane frangaise," and Suriname). Given that both Rehvana and the Ebonis
are of Antillean origin, the primary element that separates them is the same
mark of difference that separates her from Jeremie; while she was born in
Martinique and now lives a metropolitan existence in a form of self-imposed
exile, the tenuous connection between the group and the Antilles -albeit one
that they effectively renounce and deny-is the fact that they are in reality
second-generation negropolitains, who have never set foot in their parents'
homeland and who speak an artificial, imperfect creole. "They suddenly hid
themselves behind their clumsy, difficult Creole, a banana Creole learned
more or less on the sidewalks of Barbes-for they had never set foot in the
Antilles, not a single one" (23). The question of the linguistic role of creole in
the construction of an effective subjective identity is an important one, and is
an issue to which we shall return. For the present, however, let us pursue the
devolution of the double displacements of the Ebonis onto the recalcitrant
subjective structures of Rehvana.
   Unlike their counterpart, Jeremie, whose identitarian reflection in the mir-
ror is apparently absent, the Ebonis, through the prism of their desire, see in
the mirror the trace of the African Other, locus of an ideal ethnic and cultural
purity that simultaneously reinscribes the bipolar axes of the colonial self/
Other conundrum. Ironically, however, they are rejected by the very cultural
body in whose name they speak, framing themselves within a conflictual strat-
egy of self-definition. They manage somehow to simultaneously alienate both




L'Autre qui danse / 151


the white and black axes of France's increasingly diverse metropolitan culture;
"there had been increasing conflicts with the purebred Africans, the non-
mixed ones who carried authentic passports from compromised Africa, of
whom the least aggressive allowed himself to ignore with a majestic disdain
these enlightened Ebonis" (57). Ironically, in this reversal the issue of
(non)metissage becomes the final arbiter of the specter of authenticity, placing
the paradigm of an africanitd of "pure souche" at odds with the modernities of
the metropole, while eliding the incommensurable multiplicities of a bur-
geoning creole culture. Doubly disengaged as they are from both the Other
and the counterpart, disenfranchised by canonical extremes of both ideologi-
cal camps, the Fils d'Agar frame through the depth of their isolation the impos-
sibility of a collective experience of refuge or sanctuary that will allow Rehvana
to reappropriate a composite identitarian experience grounded in stability and
self-recognition.
   At the same time, however, Rehvana herself articulates through this series
of alienated actions a pressing condition of deficit and dependency that, as we
shall see, plays a cardinal role in the unfolding of her race-based dualism.
   It is precisely Rehvana's background as a matisse, as "a historic mulatress
with slight aristocratic ties" (i8), that lies at the heart of the diverse disjunc-
tures and divisions that she attempts, unsuccessfully, to confront and correct
throughout the course of the novel. These sociocultural tensions and teleolo-
gies of the intrinsically ambivalent aftermath of the DOM-TOM, and whose
complex implications we have explored on the thematic and discursive levels
in previous novels, are here translated to the psychological level of a split sub-
jectivity whose disturbing divisions are grounded in a racial and a geopolitical
duality. Here, the constant challenge will be to articulate a generative sense of
creolization out of an ethnocultural experience of metissage. What sets
Rehvana apart from the compulsive contradictions of her fellow Caribbean
exiles, like Jeremie and the Fils d'Agar group, is the fact that she, like her sister
Matildana, was born in the Antilles; both were formed by that paradoxical
difference-within-sameness that is the ambivalent corollary of departmental-
ization, and both are still inhabited by an ethnocultural interstitiality that sees
"her native but still foreign Fort-de-France" (i8) as a doubled identitarian
space of inscription, with which a cardinal cultural contact must be re-estab-
lished at all costs. The sisters' (re)negotiation of the binary boundaries that
separate metropole from department, and their respective attempts to turn
these discursive and subjective ambiguities into transformative patterns of plu-




12 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ralism, emphasize the problematic of the interstitial impasse that is symboli-
cally recuperated by Rehvana's doomed but insistent search for a redemptive
racial authenticity, and her sister's transformative, enthusiastic embrace of her
own multiple modernities-divergent paths whose opposition between m6-
tissage and creolization is mediated through the connective counterpoint of
the creole culture of their native Martinique.


Exile and Metissage

The double nature of Rehvana's sociocultural situation is a rather specific one,
and it both reflects and refracts the complex shades of signification that beset
the extremes of exile that confront so many Antilleans both at home and
abroad. Indeed, from one perspective, community identity has been fostered
and expanded in both locations through the postdepartmentalization wave of
migration that took thousands of French Caribbean subjects to the metropole
after 1946; the postwar phenomenon of anglophone Caribbean migration to
Britain and North America in the 1950s and 196os traced a similar parabola of
physical and cultural displacement. These transplanted subjects transferred
with them to the former colonial capitals their indigenous patterns of cultural
practice, giving rise to a form of transnational identitarian affiliation that in-
creasingly influences both the shape and performance of popular culture-
particularly in the areas of music, film, television, drama, dance, and fash-
ion-in those metropolitan centers that now serve as axes of association. Yet
such phenomena of recolonization, in which the imperial metropole is in its
turn made subject to the paradoxes and pluralities of the Other, come at a
price; the realities of their exile are relative but permanent. The sense of dis-
placement that Rehvana experiences is indicative of the persistent historical,
geopolitical, and cultural distance that separates France from its Others, and
that insists upon the recognition and inscription of an inescapable alterity that,
as Frantz Fanon has pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks, finds its origins in
long-standing perceptions of difference grounded in notions of race and place:
"But in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am given no chance. I am
overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the 'idea' that others have
of me but of my own appearance" (u16). This ineluctability of the racial
marker, or, more precisely, the place of its splitting, re-cites the hierarchies of
the colonial encounter; its misapprehension will act in conjunction with her




L'Autre qui danse / 153


exile to become the generative ground of Rehvana's double displacement and
subsequent (re)turn to tradition.
   The double perspective that guides or drives these protagonists is simulta-
neously recuperated by their double inscription in the interstices of race and
gender; the ineluctable identitarian impositions that are the product of racial
overdetermination marginalize the creole siblings of this novel through the
indeterminacy of their metissage as well as through the otherness of their ines-
capably biracialized femininity. The resulting double bind tends to exacerbate
the already split and splintered uncertainties of racial and cultural identity,
with the apparent impossibility of the successful synthesis of these categories
for the subject leading to the temporary valorization of one category over the
other as a possible solution. As Paul Gilroy has cogently suggested in Small
Acts, when "racial identity appears suddenly impossible to know reliably or
maintain with ease, the naturalness of gender can supply the modality in
which race is lived and symbolized" (7). Can this formulation account for the
subjective trajectory traced by Rehvana? Does she in fact attempt to come to
terms with herself as a female creole subject by suffering the traditional subjec-
tions of the regional modalities of gender? In the incessant redoubling and
splitting of the ties between sister and sibling, home and exile, DOM-TOM and
metropole, biraciality and biculturality, the oppositional paths traced by
Dracius-Pinalie's creole protagonists ultimately will engender alter/native per-
spectives on the pitfalls and possibilities intrinsic to an effective elaboration of
Caribbean female subjectivity.


Misrecognition and Unbelonging

The complex subjective dilemma that Dracius-Pinalie presents for our perusal
is, in a certain sense, the culmination of previously inscribed patterns of femi-
nine disjuncture, those archetypal attributes of an experiential alienation that
abound so readily in Caribbean literature of feminine expression. The para-
digm of double colonization to which the women of the region historically
have been subjected produces what Marie-Denise Shelton has called "a differ-
ent 'knowledge' of being Haitian, Martiniquan, or Guadeloupean. . . . femi-
nine writing tends to expose conflicts and mutilations that characterize the
being-in-the-world of women in the Caribbean" (1990:346-47). The result of
this conflictual relationship to a masculinized world of simultaneous domina-





154 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tion and disjuncture produces patterns of dispossession and degradation that
tend toward thematic re-presentations of the disintegration of the feminine
self. Primary among the symptoms of affective disorder are patterns of madness
and withdrawal, of silence, solitude, and suicide that trace the paradox of spiri-
tual deterioration and physical survival that follows the deprivation of identity
and the dissolution of subjective coherence. These narratives of the Carib-
bean's pervasive mal fdminin have been produced by such authors as Michele
Lacrosil and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, and it receives perhaps its most notorious
treatment in Mayotte Capecia's Je suis martiniquaise (1948).2
   Of interest here, however, is a narrative and psychosocial phenomenon that
Shelton identifies and terms autophobia. Drawing on psychologist Erik
Erikson's work in the area of shame, Shelton explores how the ultimate effects
of this self-hatred and desire for invisibility clearly become gender-marked in
the appropriation of these tensions to a context of Caribbean female subjectiv-
ity.3 Her contextualization of autophobia draws on an extract from Michele
Lacrosil's novel Cajou (1961), where the female protagonist is consumed by
anguish, self-doubt, and a desire for invisibility. But it is the explanation of her
dilemma advanced by Cajou herself that so interestingly illuminates the argu-
ment advanced by Erikson: "When a little girl discovers, in the dim light of her
experience, that all the ugliness of the world has gathered in the mirror she
consults, instead of viewing herself as a monster, she at first directs her anger at
the mirror" (30; emphasis mine). The implications of this interaction of fiction
with the psychoanalytic phenomenon of autophobia for the Caribbean female
subject together frame the argument that I now want to address.
   At first glance, it would appear that the subject's ineluctable involvement
with the images generated by her interaction with the mirror must result in a
self-directed anger. Such an internally driven form of resentment does create
the appearance of avoiding the aura of an unnameable monstrosity by redirect-
ing the terms of the displacement into a schema of self-blame. But upon closer
inspection it becomes increasingly clear that the target of this specular redirec-
tion must in fact be the image of the (m)Other, the displaced double of this
already alienated subject. For, as Lacan reminds us in the Ecrits, the symbolic
matrix of the specular image tends to "situate the agency of the ego, before its
social determination, in a fictional direction" (2). In other words, it is this very
misrecognition that ultimately (re)locates this subjectivity as a fictional con-
struct; the resulting crisis of ambivalence and alienation is engendered by the
mirror image, since, as Kaja Silverman's gloss on Lacan shows us, "to know




L'Autre qui danse / 155


oneself through an external image is to be defined through self-alienation....
It loves the coherent identity which the mirror provides. However, because the
image remains external to it, it also hates that image" (1983:158). Seen in these
terms, then, the displacement from self to re-presented Other (re)traces the arc
from department to metropole, building a bridge that inscribes these protago-
nists within the terms of a sort of "dualized subjectivity," a doubling of the
subjective matrix that draws its polysemic, oppositional patterns from the
subject's intrinsic fragmentation. But it is within this differential dualism, this
world of seemingly infinite dislocation and disjuncture, that a generic "double
colonization" also engenders a perpetual distance between the subject and the
object of its desire, producing a multipartite alienation that is seemingly the
ineluctable domain of the female Caribbean postcolonial subject.
   Given the inescapable context of cultural multiplicity and geopolitical
doubleness that constitutes the functional framework of the French Carib-
bean experience, an alienated femininity that assumes an identitarian
identification with opposed subject positions renders this female postcolonial
subject an iconic re-presentation of the very paradoxes that structure and stri-
ate the social space she inhabits and of which she is a product. For if the in-
scription of Caribbean femininity inherited from colonial discourse-in
whose terms the economy of colonized woman was first circulated and cir-
cumscribed-turns upon furthering stereotyped figures of enclosure, of
subordinacy, of inadequacy and alienation, in short, upon being not even that
which the colonized male is not, then a discourse of feminine postcolonial
identity for the Caribbean must begin by reframing and transforming these
regional resonances of feminine fragmentation. The turning of these dualities
to the deconstruction of monolithic models of womanhood must address the
"double unbelonging" of women who inhabit a Caribbean creole context.
And it is here that the critical difference signified by the multiplicities of the
matisse finally comes into its own.
   In Woman Version, an analysis of West Indian fiction by women, Evelyn
O'Callaghan remarks upon the pervasive nature of the "alienating, neo-colo-
nial middle-class world" of the Caribbean woman (70), a world riven by
conflicts of class, culture, gender, and language. The paradoxes and dualities
of the relation to the metropole allow us to postulate a number of penetrating
parallels that impact the female subject caught in the neocolonial departmen-
talization strategy operated by France, reflecting the attendant dualities of the
British imperial colonialism that O'Callaghan so trenchantly analyzes. The




156 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


presence of these multiple models of class, color, and political allegiance that
result in the articulation of an artificial economy of choice tends to impose a
telling polarization upon the perspective of these female postcolonial subjects,
generating a pattern of mimesis that O'Callaghan sums up as "conflicting gen-
der roles from which she must choose"; the subject's subsequent acquiescence
to the linear disjunctions of this model results in patterns of "doubleness, self-
estrangement, [and] a loss of sense of self" (70). Yet, at the same time, it is
important to note that these externally driven impositions of division, exclu-
sion, and subjection, from a cultural and subjective point of view, mark pre-
cisely the sorts of oppositional ambiguities that are recuperated in the figure of
the matisse. However, by creatively recuperating, expanding, and re-citing the
influence of such bipolar sites of alienation, these complex subjects can in-
scribe difference by interrogating the diverse, conflicting paths that an intersti-
tial neocolonialism imposes upon this latent postcolonial femininity. And so it
is by bringing this complex set of moves full circle that we are able to return to
the network of cultural, geopolitical, and subjective complexities signified in
Dracius-Pinalie's text through the paths taken by the siblings Rehvana and
Matildana.
   Together, these sisters signify a complex web of contradiction and recogni-
tion that contests and relocates the series of assumptions attaching to the issues
of exile, biculturality, bilingualism, and femininity in the French Caribbean.
The parameters of this conflicted relationship that is the bane of departmental
francophone culture are marked by the very questions of assimilation and ac-
culturation, of the absence of a stable sociocultural position and the paradox of
exiled presence in the heart of the metropole that define these Martinican
sisters. The constant sense of displacement and lack of belonging that ener-
vates Rehvana's metropolitan existence eventually engenders her return to
Martinique, setting in motion a tragic trajectory that ultimately ends in a vi-
cious cycle of pregnancy, poverty, disgrace, and death. Yet, on the other hand,
her sister Matildana's relative success at the process of sociocultural integra-
tion, first as a student at the Sorbonne, then, following her own return to her
homeland, as an engaged teacher and journalist, raises critical questions con-
cerning the divergent paths and possibilities produced by the dynamics of cul-
tural authenticity. As French Caribbean female subjects, inscribed as opposi-
tional signifying systems that renegotiate the relative failure and success of
cultural coherence and cultural pluralism, this conjoining through the polyva-




L'Autre qui danse / 15;


lent social structures that link these intrinsically multiple subjective sites is
recuperated and refigured through the shifting, interstitial space of the metis.
   This inherent multiplicity allows the figure of the metis to encompass the
far-flung diversities of a postcolonial subjectivity for the francophone Carib-
bean, serving as a metaphor for the sweeping range of ethnic, cultural, and
political possibilities that frame the paradoxical realities of the Caribbean
diaspora, and of the domiens as borderless imagined community. In this re-
gard, it is interesting to note that a latent ambiguity concerning the role and
positionality of women has historically informed Caribbean literature, creat-
ing a thematic and discursive complexity that increasingly compounds the
nexus of national identity. As Simon Gikandi points out in Writing in Limbo,
"To consider the question of gender and subjectivity in modernist discourse is
also to confront the ambiguous role women play in the construction of na-
tional identity. . . . the end of colonialism does not rescue women from their
historical confinement-they still remain modernism's 'other,' excluded or
marginalized from the signifying systems of the new nation" (197-98). By ex-
ploiting the latent displacements and dualities that simultaneously separate
the symbolic schema sketched by each of these sisters, and yet paradoxically
also join them into an intricate figure of fragmented feminine difference, we
may come to a fuller understanding of the composite and transformative web
of signification woven by these contradictions of exile and integration,
ethnicity and positionality, in Dracius-Pinalie's relocation of the boundaries of
francophone feminine subjectivity.


Return, Revival, Resistance

The presence that most effectively mediates the transition in the novel from
the "Chant premier" to the "Chant second"-marking the moment of Reh
vana's memorable return to Martinique-is the figure of Eric, an irresistible
young man she meets at a party and with whom she pursues a relationship and
suddenly and inexplicably decides to return home. Confronted with this
dominating and debilitating presence, she finds herself "defenseless and with-
out will" (8o), trapped by an overwhelming masculinity and a complete loss of
self-control: "Rehvana has no idea where to go. . . . She has never felt such
pain, such shame and such confusion. She is ashamed to be there, blushing
and frozen in place" (76). Transfixed, she can do nothing, say nothing, but




158 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


continue to suffer his domination in silence: "She hates him as he continues to
dominate her with his height, his haughty look, and his self-assurance" (76).
Indeed, she finds herself unable even to dance. By contrast, her sister, Matil-
dana, in a symbolic precursor of their twin trajectories of displacement, seems
to be dancing herself into oblivion at the precise moment of Rehvana's deepest
confusion: "Matildana, dizzied, carried away, dances . . . in the exaltation of
her being" (74). By the party's end, Rehvana's life has taken a new and unfore-
seeable turn: "Inexplicably, a single glance, a single second had been enough
for Rehvana to make Eric the man of her life" (83). The oppositional axes of
their reactions to the musical expression of their cultural heritage -inscribing
them both between constraint and autonomy-set in motion the repeating
patterns of dualism and disjunction that define their divergent reactions to the
larger issues of departmental dependency and cultural authenticity at work in
the novel.
   This singular new path that Rehvana decides to follow with Eric is meant to
counter the pervading sense of exile and unbelonging that we have observed in
her behavior to this point. She will return to Martinique and reintegrate herself
seamlessly into the society; indeed, it will be as though she never left. If, how-
ever, as Gilroy has suggested, the modality of gender through which she at-
tempts to come to terms with herself as matisse is signified through her sub-
jection to and subsequent terrorization by Eric, then this choice certainly
constitutes an overt interrogation of the hierarchical pattern of gender rela-
tions and the destructive role played by a dominant masculinity in the (de)con-
struction of a valid, independent feminine identity in the Caribbean context.
   Rehvana's approach to accomplishing her double goal of subjectivity and
authenticity involves little questioning either of herself or of the categories she
has in view; rather, it is to adopt a strategy that, in a certain sense, is perception
based, and it is in the interstices of these gradations of appearance and reality
that her search ultimately loses its way. Her alienation has always been in
search of a mythic, overarching authenticity; from the beginning, "she wished
to be authentic, more authentic than those who had never been to the Other
Shore, and displayed her pretty little feet, the feet of a historic mulatress with
slight links to aristocracy, on the uncaring macadam of a Fort-de-France which
was both her birthplace and foreign to her" (i8). Already, Rehvana's unfamil-
iarity with the metropole is leading to the authenticity she seeks, while ignor-
ing the potential doubleness of the mulatresse historique that she embodies. As
a result, the Martinican capital of Fort-de-France remains an impenetrable




L'Autre qui danse / 159


paradox for her, simultaneously natale and yet dtrangere, its enigmatic identity
capable only of reflecting her own displacement.
   It is both striking and paradoxical that the contours of the native country-
side to which Rehvana wished so strongly to return appear so strange, if not
downright foreign, to her upon her arrival. Sights, smells, and sounds all seem
distant and unknown to this prodigal daughter: "The smell of ylang-ylang, the
caresses of frangipani, the violence of the red balisier, the dizzying sound of
Creole, the universal trembling at the scent of sweet sweet, Rehvana gathered
from all these gifts, piously, her inheritance, what was expected" (88). The day-
to-day aspects of island life are increasingly striking-"At Sainte-Therese, at
the entrance to the city, the traffic jam is monstrous, the heat infernal" (93) -
and even the architecture appears decidedly "unmetropolitan"-"All the huts
are in some way or another 'colonial'-but in such a modest way, in style
rather than in substance" (95). This supposed distinction between style and
substance, however, may well be a subconscious desire for a subliminal au-
thenticity engendered by Rehvana herself. For indeed, an inscription in this
particular desire becomes the motor of Rehvana's lifestyle once she settles in,
apparently driven to recuperate an almost mythical, idealist authenticity dis-
placed by her time in the metropole: "Rehvana left the hut hurriedly to take in
the washing she had spread out on the grass, faithful to the traditions of old-
time Antillean washerwomen.... A whole congregation of former beliefs, all
badly understood, badly overcome, has found a place through voluntary fervor
in the young Foyalaise of Paris, and controls her movements, gives rhythm to
her life, and inhabits her tormented nights" (99). The text leaves us in no
doubt here as to the implausibility of Rehvana's vision of "authenticity"; her
desire to return to the past, to the One, is, as we have already seen, doomed to
encounter only failure; this search for Glissant's moment of "Reversion" visu-
alizes an originary site of agency that will be forever ephemeral.
   In these terms, Rehvana's desire is effectively the desire of the Other, as she
is alienated and overdetermined by subjective structures that she imagines to
be those of the society in which she hopes to find herself. As a result she man-
ages only to reformulate the basis of her own alienation, since the codes and
practices she sees in her mind's eye no longer ground the society she left be-
hind.
   Her decision to forgo the luxury of modern conveniences, and to concen-
trate instead on eschewing technological progress and rediscovering national
dishes and condiments, marks in fact a fundamental misrecognition of the




16o / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


forces that give rise to the regional realities of exile and departmentalization.
For the (re)discovery of a true Caribbeanness does not lie in such trivial articu-
lations of consumption or self-sacrifice; by attempting to recreate the super-
ficial structures, sites, and sounds of a vanished colonial era, Rehvana responds
ultimately to the covert, sedulous demands of the Other when she should in
fact be seeking alternatives to them, exacerbating rather than apppropriating
the unspoken doubleness of the departmental dilemma.
   What takes place, instead, is that the complex, anomalous terms of the
Martinican relationship to the metropole remain completely unaddressed by
her; the cornerstone of this intrinsic cultural and political doubleness, of
which Rehvana's metissage is perhaps the ultimate symbol, remains aligned
along its metropolitan rather than its Antillean axis, the binaries of the subjec-
tive hybridity produced by the colonial encounter simply relocated rather than
resolved. Indeed, the very fact that "Rehvana had deliberately cultivated this
blind faith and this forced credulity . . . determined to be Antillean, to make
herself totally Antillean" (ioo-ioi; emphasis mine), renders this deliberateness
of her gestures a sign of the alienation and displacement she is attempting so
desperately to contest. Through her inability to come to terms with-and to
profit from-the pluralities of her own perspective and experience, Rehvana
effectively discounts the very multiplicity, born of the dilemma of her own
double inscription, that holds the greatest potential for transforming her
Martinican metissage. In this regard, then, the origins and peculiarities of the
drive for nativism that appears to occasion Rehvana's return to Martinique are
of critical importance; the terms, conditions, and contingencies of this return
instigate the disjunctions that separate Rehvana's ongoing metissage from
Matildana's assumption of the modernities of creolization.


Commensurability and Authenticity

The differences that separate these two sisters are of such cardinal importance
that they transcend the merely significant to approach the realm of the socio-
culturally symbolic. For the fact is that together Rehvana and Matildana repre-
sent the complex network of pluralisms and ambiguities that construct the
character of the Caribbean basin. The essence of their creoleness goes beyond
the interstitial individualism of skin color; at the critical ancillary conjunctions
of language, culture, class, and the ineluctable dualities of dom-tomisme, they




L'Autre qui danse / 161


inhabit the articulative ambivalences and polysemic possibilities that are sym-
bolically summed up by the intrinsic dissonances of their metropolitan exile.
On a primary level, then, the divergent symbolic directions of these siblings
suggest opposing conceptions of the greater imagined community that encom-
passes both the Caribbean and its diaspora; a subtle yet complex framework for
indigenous identity, a discursive inscription of a multivalent Caribbeanness
that simultaneously binds the French Caribbean to its metropolitan center
while still separating it from the vaunted unicity of the center's sense of
francitd. But on another, more abstract level, it is the depth and persistence of
Rehvana's drive to redefine herself, her assumption of the linearities of mis-
recognition by essentially renaming and reinscribing herself as an authentic
Martinican native, that open up new perspectives on feminine subjectivity and
creolization in an ambivalent postcolonial context, interrogating our fixed as-
sumptions of the function of class and ethnicity within the cultural framework
of the DOM-TOM.
   If Rehvana's ultimate goal is the rediscovery, or rearticulation, of her cul-
tural essence, then, on the face of it, her plunge into the Martinican peasantry
should theoretically provide the enabling conditions for the accomplishment
of this goal. Rehvana therefore appears to seek the literal exchange of one
identity for another, simultaneously surpassing the interstices that bind the
DOM-TOM to the metropole while bridging the binaries that define and divide
the bipolar categories of colonizer and colonized. But even beyond the hollow
politics of Reversion, how effective a counterfoil to the departmental politics
of division is this exchange of the modalities of class for those of race?
   Ultimately, Rehvana's error here is one of vision, the inability to fully com-
prehend the array of antinomies that undergirds the network of departmental
ambiguities within which she is inscribed. Her goal is to change the terms of
her social inscription by dis-placing its terrain; to move from rootless depart-
mental reject in exile at the margins of the metropole, to the comprehensive
certainty of a nativist position that excludes and negates the interstice by virtue
of its assumed authenticity. But it is precisely at this juncture that the inelucta-
bility of her error is to be located; since the ambivalence of the departmental
experience is itself founded upon an expedient extension of the colonial en-
counter, a rehearsal of old hierarchies of dominance, exclusion, and depen-
dence disguised as egalitarianism and inclusion, a simple shift in positionality
within the boundaries of a metropolitan domination of the DOM-TOM does




162 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


nothing to contest effectively the strictures of this determinedly bipolar rela-
tionship. Further, the assumptions that undergird such searches tend to be
grounded in the fabric of metropolitan patterns of alienation. As Robert Young
reminds us, "There can be no such nativist alternative history. . . . it is worth
pausing to consider . . . to what extent an 'alternative' simply represents the
narcissistic desire to find an other that will reflect Western assumptions of
selfhood" (199o:165). In the end, Rehvana is simply extending her inscription
in colonial binaries; neither her situation nor its proposed solution is effec-
tively problematized, so that the terms "authenticity," "metissage," and "peas-
antry" continue to structure a framework grounded in and bounded by an
ineluctable duality constructed and dominated by the metropole.
   This is what ultimately constitutes Rehvana's blindness; by engaging in a
posture that ultimately produces only a distinction without a difference, she
transforms neither the terms of her dependence nor the dualities of her subjec-
tivity. In any event, even a politics of identitarian exchange based on consider-
ations of class, as Rehvana visualizes it, would be equally ineffective at formu-
lating strategies of freedom able to articulate the complexities of a creole
culture. From the plantation to the H.L.M. (Habitations de Loyer Moder6),
from the bdkd (Caribbean creole white planter class) to the bourgeois, differ-
ences of class within the DOM-TOM have always been a function of the implicit
presence of colonial hierarchies; the principles of relative privilege and social
exclusion that have shaped these societies have inevitably extended the hege-
mony of the colonial principle of divide and rule.
   And so even the empyrean promises held out by the attempt to elude the
class struggle cannot bring the authenticities of antillanitd or crdolitd into be-
ing for this Antillean subject. Indeed, since such class concerns must function
within the neocolonialism of the departmental moment, the intersection of
class with the contingencies of colonialism engages only, as Ato Sekyi-Otu
points out, "a modulation of the exclusionary politics of the 'colonial con-
text,' the degree to which the dream of the colonized to 'take the place' of the
colonizer is partially consummated or hopelessly doomed to frustration" (1996:
159). Simply "going native," then-whatever that means-cannot produce a
functional identitarian framework for Rehvana; the essence of creoleness lies
outside the binary boundaries of race and class, a cultural composite con-
tinuously reconstructed by recognizing the liminal, polysemic postcolonial-
ity of the DOM-TOM. The idea of nativism itself, on which her search for
identity appears to depend, poses an alternative set of difficulties, raising issues




L'Autre quiddanse / 163


of cultural specificity whose implications are at the heart of creolization's mo-
dernity.
   Given its recent insurgency within the polysemic patterns of postcolonial
identity, the principle of creolization has increasingly characterized the sub-
jects and objects of contemporary cultural studies. Modernity, in turn, draws
upon a concatenation of political and cultural phenomena to inscribe an all
but intangible sense of ongoing newness, a drive for the disparate and the
disjunctive that has been succinctly defined by Paul de Man: "Modernity ex-
ists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of
reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that
marks a new departure" (1983:148). In these terms, what is most compelling
about the quest for modernity in a postcolonial context is its ineluctably dual
relation to both past and future; since its points of departure simultaneously
(re)inscribe the past upon which they draw, as Rey Chow writes, "Modernity is
ambivalent in its very origin . . . It must incessantly deal with its connection
with what precedes it . . . in the form of a destruction" (41; emphasis in the
original). Modernity, then, effectively (re)stages the confrontation between
the first and the third worlds that lies at the heart of contemporary postcolonial
theory and its corollary of cultural identity politics. And so these are the terms
within which the quest for authenticity practiced by Rehvana in this novel
rehearses the intrinsic ambivalences not only of the modernity of postcolonial
discourse but also of the attendant positionalities it is meant to inscribe.
   Both Rehvana and Matildana are, in a sense, two halves of a matching pair,
a dystopian duo marked most trenchantly, perhaps, by the stark contrasts that
define and demarcate their lives and that appear, on the surface, to restrain
them within the binary ambit of neocolonialism and metissage. These differ-
ences and contrarieties are all the more striking given that both siblings share
an ethnic and cultural background, an ineluctable metissage of ethnicity and
location that is augmented by their dual exile within the alienating confines of
the metropole. But where Rehvana encounters rejection, Matildana encoun-
ters acceptance; where the former suffers isolation, the latter finds inclusion:
and where Rehvana's world seems one that dooms her to failure, her rival
sibling progresses from success to success. It is this deliberate dichotomy be-
tween subject and counterpart, between these polar opposites who are yet so
much the same, that compels us to interrogate both the basis of Rehvana's
dissolution and the progressive path traced by her more successful sister. How,
then, does the latter's deeper inscription in the culture and society of the




164 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


metropole, and the tacit acceptance and transformation of its implicit divi-
sions that increasingly inscribe her in creoleness, play in the elaboration and
evolution of her success?


Assimilation and Alienation

The context through which Rehvana's sister Matildana is figured appears on
the surface to be one of assimilation to the values, practices, and traditions of
the metropole. However, we shall see that her metis subjectivity is equally
predicated on her acceptance of her ties to Martinique as well. On the one
hand, not only does Matildana achieve ascendancy by virtue of a thoroughgo-
ing attachment to metropolitan culture-as a graduate student in classics at
the Sorbonne, she epitomizes the very paradigm of traditional socioacademic
conservatism-the patterns through which this assimilation is practiced do
not, on the face of it, diverge from the historical norm of colonial/departmen-
tal migratory movements. Matildana's resolute absorption into metropolitan
life reverses the traditional hierarchy pitting department against metropole by
having her symbolize one of the more than 400,000 people of French West
Indian descent or origin currently resident on the French mainland, with
more that three-quarters of this figure resident in Paris and its environs. And if,
as one study has shown, this population stood at over 320,000 as early as 1982-
a figure more or less equal to the individual population of Guadeloupe or
Martinique, and nearly three times that of French Guiana-then Alain An-
selin's conclusion that "a third island is situated in the heart of Europe ... one
West Indian in three lives in France" (1990:110) is by no means an overstate-
ment of contemporary realities. The sociocultural complexities generated by
the population of this "third island," circulating as it does between department
and metropole, enlarge the concept of a regional diaspora and are of just as
much concern, perhaps, as the dislocation and dispossession that are the more
obvious signs of departmentalization's imagined community.
   These hybrid communities maintain a level of ties with and travel to their
homelands that effectively problematizes perceived notions of belonging, of
the difference between "home" and "away." As a result, there is also a doubling
of these sites of affiliation that blurs fixed notions of identity and erases the
distinction between positionality and place. As Richard Burton points out in
his introduction to French and West Indian, "Almost all French West Indian
families have members living in France. . . . The constant crossing of the




L'Autre quiddanse / 165


Atlantic tends to undermine the distinction between 'France' and the West
Indies" (12). Such social patterns ultimately have the effect of repositioning
and globalizing identity as a product of the departmental encounter itself; as
Anselin points out in his full-length study L'Emigration antillaise, "French
West Indians no longer migrate, they circulate" (266), their ceaseless, circular
movement creating a modernist nomadism where migrating metaphors of dif-
ference disturb the hierarchic assumptions of both center and periphery.
   The psychocultural chasm, then, that separates these siblings has its roots
in a migratory movement of Antillean peoples from margin to center, encour-
aged and developed through active bureaucratic efforts by France to increase
its own labor pool; the primal role played here by the state agency BUMIDOM
strongly marks the postdepartmental period but perhaps reached its zenith in
the decade of the 196os.4 As paradigmatic products of this migratory phenom-
enon, Rehvana's and Matildana's resemblance to and difference from each
other epitomize that "double consciousness" that tends to be manifested with-
in the colonial trace. But to see more clearly the extent to which these captious
coalitions of metropolitan exile intersect with the complex patterns of cultural
and subjective alienation drawn by this sibling rivalry, and to clarify the way in
which they inform and impact the structure of the narrative, we must exam-
ine more closely the terms in which Matildana herself confronts the multi-
layered terrain of the metropole and the compromises, if any, she is made to
accept.
   If the parabola of failure traced by Rehvana in the novel marks a simulta-
neous pattern of success for her sister Matildana, it is significant that these
differences are apparent from the opening moments of the narrative. Where
our first view of Rehvana underlines the fragmentation, pluralism, and alien-
ation that are the generative ground of her shifting subjectivity, when we first
encounter Matildana these patterns of progressive dissolution are notably ab-
sent; indeed, she appears to be firmly ensconced in the precepts of affirmation
and acceptance that lie at the opposite end of the subjective spectrum. The
contrast between them is a deliberately multivalent one, operating on a variety
of levels. As Frangoise Lionnet argues, "In contrasting the character of
Rehvana to that of her more reasonable and well-adjusted sister, L'Autre
sketches out a solution to the problems of identity. . . . Matildana represents
the self-possessed Caribbean woman, comfortable with her body and able to
negotiate the contradictions of her past and of her cultural and racial present"
(1995:99). Further, and perhaps most important, Matildana is marked not by




i66 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


the fragmented voices and visions, nor by the dis-ease or the need for recogni-
tion that beset her sibling, but by the golden glories of her Afro-Caribbean
metissage.
   Symbolically, when we first encounter her, she has gone to the hospital
along with Jeremie to help Rehvana after she has been locked in a trunk and
has refused to have her face tattooed, followed almost immediately by her
beating in the metro, all at the hands of Abdoulaye of the Ebonis: "Jeremie had
found an ally for himself in this endeavor: Rehvana's older sister, a big, healthy
girl with heightened Caribbean cheekbones . . . comfortable with her own
strangely polychrome self. . . ebony-colored along her long, unending hands,
covered with rings up to the curving nails, smoothly cinnamon-colored on her
arms, and light sapodilla, satiny apricot on her face" (39). There can be no
question here of the active articulation of Matildana's antillanitd: from her
"heightened cheekbones" which, significantly, are wholly "Caribbean," to the
multicolor of her polychromatic skin, inscribed and signified through the sym-
bolism of cinnamon and Caribbean sapodilla, she is totally at home in her
Caribbeanness and rejoices in the apparent polysemy of her ethnicity. She has
no need to search for a space to provide her with an identity, for she already
inhabits and embodies several spaces, and whether she is located in Paris or in
Fort-de-France, she incarnates its symbolism through her very being.
   It is important, indeed telling, that the narrative positions Matildana at the
virtual center of a maelstrom of multiplicity, providing her with an ethnic and
cultural identity that not only is beyond question, but which also allows her to
act as a protective and regenerative shield for her sibling; the creoleness that
she has adopted comes to the rescue, in a sense, when Rehvana's fails. For
Matildana, identity is grounded in the secret strata of a history whose polymor-
phous precepts stretch back through the mists of colonial time, and whose
lineage leaves Jeremie speechless: "At first he hardly knew what to say to this
girl, this moving wave, this vine, this incredible new beauty who brought to-
gether so many centuries, this magnificent contrasting harmony of all races
joined together" (39; emphasis mine). As the amalgamation and assimilation
of the cultural complexities and temporal discontinuities that make up the
Caribbean diaspora, Matildana is the fruition, the culminating point of a Car-
ibbean creoleness re-presented as a symbolic "harmony of contrasts."
   Yet above all, Matildana is at ease, comfortable and unconstrained in the
unbridled acceptance of the sociocultural plurality that this identitarian space
necessarily constructs. Indeed, not only does she symbolize the multiple mo-




L'Autre qui danse / i6;


dalities of Caribbean history, she personifies them: "In herself she set in oppo-
sition her striking profile from the Ganges shores . . . with her callipygian
stature of a Yoruba princess. A marvelous aberration of history, she blended it
without comment, her mixed blood. It was as if each race, each people had
added to her flesh everything within it which was most beautiful. There she was,
untouchable, a freed Pandora, solid in the confusion of her blood" (40; em-
phasis mine). As the text deliberately emphasizes the continental differences
that, paradoxically, come together to create Matildana's identity, it simulta-
neously stresses the pluralities of race and ethnicity whose confusion locates
and liberates her transcendent self-sufficiency. The product and progeny of
colonial practice, Matildana now re-presents that network of signification that
colonialism sought to foreclose but to which, paradoxically, it ultimately gave
rise: a polysemic subject whose deliberate disjunctures act as a corrective to
the presumed univocality of colonial discourse.
   From the outset, then, Matildana as a character is put into place as one who
inhabits and personifies the multiple materialities of Caribbean culture. But of
critical importance here is the fact that the basis of the polysemic creole sub-
jectivity that she so successfully embodies appears to be drawn on the symbols
and figures of racial difference. Indeed, the discourse is at pains to point out
that the multiple ethnicities of Matildana's background, those that provide the
subjective framework through which she is figured and by which she achieves
self-representation, are subsumed and summarized by the intrinsic complexi-
ties of her skin color. This conflation of blood and melanin that acts as a
signifier for the plural encounters of the Caribbean historical and cultural
experience is explicitly framed as the visible locus of Matildana's identity, the
site and symbol of her subjective strategy.
   It is therefore at this juncture that these patterns of textual signification
encounter the established myth of race as a verifiable biological category. The
argument is not a new one, and the notion that the external physical character-
istics upon which we depend for our superficial system of racial and ethnic
classification-a notion that reached its zenith in nineteenth-century French
metropolitan discourse with the publication between 1853 and 1855 of Count
Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'indgalitd des races humaines-has been re-
peatedly and effectively debunked and disproven by such critics and theorists
as Nancy Stepan, Claude Levi-Strauss, K. Anthony Appiah, and W. E. B. Du
Bois.5 Appiah, in this regard, in a well-known essay on the subject of Du Bois
and race, puts the argument well: "Given only a person's race, it is hard to say




i68 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


what his or her biological characteristics will be, except in respect of the
'grosser' features of color, hair, and bone" (1986:31). To grasp the obvious con-
clusion to be drawn here, one need not look much farther, "The truth is that
there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask 'race' to
do for us" (1986:35). And yet, if we accept as a primary premise the logic of this
racial argument, which is, in sum, that the concept of race cannot contain the
ethnic distinctions and coalescences of humankind, then it immediately ap-
pears to undermine the racialized basis for this textual re-presention of
Matildana's creole identity.
   But perhaps the issue we really need to interrogate is the role to be played by
the discursive re-presentation of nuances of pigmentation and skin tone in
such a context of creolized identitarianism. Further, and perhaps even more
important, is the fact that this issue is linked to the terms in which race itself is
inscribed in the text as a means of embodying both character and representa-
tion. For these twin terms to articulate the material totality of Caribbean his-
tory and culture that are located within Matildana's subjective space, both
siblings must be recognized as textual signs, as signifying vessels capable of
carrying a multitude of creole contexts. These sisters are more than simple
formulations of character; they embody and respond to the myriad patterns
and possibilities that together have shaped the multirelational essence of the
Caribbean creole experience. Seen in this way, Matildana's polychromatic
skin, the racial sign that identifies her as a matisse, functions as a signifier of
cultural pluralism, a coded re-presentation of the many historical encounters
that have produced this polysemic creole society. The very unlocalizability of
her racial heritage, functioning as a signifier of difference, is made to stand in
for the oppositions and possibilities of cultural change. As Appiah puts it,
"Where race works . . . it works as an attempt at a metonym for culture; and it
does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, or ideology" (1986:36;
emphasis in the original). In inscribing biology as metonym, then, this textual
re-presentation of creole polysemy through the racial complexities of ethnicity
and culture is effectively probed and problematized; Matildana is made to
inhabit the spaces of both self and Other while transforming them into a net-
work of commonality that is less than either of its primary axes yet effectively
more than both. This biologization of the creole experience, functioning pri-
marily as a signifying structure, works to present the identitarian complexities
of the region by preserving the conflictual traces of the historical encounters




L'Autre qui danse / 169


between civilizations that inaugurate the affiliative strategies marking the re-
gional present.
   This problematization of the historical and the cultural, which locates and
actualizes the warp and the woof of common experience that binds the region
together beneath the shifting sands of colonial history, both joins and separates
Matildana and Rehvana while articulating the themes of continuity and au-
thenticity that escape the latter. In fact, Matildana's double difference, from
Rehvana and from the binaries of the (neo)colonial Other, allows us to posit,
in a certain sense, her identitarian incarnation of Caribbean creoleness as a
practical example of identity production as it has been visualized by Stuart
Hall: "Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact,
which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of
identity as a 'production' which is never complete, always in process, and al-
ways constituted within, not outside, representation" (1994:392). Hall's vision
of identity formation in postcolonial societies paints an interlocking pattern of
divergence and commonality that is the core of a Caribbean framework of
signification: "This 'oneness,' underlying all the other, more superficial differ-
ences, is the truth, the essence, of'Caribbeanness,' of the black experience. It
is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate,
bring to light and express" (1994:393). Here, the presence of scare quotes de-
notes the conscious problematization of both oneness and its categorical oppo-
site of Caribbeanness, and this paradoxical pluralism thus becomes the basis of
a new grammar of nationness, in which the practical positioning of the subject
within a discourse of difference can frame the simultaneities of subjection and
rupture through which the Caribbean has been figured as "Other."
   It is by appropriating and transforming this Otherness into a site of affiliative
transcendence that Matildana ultimately re-presents the core of the Carib-
bean character; her inclusive positionality now initiates new strategies of cre-
ole recognition. As Hall sums up this process, "The rift of separation, the 'loss
of identity,' which has been integral to the Caribbean experience only begins
to be healed when these forgotten connections are once more set in place"
(1994:394). Through this play of difference within identity, the essential dou-
bleness of the Caribbean diaspora is repositioned and re-presented in terms of
Matildana's acceptance of her racial and cultural complexity, engendering a
multivalent subjective site which is itself further underscored by Rehvana's
misrecognition of its innate possibilities.




170 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


   This critical contrast that the text establishes between the siblings' differing
perspectives on the patterns of ethnicity and duality within which they are
both initially inscribed is thus in play from the outset, simultaneously marking
the identity of both sisters and determining the opposing paths upon which
they each embark. Importantly, the rootedness that is Rehvana's ultimate goal
is assumed, transformatively, by her sister and is already an integral part of her
social and psychological framework.
   This dissimilarity of perspective is quite apparent when the sisters attend a
dance party hosted by a young professional academic Afro-Caribbean couple.
Matildana has insisted that Rehvana go to the party, although she knows no
one there. One of the most significant aspects of the proceedings, excluding, of
course, Rehvana's encounter with Eric, and from a strictly sociological point of
view, is the ethnic and cultural diversity of the invitees; not only are the host
husband and wife from Cameroon and Martinique, respectively, we are told
that "it's true, there are all kinds of people, from France, from Spain, and
from everywhere-le gai Paris-Africans, people from the DOM-TOM, mixed
couples, a Pakistani woman who does't wear her sari and her French-German
husband, the woman from Abymes in Guadeloupe living with an upper class
guy, pale, dignified, and who listens, amused, and complicit" (71). Ill at ease in
this metis group of yuppies who delight in the diversity that provides them with
just the sort of identitarian affirmation that she so sorely lacks, Rehvana feels
abandoned and afraid. (Ironically, it is here that later, despite her sense of
isolation, Rehvana meets and bonds with Eric.) It is quite striking that while
Rehvana wanders the room in a state of deadly boredom, Matildana not only
feels completely at home but is immediately entranced and enraptured by the
insistent polyrhythms of the music.
   However she interprets the call of these Afro-Caribbean cadences, Ma-
tildana is drawn to respond; it is the sense of oneness that simultaneously
joins her to the music and to this metis, multicultural group of exiles that
inscribes her through involvement rather than isolation, and signals participa-
tion rather than withdrawal. This associative framework is signified in the text
through both movement and voice, "through African heat flowing through the
body, a heat that undoes, that leaps and drags her arms up as she cries out the
same OUEEE, as she submits, lawlessly, to the same chords" (72). What
Matildana responds to in fact is, in a sense, the call of hi/stories, the transmu-
tation of the slave rhythms whose call-and-response signaled community and
resistance into the transnational, cross-cultural cadences of zouk and calypso,




L'Autre qui danse / 171


whose polyvocality is the hallmark of Caribbean expression. Even here, her
capacity to distance herself from the intrinsic, isolating paradoxes of her own
academic pursuits does not go unremarked. "I'm talking about the night festi-
val. This is the same one which shook the chains, in the evening, on the plan-
tations; it can't be learned academically, and Matildana knows it. . . . tall,
shameless, in the glory of her being, here she is, taken over to the depths of her
self" (73-74). It is this bridging of the binaries that separate the world of the
DOM-TOM from the world of the metropole, an act that simultaneously diffuses
the disjunctures of race and place, history and culture, that ultimately sepa-
rates Matildana's world from the summary stalemate that is Rehvana's.
   For both sisters, then, the primary factor that grounds their respective sub-
jective fields is the play of difference. For Rehvana, this difference is intrinsi-
cally negative, oppositional, generating a condition of fragmentation which is
re-presented through the tensions of a narrative of displacement. For
Matildana, on the other hand, this very condition is ordinary, unsurprising; it
locates her psyche and positionality within a framework of liberatory plural-
ism. While it is true, as Stuart Hall has suggested, that all identities are essen-
tially fictions, the construction of these symbolic selves is produced by the
intersection of difference and diaspora, of discursive performance and the
identity politics of the affiliative postcolonial community. But it is the insistent,
re-iterative doubleness of this question of difference - of one sibling from the
other, of metissage from creoleness, as well as of both from the metropole-
that lies at the heart of this cultural and subjective negotiation. As Hall points
out, "It is an immensely important gain when one recognizes that all identity
is constructed across difference and begins to live with the politics of differ-
ence" (1987:45). It is the complexities of working through this politics of differ-
ence that explains the arc of antipathy eventually traced between Rehvana and
Matildana.
   For Rehvana, her descent to the depths of degradation and despair takes
place fairly quickly. Initially, she plunges into her rediscovery of the "authen-
tic" Martinique with an enthusiasm that borders on fanaticism. Without re-
spite, she cooks, cleans, and reconstructs, but inscribed within it all is an ironi-
cal subtext of ineluctable failure and misplaced perspective: "She pruned the
hedges, cared for all the plants, fertilized all the flowers. More royalist than the
king, aggressive, carried away with militant Caribbeanness, Rehvana took
arms against all those who, according to her, did not possess incontestable
authenticity. She started raising chickens. She has nothing to do with house-





172 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


hold appliances or other examples of modern laziness: anyway, what would
she do with them in this house without any electricity?" (n5, 19, 121). Indeed,
in short order, this deliberate plunge into a traditional, mythicized past-one
upon which Antilleans themselves had turned their backs, in their ongoing
journey into modernity-becomes unalterably entwined with her tacit subju-
gation in terms of gender, an ongoing process to which she appears inexplica-
bly blind. "Everything would be wonderful if only Eric appreciated her efforts
for what they were worth, if he only gave her some word of encouragement, if
only that beloved man didn't come home so late at night-if he came in! -to
shove his feet under the table, only to wolf down his food without speaking a
word, fast, swallowing his fish soup which she had delicately simmered, after
having, she herself, scaled and gutted the fish with her own delicate city girl
hands" (119).
   It is this double, misplaced subjugation to both gender and culture -and its
attendant, implied blindness-that leads Rehvana inexorably to the point of
subjective dissolution. The simultaneous narrative critique, always surrepti-
tiously present in tone, sums up the double bind of her misprision in a single,
succinct phrase: "She does all this for Eric, and because it's the Caribbean
way" (122). The depth of the irony by which Rehvana is figured here recuper-
ates the extent to which the complexities of authenticity and exile, of "home"
and "away" remain as patterns of protean elusiveness for the female Caribbean
subject. This constant sense of displacement and lack of belonging that ener-
vates Rehvana's existence signals the presumptions, practices, and position-
alities that historically have informed the actions of generations of Antillean
women, and which are finally taken to task and effectively dismissed.
   This blindness is in fact continually represented as a deliberate refusal to
see, and the text leaves us in no doubt as to Rehvana's responsibility in the
matter. "Since her return to Martinique, Rehvana had deliberately cultivated
this blind faith and this forced credulity, for in that she perceived the dark
essence of the Antillean soul . . . determined to be Antillean, to make herself
Antillean, totally.... Rehvana buried herself, in a hallucinatory, haggard way,
in the nightmare of the intense nightwatch she had inflicted upon herself"
(ioo-ioi). In this insistent process of self-transformation, her mind remains
firmly closed to whatever does not fit neatly into her preconceived notions of
Antillean reality, but her own responsibility in creating a real-life nightmare
for herself somehow escapes her.




L'Autre qui danse / 173


   By adopting the positionality of the victim, she rejects the subjection that
should be her salvation, and this stance is rendered even more painful when it
comes to Eric's thinly disguised adultery: "Gradually, all around Rehvana,
floats the penetrating female vapor the man carries back with him from out-
side, and which is emitted by his entire body, leaning over her" (103). By
giving in to Eric's desire, she tacitly accepts his adultery, although it becomes
increasingly impossible to disguise "the scent of the unknown woman" (103).
Through the metonymic presence of this unseen but felt rival, the narrative
sums up both the depths of Rehvana's despair and her refusal to countenance
its implications, a position which is tantamount to psychic self-immolation on
the altar of an unalterably elusive authenticity.
   From here, it is but a short step to the depths of physical abuse. Most often,
Eric beats her with his belt, and perhaps the most brutal of these beatings
occurs after she becomes pregnant. Since, crucially, the father is Jeremie, the
batterer displays the usual technique of blaming the victim: "All she sees is the
heavily buckled leather, he's speaking too loudly for her to understand, he has
no idea how her ears are buzzing, he laughs when she vomits, he is furious that
she got up, complains of her bad manners" (131). In vain does Matildana en-
courage her to file a police complaint; her friend and mentor Cidalise, on the
other hand, at first, surprisingly, counsels resignation -"After all, if this man is
pleased with you. . . . Even if the child you are making is not for him" (185)-
but, in a striking reversal, redeems herself by insisting on an end to Rehvana's
victimage when the child is threatened. While, on the one hand, much of this
woman's experience has long been familiar lore in the Caribbean, the inten-
sity of these episodes draws in large part on their chronology, an implied chain
of cause and effect instantiated by an insistence on the efficacy of Reversion
and a repudiation of proferred alternatives. By conflating these twin teleologies
that Frangoise Lionnet calls "a sometimes poorly repressed tradition and the
lure of a passively lived femininity" (1995:99), Rehvana, perhaps, dooms her-
self to an increasingly inexorable downfall.
   Together, the contrasting experiences of these sisters map a new, alterna-
tive strategy for the construction of postcolonial identity, one whose signal
liminality draws on the ambiguities of the DOM-TOM and its diaspora and is
reflected in the creole complexities that they both resolve and reproduce. The
persistent discourse of doubleness that we have seen at all levels of the narra-
tive is of key importance in the construction of the open, affiliative identity




174 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


that Hall envisages: "It is possible to think about the nature of new political
identities, which isn't founded on the notion of some absolute, integral self
and which clearly can't arise from some fully closed narrative of the self"
(1987:45). Pursuing the trail of disjunctures integral to this strategizing of dis-
cursive subjectivity leads us to examine those contexts of communication that
they share, articulated antinomies that simultaneously unite our siblings while
separating them one from the other. Let us take a closer look at the tensions of
their relationship during Rehvana's sojourn in Martinique, a site of communi-
cation which, significantly, takes place largely through a remarkable trio of
letters directed from Matildana to Rehvana.


Epistolary Economies

Matildana's first letter to her sister Rehvana appears several pages into part 2 of
L'Autre qui danse. This long middle section, titled "Chant second," covers the
period of Rehvana's return to Martinique and traces her decline from idealistic
participant to despondent outcast. Appearing unannounced as an untitled
subsection of a chapter titled simply "La Martinique," the entire letter is itali-
cized, drawing attention to its peculiar, particular status as a text within a text.
Before we consider the narrative content of Matildana's missive, and what it
says and suggests about the relation between both writer and her interlocutor,
we need to examine the question of the letter's discursive form, particularly
as it relates to the status and function of epistolary conventions as they are
inscribed within the larger framework of a discourse of postcolonial identi-
tarianism.
   The issue that first engages us here is the overall nature and function of
epistolary discourse. The use of the epistolary form in fiction puts into play a
number of interesting and important possibilities that impact the key areas of
gender, reflexivity, and representation, areas that hold particular implications
for the analysis of a liminal, polysemic, feminized postcolonial subjectivity.
The broad lines of the epistolary code suggest that the appearance of the letter
implies, at bottom, a distinctive doubling of the narrative discourse, what
Linda Kauffman, in her key study Discourses of Desire, calls "the letter as lit-
erature, literature as a letter" (17). The problematics of presence that lie at the
heart of epistolary communication insist on this act of discursive doubling,
since what is implicit in any fictional letter-form is an address to an invisible
other, an attempt to transform absence into a proxy of interlocutory presence




L'Autre qui danse / 175


through a reply to another implicitly absent text. Integral to this performative
moment is the duality of the writer's desire: as Kauffman puts it, "The heroine
... dedicates herself to nurturing her illusions.... Yet her strategy is simulta-
neously subversive, for she contests. . . . Her epistle is . . . a revolt staged in
writing" (17-18). These are among the formal qualities that characterize fictive
letter writing, producing a discourse that simultaneously undergirds and un-
dermines stereotypes of gender and authorship, authority and subjectivity.
   In tracing the trajectory of creole subjectivity for the DOM-TOM, we have
sought to stress the openness and the polyvalence of the complex situation
faced by those doubly disenfranchised metis women of the francophone world
who must negotiate the anxieties intrinsic to their simultaneous complacency
and dis-ease within the confines of both the metropolitan and the departmen-
tal contexts. The insertion of an epistolary discourse takes the politicization of
these complexities one step farther, since what is resited at this intersection of
writing and ideology, gender and desire is the very notion of positionality, as
epistolary writing ultimately comes to mark, in Linda Kauffman's words, "the
process and strategies by which . . . writing women transform themselves into
artists, taking control of the production of writing to challenge ... the funda-
mental tenets of representation itself" (22). For if epistolary discourses effec-
tively stage the fundamental dramatization of the inscription of desire, their
teleologies of transgression can also undermine traditional concepts of desire,
gender, and subjectivity. And it is precisely here that the polyvalent rhetoric of
desire that grounds Matildana's unanswered letters encounters the alienated
axes of Rehvana's narrative of duality and displacement. In this interrogation of
the interstices of metissage, revolt is inscribed within each iteration of its axes;
in the heart of the contrarieties that separate both sisters, in the paradoxically
affiliative antinomies that bind them while banishing them from each other.
   If the goal of Matildana as writing subject is to wrest control of the terms of
sibling representation, her first letter begins by berating Rehvana-albeit in a
lovingly reproving tone-for the silence of separation that the family has had
to endure since her departure for her homeland and her attempted re-cogni-
tion of "authenticity." Through the extensive use of the second person singu-
lar, she registers her worry, dismay, and disapproval of her sister's actions while
encouraging her to resume communication with the family: "Believe me,
you're making a mistake, deciding to stay cut off from everything, cut off from
us, even from me!" (105). Here, the exclusion to which Rehvana has felt sub-
jected for so long has been effectively turned against her erstwhile protectors,





176 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


in an inversion of subjective hierarchies that signals her intent to forgo previ-
ous protocols of safety and now leaves her family unit feeling alone and aban-
doned. At the same time, Matildana is able to communicate Rehvana's over-
whelming importance to her-her salutation is "Rehvana de ma vie"-while
signaling, through an important interplay between subject pronouns and dis-
junctive and indirect object pronouns, her own singularity of vision and of
purpose: "For I have things to tell you, yes I do. Even if you don't want to talk
to me anymore, my far-away beauty" (105; emphasis mine). In this way, Matil-
dana sets up a revolving register of opposition between Rehvana and herself
that reinforces the recurring cycle of love and anger, presence and absence,
itself metonymically signified and deepened by Rehvana's appellation of
"belle lointaine."
   Matildana's criticisms of Rehvana's choices in this first missive are articu-
lated primarily through the latter's multiple relations with the three arbiters of
masculinity in her life: their father, Jeremie, and Eric-although the last is
named only in disparaging terms. As a result, the efforts at revolt and re-vision
by both sisters are inscribed through their analysis of an ideology of masculin-
ity to which they take opposing views. The divergent attitudes shown toward
these figures of masculinity trace the tensions of both internal and external
difference; Rehvana displays singular attitudes toward each of them-al-
though these can only be inferred-while Matildana's overall perspective de-
volves specifically into a difference from each aspect of her sibling's. By articu-
lating her disapproval through this critique, effected through an epistolary
discourse and aimed at freeing Rehvana from the social stereotypes written
into traditional gender roles, Matildana implicitly inscribes the terms and con-
ditions of her subjective revolt.
   For their part, the sisters' parents have cut off all communication with
Rehvana since her decision to return to Martinique to live with Eric. While
she evenhandedly writes no letters to anyone, they would still like to hear from
her, although her father in particular appears to have disowned her altogether:
"The parents would really like it if you wrote to them from time to time, real
letters, even if Papa has pretended to deny you.... he never speaks of you, out
of pride, but I can tell that this hardness is just pretence" (io6). At the same
time, the monthly allowance that Rehvana receives has also been stopped,
accompanied by a series of parental-or paternal-injunctions to be followed
for the cash flow to be reinstituted: "Here's the bad side of things. . . . Papa
apparently won't go back on his decision to 'cut you off' until you get back on




L'Autre qui danse / r


'the right track,' until you've gone back to being a 'good girl,' until you've come
back to the behavior of a 'girl from a good family' until you've stopped 'sowing
your wild oats,' until you've left your 'gang of niggers,' and 'gone back to your
studies"' (106-7). It seems that Rehvana indeed has done the unthinkable and,
through her actions, offended her parents' delicate middle-class sensibilities
and set about the ruin of their good bourgeois name. She needs to get back on
track, to make up for her thoughtless flings with both Eric and the Ebonis, and
to resume her studies. It is to be noted that these concerns are communicated
to Rehvana indirectly, her absence mediated by her sister's discourse, such that
the discursive aspects of the paternal edict are deliberately presented in scare
quotes.
   However, even as she conveys the content of the parental mind, Matildana
is able to register her double disapproval of both parent and sibling several
sentences later through the form of her expression: "In the meantime, I'll keep
sending you half of whatever he gives me; don't thank me, this is just normal,
since you still have the right to half of the studio where I'm living alone now
since you've run off, you bad girl!" (107). Matildana's re-presentation of their
father's wishes becomes a discursive doubling of his decisions, coupled with
her own decision to share her allowance while remonstrating with Rehvana for
her departure and her ongoing silence; this allows her to appear to be pleading
while in fact she registers her strong sense of separation from the actions she
reports.
   Jeremie seems to occupy the literal and the figurative middle ground here;
as Eric's predecessor, and Rehvana's nominal rescuer from the Fils d'Agar, he
appears to symbolize the possibility of a return to stability and security. Indeed,
a projected reunion with him seems to meet with Matildana's approval: "I was
able to console myself for your absence when you left me by going to live with
Jeremie, and if you come back to him, you already know that it would be with
my blessings" (107). But this may be only for form's sake, since she knows that
Rehvana attaches little importance to news of Jeremie's well-being: "I'm send-
ing you news of Jeremie on purpose, even though I know perfectly well that he
means nothing to you" (107). This acknowledgment serves to undermine
whatever note of regret or remonstration may have lurked in her references to
Jeremie, and in fact both reader and interlocutor are quickly confronted by the
specter of Eric, cast in such snide and sarcastic terms that the extent of the
hierarchy that separates them soon becomes evident: "In fact, there's one thing
that I don't understand: since Jeremie is ten times more handsome, a hundred





178 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


times nicer, a thousand times more intelligent than that idiot from la Pelee,
and at least as much 'son of Africa' as he is, why in hell did you chose the worse
of the two?" (io8). The complex and effective use of metonymy in this frag-
ment is quite remarkable and deserves a closer look.
   The criticisms leveled here by Matildana against Rehvana's choices are all
the more penetrating given the fact that the object of her criticism is never
identified by name. Using Jeremie as a point de repere, she is able to implicitly
critique his competitor without according him the status of discursive subjec-
tivity. The phrase "the idiot from la Pelee" uses a combination of geography
and historical event to locate Eric through his Martinican origins while both
disparaging his intelligence and simultaneously differentiating him from
Jeremie, the second-generation Antillean who paradoxically recognizes Paris
as home. The geometric progression of the resulting comparison, from "ten
times" through "a hundred times" to "a thousand times," places Eric on the
losing end of a sliding scale of values; but then by turning to "sons of Africa,"
and particularly by enclosing it in quotes, she is able to undermine the central
criterion of Rehvana's search for identity, one that she has carried out succes-
sively through Abdoulaye and Jeremie, vainly seeking to locate an elusive au-
thenticity of which Eric is only the most recent arbiter. Such a strategy simul-
taneously allows her to collectively critique these masculine figures in whom
her sister has invested the possibility of her own identity, making liberal use of
irony and sarcasm to cast doubt upon the validity of what is in reality her con-
tinuing subjugation through gender, at least in the terms in which Rehvana
has sought to locate it.
   Interestingly, the subtle terms in which this critique is couched follow a
more overt attack, one which involves the capacity for judgement of both
Rehvana and her chosen paramour. Here, Matildana opens by ostensibly al-
lowing her sibling a measure of accommodation, but this impression is quickly
stifled by what follows: "I know very well that you are not a pure spirit, I have a
hard time visualizing how you can cling for so long to that illiterate who can't
even hold a conversation. Still! I suppose that Mister Muscles must have all
kinds of hidden charms" (107). This turn to the sardonic again does not iden-
tify Eric by name but rather relies on drawing an implicit distinction between
the lovers based on the levels of education and class that separate them. This
implicit reference to the upbringing that they share is Matildana's verdict on
her sister's chosen path, its penetrating allusion to his lack of letters and her
lack of prudence swiftly followed by a mocking, acerbic sexual aside that dep-




L'Autre qui danse / 179


recates Rehvana's discretion and disparages both sibling and her lover. This
broadside gives way to a final cutting remark, issued in the same vein: "So,
fine! Go on and cuddle with your caveman, but don't forget, still, that I can
barely forgive you for the way you're making me suffer, for the hurt you're
giving Jeremie, and especially for how you're destroying your life" (109). Here
again, Matildana delivers her commentary in terms that are deliberately
double voiced; Eric is again described with irony, but only indirectly, as "your
caveman," while what can only be categorized as the cutting satire contained
in the verb "cuddle" is completed by the triple "gachis" that she has made of
three lives. Rehvana takes Jeremie's side, we may conclude, as a proxy for the
implied ruination of both Matildana and herself. But it is Matildana's refusal
to accept Rehvana's choice that is of the greatest overall interest here; the dif-
ficulty in forgiveness is in fact a warning, a foreclosure of continuing pardons
and a signal of her need for independence, and her intention to eventually
abandon her sibling to the persistent ineluctability of her own devices and
desires.
   Matildana's second letter to Rehvana comes nearly eighty pages after the
first and takes a decidedly different tone from its predecessor. It takes up barely
two pages of text, as opposed to the five-page length of the first, and this new-
found brevity is matched from the outset by the impersonal character of its
salutation. Addressed this time simply to "l'6trangere," it soon paradoxically
displays her awareness of changes in Rehvana's material condition even as its
opening sentence signals the growing distance and estrangement between the
siblings by Matildana's inaugural use of the unfamiliar vous, since, as she
states, "I have no idea how to address You from now on, Dear" (188). After this
lapse, however, she quickly reverts to the familiar tu, inquiring after Rehvana's
health during this period of pregnancy and announcing her intention to be
present for the birth. But the damage has already been done, and in spite of her
ongoing concern for her sister's welfare, Matildana will not hesitate to signal
her discursive separation from Rehvana's isolationist posture.
   Again, Matildana remonstrates with her sister, but significantly, she does so
this time in tones that border more on the prosaic than the reproachful: "You
still haven't called, you don't even send a little letter" (289). By recapitulating
the status quo in declarative terms, without problematizing her sister's absence
or protesting her continued, insistent refusal of communication, Matildana
tacitly signals her acceptance of it, and this act functions to reregister her own
insistent, pluralist difference, one that is thus inescapably creole. She cements




i8o / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


this impression when she conveys the news of her own social and cultural
stability through the discursive appropriation of a phrase from her chosen in-
tellectual field, the classics: "As for me, I don't have anything especially new to
tell you; nihil novi sub sole, nothing is new under the sun; I'm studying for my
midterms, the Sorbonne is the same as it always is, but the statue is in a differ-
ent place" (189). In this apparently laconic reference lies what is perhaps the
key to Matildana's secure subjectivity; she is able to accept her interest in other
worlds and other cultures as valid precisely because she sees them as intercon-
nected extensions of her own complex historical experience, and she rejects
notions of oneness and univocality as anathema to the polyvocalic perspective
she embodies. Her affirmation of this sense of pluralism through the key refer-
ence to the Sorbonne and the use of the Latin phrase is the subtle sign of a
vibrantly polymorphous subject. All this contradicts the turbulent state of af-
fairs symbolized for her through the suggested displacement of the institution's
hallmark statue.
   Matildana ends her missive by equalizing the situations of both siblings in
terms of a discursive confrontation: "I'm going to stop here; it's impossible for
me to tell you about my life when I know nothing, or so little, of yours" (189).
She insists on a fair exchange of information, registering her protest by with-
holding her own narrative, uneventful though it might be. But significantly,
this second letter is followed immediately by a discursive commentary, com-
municating the reasons for Rehvana's inveterate lack of response. These letters
have all "gone unanswered" (190), for symbolically, and in contrast to her sis-
ter, writing is not Rehvana's medium of choice. In fact, the communicative
preferences of each sister have been apparent since childhood: where Matil-
dana has always favored the infinite play of discourse, Rehvana prefers not to
display her "uncontrolled, capricious spelling" before the "Miss Perfection-
first-prize-in-dictation" (190) of her sister. This ease of inscription and intrinsic
preference for polysemy that Matildana exhibits are directly at odds with the
insistence on origins and their corollary of unicity heralded by Rehvana's
search for a cultural authenticity she is already convinced exists. Thus her wish
to keep to herself the "stony crucifixion of vain efforts and sterile out-
bursts"(19o) of her self-styled grand return is symbolic of this differential atti-
tude toward the discursive that reinforces the twin registers of creole subjectiv-
ity signified by these siblings and reinscribed by their isolation across the divide
of the epistolary.




L'Autre qui danse / 181


   It is thus perhaps not surprising that Matildana's third and shortest letter
should be reduced to a series of disjointed fragments barely four lines long,
miming ironically the condition of its interlocutor as it finds Rehvana in a
subjective state of siege, disoriented, afraid, cowering from Eric's wrath while
vainly seeking to maintain her self-respect. Despite the joy associated with her
daughter's birth, and the visit made to them both by Matildana, the salutation
bottoms out here in the unmistakable tones of "abominable little sister" (280).
There then follow only hints of the immoderate succession of issues that have
intervened between the siblings: "Pardon me ... police ... lying to Maman .. .
it doesn't matter" (280).
   In the form and the function of these letters, then, Rehvana is both physi-
cally and symbolically absent, caught in an insistent silence that verges on the
autistic. Her increasing fragmentation is underlined by the presence of ellipsis
dots, particularly in the brief last letter which she cannot even manage to ren-
der coherent. Compared to Matildana, in fact, Rehvana speaks relatively little
in the novel, with a turning inward that is symbolic of her inscription in Rever-
sion. The subtle staging of these discursive strategies through the epistolary
mode permits Matildana to separate herself from the succession of disjunc-
tures and misapprehensions that characterize Rehvana's search for an authen-
tic identitarian inscription, while inscribing both her own spirit of revolt and
independence and her insistent recognition of the importance of cultural di-
versity and difference. By dis-placing the traditional subject of an epistolary
discourse, she is able to engage an alternative site of enunciation, refracting the
creative fragmentation and possibility of the DOM-TOM through the deliber-
ate presence and absence of her letters' dissymmetry. But ironically, it is as
early as the first of these epistolary inscriptions of independence that we can
also remark a material sign of Matildana's capacity to distinguish and demar-
cate the imprint of cultural difference, a marker of recognition uttered but
unidentified by Rehvana, yet grounded in the complex articulations of creole
expression.


Language and Authenticity

What Matildana recognizes and linguistically valorizes in her sister Rehvana
can be coded as a verbal signifier of indigenous Caribbean cultural specificity,
an appreciative inscription of the Africa-derived act of "sucking one's teeth."




182 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


This capacity to produce an expressive, onomatopoeic cheups (Fr. tchips) of
disgust or disapprobation is one of the cross-cultural hallmarks of the Carib-
bean vernacular, conveying wordlessly but effectively the mind-set of the
speaker with regard to the subject at hand.6 At the same time, it remains almost
unknown (and practically inexpressible) outside the Caribbean region and the
ethnic African lexicon from which it was originally adapted. Given the
specificity of these parameters, it is thus all the more significant that when
Matildana raises the cultural flag by referring to Rehvana's "tchips," she does
so not only in an epistolary context but by simultaneously enclosing the refer-
ence in parentheses: "(I even miss our arguments, and I even go so far as to
miss your inimitable 'cheups,' you remember, the lovely resounding cheups
that only you could do. . . )" (105). On a primary level of signification, the use
of parentheses would appear to impose a symbolic line of demarcation, re-
stricting the reference to the valorization of verbal exchanges between the
siblings while enacting a further refraction of the textual framework. The term
is thus clearly valorized by being positioned in a text-within-a-text-within-a-
text. At the same time, however, there can be no doubt of the importance that
Matildana attaches to this catchall Caribbean neologism. Indeed, she insists
upon exploiting and extending the image, rendering an absent Rehvana
metonymically present through sound, yet within the parentheses: "Yes, I can
hear it, that remarkable dry little sound that you just made with your lips, the
air whistling through your teeth, I'm coming to drag one out of you, oh, how
lovely it is" (io5-6). It thus becomes increasingly clear that Matildana's dis-
course here turns on a particular practice of cultural expression.
   Between the parenthetical and the epistolary, then, lies a critical area of
creole expression that is enhanced and enlivened through Matildana's recog-
nition of the cultural value articulated by the Caribbean vernacular; at a sym-
bolic level, it is not by coincidence that it is she, rather than her sister, who
engages and valorizes this aspect of their culture. By bracketing her own dis-
cursive re-presentation of this typically Caribbean ejaculation, and conflating
it with the apostrophic address of the letter, she is able to reflect the complex
intersection of ethnic and linguistic experience symbolically embodied in this
creole utterance, while using it to challenge the traditional tenets of regional
re-presentation displaced by the expression itself. The world of historical and
cultural specificity contained in Rehvana's titillating cheups signifies a micro-
cosm of performative Caribbeanness, a vocalized vision that distills the es-
sence of the Caribbean character. This irruption of creole expression in the




L'Autre quiddanse / 183


text marks an initial site of cultural identitarianism, a singular event that ulti-
mately leads to the extensive distribution of creole across the discursive spec-
trum. Matildana's identification of this signal space remains in stark contrast to
Rehvana's refusal to acknowledge it, and simultaneously signifies Matildana's
integral inscription in the creative creole culture of the region, whose plural-
ized openness she effectively inhabits. But it is the symbolic significance of
vernacular communication in this context of Caribbean pluralism that leads
us to consider the role of the creole language itself in the signifying structure of
the text.
   While it is not my intention to provide, at this stage, an extended analysis of
the social role played by Creole languages in the Caribbean context, an effec-
tive reading of the incorporation of this form into the novelistic discourse re-
quires some historical background. It is critical to recognize initially that, as
Peter Roberts points out, creoles are not dialects but are full-fledged languages
in themselves: "A creole represents a stage in a developmental process which
started as an unstable, structurally restricted, non-native form of communica-
tion between peoples of different cultures. This communication has become
stable, and more expanded in roles, functions and structures and represents
the native language of the descendants of those originally involved in the con-
tact situation" (1988:13). In other words, such creole languages have become
the communicative vehicle for those societies identified under the same ru-
bric; rather than a simple process of homogenization, this linguistic creoli-
zation typically marks a society constructed out of the tensions and teleologies
of the colonial encounter, both its population and its language the product of
this cultural intersection. This cultural contact between colonizer and colo-
nized, both of whom, in the Caribbean case, were transplanted subjects from
a variety of African and European ethnic groups with no common language,
functions as the dominant marker of a creole Caribbean society. As Mervyn C.
Alleyne observes, "It was contact among immigrant groups of diverse origins .
   that became the most significant factor for the emergence of West Indian
societies, because nowhere else in the hemisphere was the destruction of the
indigenous peoples and their civilization more complete" (1985:158). It is this
important link between linguistic transplantation and (re)construction, on the
one hand, and cultural re-presentation, on the other, that we must now explore
in Dracius-Pinalie's text.
   The critical conjunction that exists in the region between historical experi-
ence and linguistic development becomes the basis in the novel for the meta-




184 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


phorical articulation of collective identity. Indeed, language and linguistic
form are intrinsically associated with the growth of the Caribbean creole con-
tinuum. As Alleyne continues, "The language situations existing in the Carib-
bean are mirrors through which the complex cultural history of the region may
be observed" (1985:158). As a means of contesting the colonial phenomenon of
mimetism that institutionalizes the colonizer's model among the colonized,
the view of creole as a valid form of cultural expression has long been subject
to opposing opinions concerning its relative value as a language, a patois, or
dialect, or even a pidgin, signifying nothing more than a typically imperfect
assimilation of colonial culture. As Alleyne suggests, "The general feeling is
that creole languages and dialects are defective-that they may be suitable for
the expression of 'folklore'. . . but that they are quite inadequate for the expres-
sion of complex and abstract thought" (1985:160). When such attitudes are
joined to historical patterns of prejudice that encourage colonial subjects to
master colonial speech and vocabulary patterns in order to better ensure social
and educational advancement and recognition, it is no wonder that creoles
continue to sustain an ineradicable social stigma. It is this crucial field of con-
testation that Dracius-Pinalie's discursive use of creole seeks to address.
   Much of the creole dialogue in L'Autre qui danse is located in a long, un-
titled, largely monologic section of part 2. In this scene, Rehvana is made to
listen to an extended mini-narrative recounted by Man Cidalise, an older peas-
ant woman and storyteller of traditional values who befriends her; as an icon of
cultural complexity "whose syncretism combines Christianity and obeah,
sweets and fasting" (221), Cidalise's embodiment of strong matrifocal values
sustains Rehvana during her progressive falling-out with and escape from Eric.
The bulk of this episode thus constitutes an embedded narrative, a tale-within-
a-tale whose structural characteristics and self-reflexive thematic relation to
the main text produce what Tzvetan Todorov terms "causal explanation" or
"thematic juxtaposition, as with arguments or examples or stories that form a
contrast with the preceding one" (1981:53). This extended articulation of
creolized language in the text is a comment on the more linear narrative and
communicative patterns that surround it, and through its difference exhibits
several key characteristics: first, reprising the principle that form follows func-
tion -and theme -it comprises an oral mini-narrative told by a member of the
lower classes to one whose social identity grows increasingly indeterminate.
Further, in syntactical terms, the passage does not quite conform to the orali-
ties of the creole commonly spoken in the French Caribbean; doubling its




L'Autre quiddanse / 185


difference in its diversion even from traditional creole forms, it appears to re-
tain a number of trace elements that are closer to what we might term a
colloquialized Caribbean French, and certain phrases are provided with foot-
note translations.
   Given the symbiotic relation that we have noted between the articulation of
Caribbean culture and the idiosyncracies of its language, it seems fair to postu-
late that such an inscription of creolized language in L'Autre qui danse func-
tions as a discursive re-presentation of the cultural complexities framing the
Caribbean diaspora that the text seeks to open up. Upon closer reading, then,
it becomes quickly apparent that this sequence displays a crucial dichotomy
between speaker and interlocutor; although the series of mini-tales told by
Man Cidalise takes creole as its basic reference, Rehvana maintains a stony
silence in response. Reinforcing the symbolic significance of Rehvana's refusal
of speech, here her distance paradoxically valorizes the linguistic difference
she refuses. Indeed, the extended monologue that this quickly becomes bears
an uncanny yet significant resemblance, on the symbolic level, to the silence
Rehvana maintains with regard to the letters Matildana writes, suggesting a
further withdrawal of this subject from the creolized patterns of difference set
into motion by both her lingual and her literary interlocutors. It remains one
of the novel's supreme ironies that Rehvana's search for cultural authenticity,
one of the primary axes of the plot, leaves her unable or unwilling to acknowl-
edge the articulation of such indigenous patterns when they are inscribed in
the character, actions, or words of her others. The persistent disjuncture be-
tween these audibly and visibly creole sites and strategies that proffer a transfor-
mative pluralism, and Rehvana's inability to recognize the various modes by
which it functions, stigmatize both her as subject and the search in which she
is engaged, making her insistence on homogeneity the very sign of her posi-
tional stalemate.
   The importance that can be ascribed to these deliberate (dis)articulations
of authenticity leads us to consider how-and why-creole establishes its dif-
ference of form and function in the text, in its dual role both as discourse and
as polysemic cultural sign. As was suggested earlier, we are confronted not with
a phonetically accurate, morphologically distinct re-presentation of creole,
but with a creolized (re)construction of a culturally drawn colloquial French,
a distinction which at once begs particular questions of the formalized textual
structure of narrative, language, and communication in the novel.
Specifically, this sequence uses current creole expressions, along with words




i86 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


and phrases from a standardized French lexicon, but modified and metamor-
phosed into an effective but intelligible approximation of a vernacular creole.
Thus we see the construction of linguistic simulacra, such as "couri-vini" (140)
and "toutes bagailles" (143), along with such creolisms as "sa ki riv6'w" (141),
"sa sa y6 sa" (142-3), "passe que" and "missi6" (144), "kout6 sa," "ka pas6,"
"manzel," and "ay fe zafe'w" (165), and with the whole periodically punctuated
by typical creole onomatopoeic expressions such as "wacha," "plim," and
"wabap" (145). Further, within the overall framework of the sequence, the nar-
rative commentary that resurfaces between monologues maintains its linear
inscription in standard French, creating a polyvocalic discourse whose several
levels of linguistic expression reflect the overwhelming complexities of com-
munication in a culturally creolized environment. The resulting conundrum
locates creole language structures in a plurality of sites that restructure,
through the parabola of plural presence engendered by the intersection of
ethnicity, language, and gender, our very understanding of what a larger vision
of creolization might entail.
   Over against the complex creole patterns of language and culture, the vi-
sion of metissage in which Rehvana remains inscribed is contrasted with an
unmistakable polysemy drawn on regional realities forged from the tensions of
the colonial encounter, a re-presentational grammar that encompasses the
split racial, cultural, and linguistic levels of articulation that frame the func-
tioning of the Caribbean diaspora. These forces interact despite Rehvana's
intransigence, locating and valorizing a pattern of creole pluralism that avoids
Rehvana's positional extremes while revealing the ubiquity of the very iden-
titarian strategies she seeks. Matildana functions, then, as the signifier of a
differential creole subjectivity, tracing the contrarieties of perspective that
separate her from the demand for an overarching procedural unicity that will
ultimately prove to be Rehvana's downfall; the patterns of race, ethnicity, cul-
ture, and language in whose interstices both siblings are intertwined offer strik-
ingly differing paths toward the open-ended challenge of creative possibility
that creolization offers.
   This constant valorization of Matildana's position, constituting an implicit
inscription in the interstices of the creole, reaches periodic crescendoes in
the text, in which the siblings' oppositionality of perspective is rendered even
more penetrating by the persistent discongruity by which they are figured.
One of these episodes occurs more or less at the narrative center of the text,
and the other is placed much nearer its end. Let us take a closer look at the first




L'Autre qui danse / i8;


of these episodes, the one in which these patterns of creolization are subjec-
tively verbalized.
   Receiving no response to her succession of letters, Matildana decides to fly
to Martinique herself to locate her errant sibling. Their meeting occurs in an
untitled chapter of part 2, the reunion of the sisters remaining unrecorded
until we confront them deep in conversation on the veranda of Rehvana's
house. Significantly, the opening words of the episode convey Rehvana's in-
ability to withstand the intense Caribbean sun, its heat the overarching
signifier of the very tropical ambience which, ironically, her vaunted return
had led her to rediscover: "This sun is making me crazy! I hate this direct
light!" (191). But this is followed by an even more significant exchange, one
dominated by Matildana's scathing dissection of her sister's insistence on locat-
ing a palpable, material authenticity.
   In thundering tones of ironic objection and dissent, Matildana rails against
the core of her sister's position; that there is a discernible and definable essence
that compartmentalizes humanity into ethnic and cultural categories whose
poles are destined never to meet. The logical implications of this position are
too much for Matildana to contemplate: "I am unnegrified! . . . Yes, I forgot
dear Abdoulaye's catechism, that holy man! Article One, identity: since I
didn't start out completely white, if I don't negrify myself, I am nothing. I have
neither race nor color, nor identity nor culture, I am nothing. I am a nothing,
a nothing at all. A less than nothing. And it is so important, so primordial, to be
truly something. Even if, in order to cultivate authenticity, one must force it a
bit and use tricks" (196).
   The extent to which Matildana's use of irony in this passage is able to under-
mine the basic premises and assumptions that govern the perspective of the
purblind Abdoulaye and the Fils d'Agar and, by extension, her sister Rehvana,
is really quite extraordinary. In fact, a close reading of the passage indicates that
each metaphor used to prop them both up is introduced only to be immedi-
ately subverted and undone. Thus any merit to be attached to the "catechism"
of Abdoulaye, the "holy man," is at once called into question since it has been
forgotten; the legalistic resonances of "Article One" bestow upon him the
profile of a political leader, but this suggestion of command and authority is
erased by her ironic insistence that ultimately "I am denegrified." But criti-
cally, this process turns upon a perception of individual racial inscription:
Matildana, who speaks, by proxy, for Rehvana as well as Abdoulaye, is catego-
rized not as black, or matisse, but as "not completely white," displaying an




i88 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


almost criminal pattern of ethnic betrayal that by implication renders her un-
knowable and indefinable, requiring her immediately to "negrify herself" in
order to avoid being reduced to "nothing." This, by extension, has proved to be
the path of least resistance down which Rehvana has been led. But by now, the
structure of the argument is visibly faulty, and the center cannot hold;
Abdoulaye's principle of authenticity, whose intrinsic unicity Rehvana adopts,
refuses to countenance the symbolic function of a cultural crossroads for fear
that it will undermine the fragile essentialism of his binary, and thus implicitly
still colonial, world, which ultimately rings hollow before Matildana's mul-
tiple modernities of the creole.
   Ultimately, then, Dracius-Pinalie's discourse seeks to valorize a vision of the
Caribbean heritage as a composite, cosmopolitan, polysemic presence, a
creoleness that David Lowenthal calls "an expression of condition rather than
of nationality" (1972:32). Even beyond the oppositional trajectories traced by
Rehvana and Matildana, the textual strategy of L'Autre qui danse envisions an
inscription of a creole society in terms that underscore the fact that it derives its
value and its raison d'etre from the intersection and interplay of the multiple
cultures and ethnicities that together signify beyond the subjective strategies of
metissage. This creole culture of the Caribbean embodies difference through
the confluent character of its collective identity, creating, in the words of Anto-
nio Benitez-Rojo, "a supersyncretic culture characterized by its complexity ...
and its instability. . . whose seeds had come scattered from the richest stores of
three continents" (1992:46). It is this inscription of instability that Matildana as
textual subject seeks to transform into performative possibilities of presence.
   If, as Benitez-Rojo argues, the mission of the Caribbean text is to go "in
search of routes that might lead ... to an extratextual ... psychic reconstitution
of the Self" (1992:28), it is perhaps the nonconflictual ease of Matildana's cul-
tural performance that allows us finally to posit this reconstitution in discursive
terms. Equally at home in Paris or Fort-de-France, a subject who "loves
Terence as much as Senghor" (325), she exemplifies the basic polysemy of a
metis subjectivity that turns heterogeneity into an elemental principle of
epistemic cultural praxis. In contrast to her ironic outburst to Rehvana-that,
from the latter's point of view, "outside of race, no salvation" (197)-her own
chosen path is one that personifies her commitment to pluralism. Moving
back to Fort-de-France after completing her studies, Matildana immediately
locates the linguistic and cultural principles at which the complexities of the
creole intersect: "She studies linguistics and Creole, and works as a collabora-




L'Autre qui danse / 189


tor, in her free time, for a new Caribbean weekly which is trying to take into
account . . . the cultural, political and social issues of the Antillean world"
(323). By conflating creole's metaphoric polyvocality and transcultural lin-
guistic structures with the dynamics of political action signified by the deliber-
ately pan-Caribbean perspective of the new journal, Matildana inscribes her-
self in her own culture as an icon of its profuse possibilities, actively inhabiting
and embodying the infinite many-sidedness of her Caribbean world.
   The rhythms and resonances of the creole language are inscribed as a sin-
gular metaphor for this network of cultural possibility: "She learned Creole
... like a language whose mechanisms and richness she is trying to plumb....
the durability of Creole strikes her as a necessity, she is on fire for Creole, she
dives into it, mines it, and Creole inhabits her, overwhelms her" (323-24).
Matildana's immersion in the creative disjunctures of creole's figurative
feasibilities thus brings to fruition the spectrum of linguistic pluralism that
serves as the founding framework for this vision of Caribbeanness, and effec-
tively inscribes what Benitez-Rojo calls the "local truths, displaced truths, pro-
visional and peremptory truths . . . that barely make up a fugitive archipelago
of regular rhythms" for the postmodern Caribbean (1992:151). For as the sym-
bolic inheritor of a cultural cornucopia, Matildana now not only inhabits but
manufactures and extends the many spaces of difference through which she is
defined; importantly, her conflation of the language and politics of the creole
inscribes her at the center of a geopolitical axis that is intrinsically and over-
whelmingly Caribbean, generating a sense of community and identity that
transcends the boundaries of the local from her immersion in these twin
defining signs of an indigenous regionalism.
   In a didactic riff that tacitly recognizes the growing empirical centrality of
the creole, the text maps the terrain of a cultural self-constitution now almost
global in its reach: "Nothing human, no matter what its color, whether white,
black, yellow, or tricolored, nothing human is foreign to her. In opposition to
her younger sister, Matildana is not one of those who punishes herself with
impossible blacknesses" (325; emphasis in the original). In this subtle yet overt
contrast in subjective strategies, the italicization of the text underlines the glo-
bal reach of her cultural pluralism. Matildana has successfully avoided the
binary colonialist essentialism of racial typing; the singular factors under-
girding Rehvana's attempt at authenticity are contested and overturned by
her sister's personification of a differential, collective Caribbean identity,
grounded in what Richard Burton calls the "continuum of cultures that have




190 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


coexisted and competed in the Caribbean ever since slavery" (1997a:2). This
suggestion of affiliation and evolution constructs a composite from the multi-
plicities of the margin, teasing out from the tensions of the colonial encounter
a coherent framework for the challenge of everyday existence.
   In this way, the intrinsic pluralisms of both language and ethnicity in a
Caribbean context are metamorphosed into cultural signs, re-presenting the
complex, multilayered network of associations that has wrought the character-
istics of this creole society. Matildana's effortless skill at symbolizing the suc-
cesses of this identitarian strategy is firmly and unalterably grounded in her
Caribbeanness: "She knows very well, in any case, that she has never stopped
being Antillean, that these innumerable years of exile haven't changed very
much in terms of the depths of her nature" (324). This embodiment of a plural-
ist cultural praxis ultimately locates the misplaced unicities of her sister
Rehvana in a revealing light, enacting a striking positional contrast that em-
phasizes the creative capacities of creolization and the protean possibilities of
metissage while illuminating the shortcomings of an elusive, illusory authen-
ticity based on the binary assumptions of racial division. For importantly, not
only does Matildana personify the substantive originality and self-invention of
the metis, she is also an integral part and product of a commonwealth of cul-
tures that cultivates a novel modernity out of the ruptures and disjunctions of
the past. As Nigel Bolland puts it, "The image of creole culture and a creole
society emphasizes social unity: the new nation as creole community" (1992:51;
emphasis in the original). By inscribing the diaspora as imagined community,
then, these textual designations reframe creoleness and are crucial to any un-
derstanding of Matildana's true achievement.
   This emphasis on the constitutive and transformative role of language re-
vises and reforms our notions of both identity and community. Indeed, it is the
very instability and polymorphism of creolized language forms that enables
the transition to cultural and identitarian pluralization. As Frangoise Lionnet
cogently explains: "Language reinforces a phenomenon of creative instability
in which no 'pure' or unitary origin can ever be posited. A linguistic and rhe-
torical approach to the complex question of mdtissage thus points to the ideo-
logical and fictional nature of our racial categories while underlining the rela-
tionship between language and culture" (1989:16). In these terms, the multiple
modernities implicit within metissage supplant the chimera of unitary origin
that is Rehvana's goal, exposing the stony ground at its source and erecting in
its place an affiliative network of creole creativity generated from the kinetic




L'Autre qui danse / 191


polyvocality of Caribbean culture and language. So that while Rehvana's fun-
damental error consists, even from her formative years, in finding herself "al-
ready just a bit too black, always just a bit too black" (341), Matildana, on the
contrary, "feels herself a whole person, she doesn't conceive of herself as any-
thing other than Antillean, but still refuses to be put into bottles of artificial
scent" (325); she thus crucially distances herself from Rehvana's misplaced
vision of overarching oneness and sets up the appearance of the final textual
arbiter of these siblings' critical difference.


Death and Survival

The novel concludes with a "Chant Ultime," a final coda to the divergent
destinies of these two sisters in metissage. Matildana's comfortable creoleness
is inscribed and encoded in a chapter titled, symbolically, "L'Autre Martin-
ique," articulating an otherness that is at once entirely Martinican and yet
distinct from the "authentic" Martinique whose discovery Rehvana desired.
The text takes up the downward spiral of Rehvana's final days in the subse-
quent chapter, appropriately titled "Quelque part entre L'Une Et L'Autre."
This in-betweenness, originally the sign by which, ironically, both Matildana
and Rehvana are figured, now marks the boundaries of the latter's destructive
displacement, the space of incessant slippage that separates both sisters.
   The seriousness of this slippage is formally inscribed in the text by Reh-
vana's almost total absence from it, a symbolic and progressive erasure of
Rehvana as subject that, beginning with her inhibited speech patterns, in-
creasingly reveals her unsettled condition by proxy, through her disappearance
from Martinique and in Matildana and Jeremie's discussions of her where-
abouts. In this roundabout way, Man Cidalise suggests that Rehvana has prob-
ably left for Paris, thus accomplishing a mysterious and elided disappearance
whose disturbingly enigmatic silence is filled by the counterpoint of Jeremie's
impending marriage and Matildana's decision not to disclose the fact of his
paternity to him. But these corollaries soon give way to a detailed re-presenta-
tion of Rehvana's approaching agony.
   Even before this final section gets under way, Rehvana's inexorable decline
becomes increasingly poignant; the text makes it clear that "Rehvana has be-
come the shadow of herself" (252). To make ends meet, she takes a job as a
secondary school teacher-"without receiving either instructions or teacher
training" (240)-in the ghetto-like town of Remorville, where "the sub-base-




192 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ments . .. harbor a rat-like people, crawling with excrement and filth" (238).
Yet, even here, she insists on dressing "in boubou and African sandals" (239) as
a sign of her difference and authenticity. Subsequently, she is finally aban-
doned by Eric, while an increasingly worried Man Cidalise turns her daughter
Aganila over to a relative for safekeeping. Meanwhile, profoundly apathetic,
Rehvana falls ill and, significantly, begins to bleed mysteriously and inces-
santly in a symbolic portent of the suffering and death to come; indeed, she has
"the feeling that she has never stopped bleeding. . . . Rehvana bathes in her
own blood" (297, 299). Returning somehow to Paris, she succumbs to poverty
and the death that it eventually brings.
   The cramps and hallucinations that she is made to undergo are now the
final arbiters of a constant subjection to alienation and dis-location, translating
her childhood rivalries and complexes into a pattern of subordination whose
concluding chapter is about to be written. "Rehvana thinks that reality exists
only because she is aware of it, that she perceives it, and that all she has to do
is to close her eyes in order to make things stop being visible" (35o). But accept-
ing these divergent images and positionalities as a simple product of sibling
rivalry would be much too reductive a reading here. While it is clear that the
young Rehvana "is not quite with it," and that Matildana "possesses . . . the
capacity to feel comfortable with herself" (342), it is the latter's striking capac-
ity for substitution and transmutation that is the symbolic key to the creole
pluralism that she re-presents. The early importance of this polysemic per-
spective is underlined by its inscription through the multivalent signature of
writing, reaffirming the critical role of discursive form in the the novelistic
articulation of Matildana's relational vision: "Matildana writes two Latin com-
positions, her own and Rehvana's . . . and sprinkles into Rehvana's work the
strings of frightened little demons that are Rehvana's adorable spelling mis-
takes" (341). It is this early capacity for discursive doubling and identitarian
transformation that functions as the overarching figure for the cultural
polyvocality that Matildana will untimately embody; as she reproduces on the
page the identifying traces of Rehvana's presence as well as her own, she em-
bodies the strategic tensions that secure and separate self and Other, subject
and object, sameness and difference. And it is these opposing patterns of
affiliation and indivisibility, pitting the confines of ethnic homogeneity against
the possibilities of cultural heterogeneity, that ultimately dictate the novel's
twin teleologies of death and survival.




L'Autre qui danse / 193


   Rehvana's death, when it finally does occur, is, in a sense, reported rather
than re-presented. It appears, in the chapter "Nulle Part," as an innocuous
newspaper item read by Matildana's seatmate on a flight from Fort-de-France
to Paris. This anonymous leavetaking is all the more ironic given Matildana's
simultaneous distance from her sibling's death and proximity to its discursive
reproduction; the old woman she has just helped heave her bag into the over-
head compartment, and who then reads "that a young Antillean woman had
been found starved to death with her child in a housing project in the Parisian
suburbs" (358) can have no inkling, despite the tears of sympathy that she
sheds, that the article's unfortunate subject is her neighbor's hapless, long-lost
sister.
   Metaphorically, Matildana's imminent arrival echoes her sister's definitive
departure. In a final, symbolic gesture of transformation, the original metro-
politan site of binary division and colonial transgression is rewritten as an
infinitely malleable cultural and subjective space, one that metes out both the
ineluctability of erasure and the infinite promise of creolized climates of
change and survival through the plethora of discourses and desires it re-pre-
sents as part of the transformative terrain of present-day postcolonial culture.
In the complex context that undergirds the disjunctures of French overseas
departmentalism, working through such pluralized patterns of creoleness and
metissage can illuminate the dilemma posed by a sense of exile and the search
for oneness, even as new fields of discursive and subjective possibility for Car-
ibbean women are opened up. As Frangoise Lionnet points out, "Rehvana and
Matildana are certainly two sides of the same character: the one who feels
exiled and the one who feels anchored, the one who searches for origins and
the one who comfortably assumes global citizenship" (1995:99). In the inces-
sant, dialectical oscillation between the incommensurable opposites of tradi-
tion and modernity, adulteration and authenticity, these sisters' twin trajecto-
ries instantiate the double Caribbean problematic inscribed between the lines
of ethnicity and identity: Rehvana, ironically, becomes "that unknown young
woman who allowed herself, at la Corneuve, at Quatre-Mille, a death worthy
of the African desert since she was incapable of living as an African" (358), as
she refigures that imaginary insistence on intangible modes and models of an
absolute authenticity that ultimately proved her undoing. Matildana, the
"other" for whom dance proved an early metaphor for her openness, spontane-
ity, and active acceptance of and participation in a creole network of cultural




194 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


signification, reframes the Parisian discursive space as one of both exile and
return, articulating a critical metamorphosis that, in Stuart Hall's words, gives
rise to "a new conception of ethnicity as a kind of counter to the old discourses
of nationalism or national identity" (1987:460). In this way, an identitarian
strategy inscribed through and across difference defines a new space for the
dom-tomienne, finally subordinating traditional metropolitan claims of mas-
tery to the differential, discursive claims of a heterogeneous creolization.
   The complex concatenation of dilemmas that confronts the metis female
Caribbean departmental subject is complicated even further here by the is-
sues of exile, integration, and positionality that frame the construction of cul-
tural identity in the region. But within these multilayered modalities we can
locate two specific but divergent subjective strategies vying for a strategic space
of survival that can empower a disenfranchised Antillean femininity struggling
against the exacerbating forces of racial and cultural displacement. Dracius-
Pinalie's discourse of liberation has deliberately articulated a wider vision of
creoleness for the contemporary dom-tomienne, avoiding the inviting but ulti-
mately reductive scenario in which, as Gayatri Spivak has suggested, "contem-
porary neocolonialism is seen only from the undoubtedly complex and impor-
tant but restrictive perspective or explanatory context of metropolitan, internal
colonization of the post-colonial migrant or neo-colonial immigrant" (1992:
98). Thus the construction of an effective subjective strategy that will reflect
the paradoxes of an interstitial composite of identity, ethnicity, and place for
the Antillean woman remains a vital discursive challenge. For the French
Caribbean female writer, then, the overriding concern must lie in this critical
conflation of discourse and identity, working, as Frangoise Lionnet states, "to
elaborate discursive patterns that will. . . displace the traditional distinctions of
rigidly defined literary genres" (1988:261). The pressing problematic of strat-
egizing alternate terms and conditions for Caribbean female authorship and
the corollaries of subjectivity it constructs are effectively yoked together in
Dracius-Pinalie's striking subversion of the traditional images of Caribbean
womanhood. The search for self-definition whose boundaries are charted by
this text install new, affiliative categories for female socialization in the re-
gion.
   In his seminal study of the origin and development of cultural metissage in
the Caribbean, Ren6 Depestre insists upon the relational dynamism integral
to the double phenomenon of marooning and admixture that is the region's
primary social and cultural heritage. The re-vision resulting from this se-




L'Autre qui danse / 195


quence of marooning and identitarian mutation eventuated an intercultur-
ality which is the basis for a specific subjectivity founded on reconstitutive
practices of pluralism and difference. According to Depestre: "Interculturality
is the characteristic, the common denominator of the Caribbean people on all
levels of their psychology and their behavior in society. They have created new
values and in as much as these were lived values, they carried within them the
universal" (1984:7). These intercultural values help to expand and redefine the
boundaries of a departmental culture marked by its difference from the Euro-
pean and the African axes while mapping a discursive space for itself that is
more than both. Transforming these terms, Dracius-Pinalie's discourse maps a
modernist space for the metis female voice, delineating and interrogating a
cosmopolitan politics and poetics of place that helps to redefine Caribbean
womanhood.
   It is not coincidental that the title of this novel is itself also an exercise in
intertextual doubling: in a kind of discursive synechdoche, it is drawn in part
from Baudelaire's poem "Le Serpent qui danse" in Les Fleurs du mal, from the
intrinsic opposition between freedom and restraint inscribed in the line "One
might say that it was a serpent dancing at the end of a rod" (57). Here, the baton
serves to maintain the dance through the implied threat of force, but ulti-
mately it cannot control the snake's dangerous, innate liberty. More impor-
tant, perhaps, the author also draws on a critical scene in Alfred de Musset's
On ne badine pas avec l'amour, in which Perdican and Camille are at odds
over the impending marriage planned for them by the Baron.7 In act 2, scene
5, Camille explains at length to Perdican her reasons for returning to the con-
vent instead of remaining in society. In order to demonstrate her argument,
she then describes to him a painting in the chateau in which there is a monk
sitting in his cell, bent over his missal; visible through the bars, there is also an
Italian-style inn, in front of which a goatherd is dancing. Asked which of the
two he prefers, Perdican replies, "Neither one nor the other and both of them
... one of them reads and the other dances" (64). But there is more to this pair
than just a simple binary opposition. Linked by their similarity as much as their
difference, these figures seem to inhabit discursive spaces that tend to oppose
as well as to merge with each other; activity is set against passivity, intellectual-
ism versus participation, but both subjects, in the end, are engaged at some
level with existence.
   What does this dichotomy-one for whose axes Perdican indicates no pref-
erence-symbolize for the discursive worlds of Matildana and Rehvana? Per-




196 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


haps, in the double gesture of metissage, these figures are not as opposed to
each other as they at first appear; by choosing "both" over "one" or "the other,"
that is, through his preference for the advantages of admixture, the full cul-
tural and historical measure of the subject can finally be explored to its fullest
extent. It is the judicious conflation of the historical hierarchies of metissage
that frames both Rehvana and Matildana, that transmutes the colonial trace
through the cultural interaction that highlights both their differences and their
similarities as symbiotic sites of creole possibility.
   Given the constructed constraints and commonalities of the modernities
that frame both the "third island" of the metropole and the DOM-TOM, iden-
tity must, in the end, be ineluctably plural. But as Evelyn O'Callaghan re-
minds us, "There is no one authentic West Indian identity, much less a
definitive female one" (1993:13; emphasis in the original). The survivalist strat-
egies inscribed here reflect the multiplicities of an interrelational model of
difference that disturbs prevalent notions of origin and return even as it re-
locates and transforms the heterogeneities of a collective consciousness. It is
the richness and variety, as well as the expansiveness and unpredictability, of
this cultural interplay, its re-formation of the old into a new order of values and
practices, that Jamaican critic Rex Nettleford sums up as "an organic whole
inextricably bound up and expressive of a new and rich phenomenon which is
neither Africa nor Europe, yet embodying the two in unprecedented and cre-
ative modes of relationship" (1970:173). Metissage is grounded in the inter-
stices of this paradoxical neither/nor relationship, dis-placing and re-placing
the binary-driven boundaries of a dominant departmental neocolonialism
through the creative expression of the multiple modalities of creoleness that
are the heritage of the colonial encounter. Its effects reshape and redefine the
boundaries of regional identity by dis-placing the double colonization that has
historically insisted on positioning the feminine Caribbean subject.













Solibo Magnifique
Carnival, Opposition, and the Narration of the Caribbean Maroon


Chaque livre est un homme. Chaque
  mot tremble du fourmillement des siecles d'ecriture.
Patrick Chamoiseau and Rapha81 Confiant, Lettres crioles






Marooning the Text

Comparatively speaking, the rise of the Martinican novelist Patrick Cha-
moiseau to the pinnacle of contemporary francophone fiction writing might
appear to certain eyes to be somewhat precipitate. Born in 1953, Chamoiseau
grew up the son of working-class parents in the island that remains his home.
He studied sociology and law in Paris, moved back to Martinique and became
a social worker, and indeed still works as a probation officer. Yet, prior to 1992,
when he received France's most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt, for
his third full-length novel, Texaco, an allegorized retelling of Martinican life
through the inhabitants of one of Fort-de-France's principal shantytowns,
Chamoiseau was known primarily as the author of several collections of short
stories and a couple of original, even inventive novels, and also recognized as
the coauthor, along with the linguist Jean Bernab6 and the novelist Raphael
Confiant, of a duo of theoretical works that sought to ground the French
Caribbean experience in the principles of crdolitd, a cultural and discursive
framework originated by these authors that valorized the pluralisms and
discontinuities of language, history, and ethnicity that had eventuated the
commonalities of the Caribbean diaspora. The fact that Chamoiseau was cata-
pulted to the heady heights of international fame through the inescapable
paradox of metropolitan recognition of the cultural production of the




198 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


postcolonial periphery that it still maintained in neocolonial thrall was not lost
among the many plaudits and commendations that followed. While metro-
politan recognition of his literary prowess went a long way toward finally mov-
ing French Caribbean literature as a whole closer to the center of a long noto-
riously narcissistic canon, at the same time, the process of centering brought
about by this act of approbation raised the inevitable question of the literary
and cultural assimilation of a field whose origins and very raison d'etre resided
precisely in its historical determination to assert its difference from the
metropole.
   However, somewhat contrary to the direction of this contemporary canoni-
zation, I focus in this chapter on one of Chamoiseau's earlier works, Solibo
Magnifiquel in which, as I hope to show, his self-reflexive inscription of tradi-
tional Caribbean tropes based on a carnivalesque sense of parody and play and
a whirlwind of verbal manipulation succeeds in re-presenting the complex,
interwoven structures of a society tracing a fiercely independent path between
cultures, between worlds, between the disappearing patterns of an evanescant,
plantation-centered age and the plural possibilities of a developing, heteroge-
neous creolization.
   This is not the moment to interrogate the intricacies of creolite, or, for that
matter, to outline the historical framework that undergirds Chamoiseau's vi-
sion of contemporary Caribbean creole culture. Indeed, much of this subject
has already been rehearsed in the introduction. But any reading of Solibo
Magnifique must come to terms with the slave-based phenomenon of
marronnage, or marooning, and with the figural role of the maroon, or run-
away slave, as an identitarian icon of rebellion and liberation for the Carib-
bean diaspora. It is this figure that both informs and determines not only the
paradigmatic persona of Solibo but the patterns of parody, pastiche, and self-
reflexivity that structure the discourse of the novel.
   The roots of the maroon figure lie in the veiled colonial mists of slave rebel-
lion, and the reality of the runaway slave has been recognized as being of piv-
otal importance, a fundamental element in the construction of an indigenous
opposition movement for the Caribbean people. Indeed, even apart from acts
of individual or group rebellion, of which the plantocracy lived in constant
fear, the ubiquity of runaways was inescapable. As Michael Craton points out:
"Wherever there were slave plantations, there were runaways; wherever run-
aways banded together and sustained themselves in the wilds, they can prop-
erly be called maroons. True maroons were found at one time or another in




Solibo Magnifique / 199


virtually every plantation colony, however small" (1982:61). Overall, then, the
plantation hierarchy suffered a number of large and violent slave revolts, but it
was certainly also faced with a sliding scale of acts of marronnage, since these
were by no means limited to the larger islands. There can be no denying the
fact that slaves generally resisted their treatment as chattel and came to revere
the successful practitioners of both the individual acts of petit marronnage and
the installation of larger, self-sustaining maroon communities that, in the most
successful cases, evolved a level of military effectiveness that forced the colo-
nial administration into signing peace treaties with them. The importance of
these maroon rebellions as models of autonomy and independence cannot be
overstated. As Craton writes: "Maroon communities were deeply inimical to
the slave plantation nexus because they offered a rival version of creolization.
. . . Maroon communities and their life-style were bound to provide an ad-
mired ideal for those still enslaved" (1982:64). It was the twin tensions in-
scribed between an idealized self-determination and the inauguration of an
indigenous creole consciousness that would provide the impetus for the con-
struction of modernist metaphors of cultural opposition based on models of
maroon courage and defiance.2
   The important parallel to be established at this juncture is the gradual
transformation of the model of the marronneur into the paroleur, or the
conteur, a metaphorical transposition of acts of opposition from the sociopolit-
ical to the discursive plane. In the search for a subaltern subject capable of
serving as an idealized paradigm of heroic opposition, one capable of encom-
passing the entirety of the physical contestation and verbal dissimulation that
grounds the temporal trace of the Caribbean experience, the maroon figure
became the embodiment of a native creole independence of wit and will that
traversed the period from the arrival of the earliest slaves to the gradual disap-
pearance of the plantation era. These pulsating patterns of cultural contesta-
tion help to explain Chamoiseau's choice of the menu peuple to shoulder the
oppositional role that seeks to keep both the bdkds and the metropole at bay; as
Richard Burton explains, "The day worker is the perfect maroon, except that
the town becomes the site of his tasks and that it is within the system itself that
he carries out his complex opposionality" (1997b:167). For if the history of the
Caribbean region was, in large part, a history written by the colonizer, one
which tended to stress the colonizer's view that the slave subject was marked by
his or her natural docility and acceptance of subjection, then the very ubiquity
of slave opposition across the length and breadth of the region would provide




200 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

the discursive and metaphorical framework for the construction of an autono-
mous, emancipatory model of creole consciousness that the social phenom-
ena of carnival and departmentalization might transform but not transcend.
Chamoiseau's work, like that of the creolistes, is a discursive act inscribed as a
response to colonial elaborations of authority and forced subordination, and
must ultimately be read within such a framework. As Burton continues, "As an
oppositional culture of the dominated, Crdolitd can only be understood
through the structures of power which it opposes, and only through them, and
their implied connection of power and writing, can any critical discussion of
Chamoiseau's work take place" (1997b:158). It is this interplay between dis-
course and power, between orality, tradition, and the problematics of re-pre-
sentation, that informs in its turn our reading of Chamoiseau's Solibo.3
   For the French Caribbean, just as for the rest of the region, the history of
rebellion against colonial imposition was long and persistent. The first slave
rebellion broke out in Guadeloupe in 1656, barely twenty years after the
island's colonization in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu's Compagnie des Iles
d'Amerique. In the eighteenth century, revolts broke out again in Guadeloupe
in 1737 and in Martinique in 1752, and the revolt in 1802 in Guadeloupe pro-
vided, as we have seen, much of the discursive background to Daniel
Maximin's L'Isold Soleil. With the entire region galvanized by the great slave
rebellion of Saint-Domingue in 1791, Martinique found itself forced to quash
a series of rebellions in 1822, 1824, and 1831. Thus this was a period that, in Eric
Williams's words, "afforded the slaves. . . examples of the success of the policy
of revolt," and bore witness to "the passion for freedom among the slaves and
the will to fight for it" (1970:198, 199). The task now would be to transpose this
tradition of refusal and revolt into a tropological framework of opposition and
enfranchisement for the protagonists of regional fiction. For an account of
Chamoiseau's vision of the marronneur's role in this discursive process, we
must turn now to a reading of his Lettres crdoles.


A Creole Caribbean History

Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant published Lettres crdoles in 1991,
two years after their publication, in conjunction with the Guadeloupean lin-
guist Jean Bernab6, of Eloge de la crdolitd, their manifesto articulating the
terms of a creoleness to be pursued in art and letters. The subtitle of the Lettres,
Tracies antillaises et continentales de la littirature, 1635--1975, summed up its




Solibo Magnifique / 201


authors' intent: to trace the contours of literary development in the French
Caribbean overseas departments, and to explore the wider relation between
history, politics, language, races, cultures, and literary genres, as they have all
been eventuated in the fertile basin of the Caribbean Sea. The growth and
development of this pluri-ethnic culture, and the integral role played in it by
the descendants of black African slaves as the primary social group, is well
documented. As Josette Fallope explains: "The Caribbean region is of over-
whelming importance in realizing this creole culture. . . . The appropriation
of this space was both transformative and adaptive. Since slavery, Blacks have
explored the Caribbean in all its myriad possibilities" (1994:45). The task of
exploring and re-presenting the myriad of plural possibilities inscribed in this
geopolitical space would demand an intrinsically polyvocalic perspective,
since it both assumed and sought to animate the network of affiliations and
alliances engendered and transformed in combination with and promoted in
the wake of the colonial encounter. The complexities of this cultural con-
figuration bring us in turn to the metaphorical evolution of the historical
figure of the maroon.
   In the Lettres, then, Chamoiseau and Confiant were at some pains to trace
the path taken by and the symbolic importance of the figure of the maroon in
the exigencies of historical and cultural experience in the region to link him to
the emancipatory, tricksterlike figure of the conteur. For a variety of cultures,
the figure of the storyteller has long fulfilled a key symbolic and transforma-
tional role, both as transmitter of identitarian traditions and as the signifying
center of the constituent community; it is a double challenge whose contours
have been succintly mapped by Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Story-
teller": "Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source
from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written
down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the
speech of the many nameless storytellers" (1968:84). By conflating the inscrip-
tion of community identity with a form of discourse that most resembles
speech, Benjamin effectively valorizes that very category of oral cultural pro-
duction framed by Chamoiseau and Confiant in the Lettres as oraliture, and
whose importance to the recognition and continuity of the social whole
Chamoiseau seeks to re-present in Solibo Magnifique.
   However, in the context of a francophone Caribbean literary history of re-
sistance upon which this generation of writers could draw, the act of
marronnage from which the figure of the conteur derives was perhaps first




202 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


discursively valorized by none other than Aim6 Cesaire in "Le Verbe
marronner," his circa 1950 poem to his Haitian friend and colleague Ren6
Depestre.
   Here, the ambitious ambiguities of negritude provide a self-assertive histori-
cal context; maroon liberation is clearly conflated with the scriptive project
that envisions a regional cultural identity: "Shall we turn maroon? Depestre,
shall we turn maroon? /. . . Bah! Depestre the poem is not a mill for / grinding
sugar cane absolutely not /. . . it is undoubtably a very serious problem / the
relation between poetry and Revolution/the content determines the form"
(1983:368-71). By placing poetry and the concept of revolutionary change in
the Caribbean into close proximity, Cesaire succeeds in appropriating discur-
sive invention to transformatively engender a framework for the articulation of
the regional experience. As Gregson Davis points out, "In inventing a verb, 'to
maroon' (marronner), based on the noun denoting slaves who escaped from
the New World plantation to live in autonomous communities, the speaker
hoists aloft the banner of artistic freedom and resistance to cultural totalitari-
anism" (1997:17). By joining the idea of resistance to the reality of marronnage
through discourse, then, Cesaire's gesture serves as an effective paradigm for
the later development of the maroon model as an effective formula for con-
structing new narrative possibilities from the material historicity of the French
Caribbean.
   In the orality-driven communities of the Caribbean, the subtle strategies of
tradition and change were also embedded in the complexities of the creole
language and its critical mediation of social resistance; as Edouard Glissant
succinctly states in Caribbean Discourse, "Camouflage. The creole language
was constituted around such a stategy of trickery" (21/33). Thus the seeds of this
transformative tension that bind the conteur to the maroon take hold almost
from the inaugural moment of the slavery/plantation regime itself and, in-
deed, recur consistently in Glissant's creative and theoretical work. As he sug-
gests in Poetics of Relation, "In the silent universe of the Plantation, oral ex-
pression, the only form possible for the slaves, was discontinuously organized
... the same discontinuity the Maroons created through that other detour
called marronnage" (68/82). The key parallel of discontinuity that Glissant
draws between the verbal act of expression and the physical act of marronnage
demonstrates the simultaneous importance of rupture and of the transmission
and transformation of tradition that came into being in the plurality of voices
and beliefs forced to coexist in the hold of the slave ship, in the cry of protest




Solibo Magnifique / 203


and bewilderment that Chamoiseau and Confiant see as issuing from this
cradle of colonialism's depravity: "In the ship's hold, there are several African
languages, several gods, several ways of perceiving the world. Where does the
cry come from? From which cultural basis, from which language? Will its
poetics reveal itself as a whole which will save all? We must imagine this, for
this outcry contradicted the colonial purpose" (1991:33). It is this inaugural,
emancipatory cry that will ultimately give rise to the verbalized acts of contes-
tation and identity inscribed in the discontinuous discourse of the conteur. In
this silence that marks "the first rupture" (33), there are already the traces of an
insistent difference. For if, as Chamoiseau himself insists in Ecrire en pays
domind, "the hold of a slave ship is not a point of departure, but a fulcrum
leading towards incredible possibilities" (1997:203), it is the signification in-
trinsic to these newfound fields of possibility, resited and restructured in the
wake of the colonial encounter, that opens up the relational, foundational
forces of social survival that engenders, in turn, the conflictual synthesis of this
cultural mosaic.4
   Almost immediately, then, the historical link between the negre marron and
the conteur is established and inscribed, a link that draws its figural power of
contestation from the strategic doubling of dissimulation and difference. "The
inheritor of the cry," write Chamoiseau and Confiant, "will be the maroon
(the one who escaped from the household to hide his resistance in the hills),
but the artist of the cry, the recipient of its poetics, the progenitor of the literary
trace who stays on the plantation will be the Speaker, our creole storyteller. It
is he who, in the midst of the fields and the sugar factories, will take up in his
turn the resistance to the colonial order, using his own art as a didactic mask"
(1991:35). By stressing the difference between the "inheritor" and the "artist" of
the "cry," the text accentuates the strategic importance of this symbolic discon-
tinuity that is doubled and reenacted through discourse. With the conteur
creole now inscribed as a primary figure of opposition, and the creative power
of this paroleur made even more intrinsic to the elaboration of identity, it is
critical to note that combatting the colonial will through the articulation of
deception and disjuncture is in fact the role of the conteur, but that he is a
figure, as Chamoiseau and Confiant point out, "who . . . does not exactly
resemble the maroon" (1991:59). Indeed, far from overtly embodying the char-
acteristic spirit of revolt symbolized by the marron, the conteur as artist and
symbol seeks to give voice to that vast majority of slaves who did not succeed in
making good their escape from the plantation but yet embodied a spirit and




204 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


praxis of resistance in the carrying out of their day-to-day existences. In this
way, the conteur can in fact appear to create almost exactly the opposite im-
pression; Chamoiseau and Confiant call him "a peaceful fellow, almost an
Uncle Tom, that the Bakra does not fear and in fact trusts, to the point of letting
him speak" (1991:59; emphasis mine). But it is in the tension between his ap-
parently peaceable character and this very authorization to speak that the sub-
versive potential of discursive displacement lurks.
   What draws these figures together is their shared capacity for contestation,
albeit on different discursive planes. But where the marron carried out a mili-
tary and political program of subversion and revolt, the conteur set himself
apart by disturbing, and ultimately reversing, the tranquil superficiality of the
plantation's set hierarchy of domination and dependence. "Tolerated by the
colonial slave system, the conteur is the vocal representative of a shackled
people, living in fear and attempting to survive," write Chamoiseau and
Confiant (1991:59). Voice of the voiceless, adopting and adapting a variety of
discursive postures aimed at taking advantage of his systemic invisibility, the
praxis of the conteur is ultimately of the same order as that of the marron: the
subversion and overturning of metropolitan domination. Expertly intertwin-
ing voice, content, and delivery, it is the artistry of both sign and act that gives
significance to this nascent poetics of the people, marking out a discursive
space whose identitarian opposition is the product of the disjunctive meta-
phors of creole artistry.
   This mode of artistic production hinges on language and is grounded in the
historical construction of creole languages; such structures, as we have seen,
facilitated the various levels of communication that contested colonial domi-
nance and hegemony while articulating a new, collective identity for the in-
heritors of the displaced African diaspora. It is here, then, at this point of colo-
nial mimesis and conjunction that transforms African and European patterns
into Caribbean cultures, that the beginnings of a creole consciousness are
instantiated; the historic polarities that separate colonizer from colonized are
transmuted into the patterns of cultural appropriation instilled by displacing
the linearities of colonial domination. Already, then, through this vision, the
foundation for the conteur's role as contestatory vox populi has been firmly
laid; the ineluctable disparateness and difference of his Caribbean heritage
translated into a multiform discourse of opposition and identity that seeks to
transmute the conteur's verbal acts of resistance into a fully constituted
affiliative discourse that embodies the past and present community spirit.




Solibo Magnifique / 2o


   With the exigencies of the Caribbean plantation system therefore mediat-
ing what Chamoiseau and Confiant call "the birth of the creole storyteller
within the framework of nocturnal liberty" (1991:56), it is possible to see the
production of discursive strategies of dissimulation as part and parcel of an
overall pattern of revolt and self-definition that functions through the inter-
stices of language and culture. It is this conflation of culture and orality in a
polysemic context of protest that transforms orality itself into a culturally
specific form of performance, ultimately producing the conjoined creole co-
nundrum of oraliture. "Creole oraliture, write Chamoiseau and Confiant,
"was born in the plantation system, both within and against slavery, in a ques-
tioning dynamic which both accepts and refuses. It confronts the 'values' of the
colonial system, and subversively inscribes its counter-values, a counter-cul-
ture" (1991:57). Here the ambiguities of Caribbean identity are not only ac-
knowledged but appropriated and re-placed within a continuum of colonial
contestation whose simultaneities of revolt and acceptance ultimately pro-
duce the modernist multiplicities of a creole counterculture. And in this pri-
mal framework that inscribes the critical plurality of the word is drawn the
framework for a consolidated discourse of cultural opposition.
   Chamoiseau's discourse, then, is articulated through a subtle strategy of
doubling, drawing on the twin axes of culture and history to arrive at a complex
elaboration of the temporalities and teleologies of the common Caribbean
experiences of exile, displacement, and creolization. Further, the centrality of
language and its role on the plantation are here both acknowledged and trans-
formed. As Jane Brooks suggests: "The folktale. .. is dominated by three major
themes . . . ruse, hunger and revolt. Traditionally, the tales are told outside at
night ... and ... have four functions: to give the community a medium of self-
expression, to store memories, to entertain and to voice resistance" (1999:131-
32). In his social role, then, the storyteller adds a critical dimension of self-
assertion to a community already displaced to the margins.
   It is thus the tension at work within these linguistic and subjective conjunc-
tures of the creole that is of cardinal importance in fashioning a diachronic
framework for the textual elaboration of an oppositional strategy of discursive
identitarianism. It should by now be clear that the creole constructs that were
articulated over time in the Caribbean were not the product of a simple pro-
cess of blending and homogenization of subtly variant elements, but rather the
heterogeneous outcome of the constant conflict and contention that accom-
panied the colonial encounter. The resulting ambiguities and contradictions




206 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


signal the inscription of critical patterns of doubling and dissimulation that
help to strategize a framework for an identity drawn in oppositional terms,
tracing the transmutation of the historical site through the radical transforma-
tion of its key tenets and tensions. As such, this process draws on Michel de
Certeau's critical operational distinction between resistance and opposition;
by stressing the positional difference between an internally derived strategy of
opposition, re-writing and re-placing the tools and customs of the system itself,
and an externally derived strategy of resistance, in which change is wrought by
bringing to bear concepts and policies from outside the system, de Certeau
articulates the basis of a discursive praxis that allows the incorporation of those
key metastasizing metaphors that have shaped the oppositional contours of a
creole poetics.'
   Language assumes pride of place, then, because it becomes the primary
weapon in this identitarian arsenal; in this context, it allows the conteur to
vitalize a collective voice of protest and parody that speaks to metropolitan
domination in the name of the people. In this sense, the communal spirit of
revolt that is at the core of marronnage is rearticulated as a vital collective
memory; as Elias Khoury points out, "Language is the repository of the collec-
tive memory. It is the basic national value which must be preserved" (1982:
245). Language mediates the composite field that links the marron to the
conteur, signifying in its disjunctures the complex struggle continually being
waged by the linguistic and cultural axes of the creole. As such, it is in the
vanguard of the array of strategic approaches to cultural difference and cul-
tural identity, acting as both vehicle and arbiter of this composite network of
opposition and contestation. Its importance in a sociopolitical context of
struggle cannot be overstated; as Barbara Harlow indicates, "Culture, then,
and language are critical as an arena of struggle, no less than as a part of that
struggle, as one of the weapons. . . . The use of language is crucial, both as
challenge to the antagonist and in redefining the identity of the protagonist"
(1987:55). The persistent proliferation of these overlapping axes of doubling
grounds these articulations of identity and allows this process of discursive
marooning to take shape.
   Such a framework would appear to be appropriate to the task at hand, tak-
ing adequate account of Caribbean specificities of history, culture, and social
structure to construct a theoretical basis for the discursive disposition of revolt
and dissimulation in the region. But it is precisely this framework, and its sup-
posed capacity for propagating gender-based disjunctures of homophobic and




Solibo Magnifique / 20


phallogocentric domination, that have come under fire from the critic A.
James Arnold. Firing the opening salvo in the 1995 collection of essays titled
Penser la crdolite-one whose original title, interestingly enough, was to have
been Repenser la crdolite-Arnold assails Chamoiseau and Confiant in par-
ticular for deliberately excluding women from the creole tradition and, fur-
ther, for a discursive overinvestment of the figure of the maroon, and indeed
challenges the very validity of the maroon paradigm: "We should note, how-
ever, that in the French West Indies these are imaginary, rather than historical,
heroes. Moreover, within this model of a nascent creole culture, the maroons
could not . . . be the effective vehicle for transmission of the syncretic new
culture that would come down to the present day" (1995:29). Arnold's attack,
launched as the keynote address of a francophone Caribbean colloquium in
October 1993, titled "Expanding the Definition of Crdolitd" and held at the
University of Maryland at College Park, remained until the original publica-
tion, in a 1997 number of the journal Cultural Anthropology, of Richard and
Sally Price's piece "Shadowboxing in the Mangrove," perhaps the most thor-
oughgoing interrogation yet published of the tenets and principles that
undergird the creolite movement. Both articles seek to call into question the
basic criteria within which the movement exists as an effective vehicle for
Caribbean cultural contestation.
   The charges laid by these authors are critical enough to warrant a reading
before proceeding from an outline of the maroon model to an assessment of its
discursive praxis. What do we make, first of all, of Arnold's excoriation of the
French Caribbean maroon, and of Chamoiseau and Confiant's attempt to
turn him into an iconic champion of a downtrodden people? We do not need
to recite the details of each maroon uprising and settlement in the Caribbean
between the inauguration of colonization and the arrival of emancipation in
order to recognize the overwhelming symbolic importance to a people held in
bondage of even the smallest act of rebellion and autonomy. As we have seen,
the great maroon uprisings documented in Jamaica, Dominica, Grenada, and
St. Vincent eventually combined with the smaller slave revolts that consis-
tently occurred on most of the islands-including, as we have seen, both
Guadeloupe and Martinique-to function as idealized paradigms of the possi-
bility of subaltern identity. This folklore of revolt produced larger-than-life
figures like Cudjoe, Tacky, and the female Jamaican rebel leader Nanny,
whose strategies of subversion inscribed events that told their enslaved coun-
terparts of heroism, resistance, and the innate possibilities of a flight to free-




208 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


dom. Indeed, no less an authority than Edouard Glissant has in Caribbean
Discourse defined the terms within which the marron functions as a heroic
figure for the regional population: "It is nonetheless the case, and we can never
emphasize this enough, that the maroon is the only popular Antillean hero,
and the incredible sufferings which marked his capture show the measure of
his courage and determination" (104). Given the entire region's subjection to
an unvarying regime of slavery, racism, and colonialism, then, these events did
not need to have occurred on the neighboring plantation for them to take fire
in the imagination either of the slave subject or of his or her descendants. On
a larger scale, history has shown that a people denied the birthright of its own
identity will ultimately salvage their own myths and heroes from the detritus of
their indigenous traditions, whether or not, in this particular context, large-
scale maroon movements took root and flourished in each and every Carib-
bean colony, since the success or failure of such movements does not intrinsi-
cally deny the symbolic value of even the smallest act of resistance or
opposition.
   It is not simply the content but also the form of the discursive articulation
undertaken by the figure of the conteur that arouses Arnold's ire. Indeed, he is
at particular pains to point out that the bdkd's trust and lack of apprehension of
the conteur conveyed in the phrase "presque de la qualit6 de l'Oncle Tom"
(59) from the Lettres crdoles is tantamount to "the total rehabilitation of the
Uncle Tom.... the only position remaining to those who would declare them-
selves the heirs to the oraliturain is that of castrated storyteller whose language
remains obscure, muffled or screamed (read: hysterical), at all events turned
away from the direct production of meaning" (Arnold 1995:31-32). Here, the
extent to which Arnold's reading is based on the misrepresentation or distor-
tion of specific historic patterns and traditions of Caribbean discursive resis-
tance from past to present must nevertheless be unpacked. For the patterns
and principles of quiet anarchy that reside here in the tension between the
word presque and the implicit acquiescence of the Uncle Tom figure mark the
world of difference that separates the subversion enacted by the one from the
subjugation of the other, in a framework where language as ruse and camou-
flage takes pride of place. It was precisely through this slippage between ap-
pearance and reality that this conteur was able to carry out his double duty of
subversion and cultural continuity and transformation, his tales and songs elic-
iting countervailing patterns of subversion and ridicule ranged against symbols
of colonial authority. The interaction resulting from such cycles of domina-




Solibo Magnifique / 209


tion and resistance between colonizer and colonized, both dislocated creole
subjects (from an etymological perspective) from the African and European
continents with no shared language, becomes the primary marker of a creole-
ness made increasingly and insistently Caribbean.
   From a more contemporary point of view, the historical transformation of
these discursive patterns into strategic articulations of subjectivity is in fact a
particularly Caribbean site of cultural expression. Any modicum of familiarity
with Caribbean life would clearly tend to suggest that the evolution over time
of the musical art form of the calypso, and the tradition of topical commentary,
satire, and social protest embodied in its primary exponent, the kaisonien
extraordinaire, has its roots in the practice of parody and dissent that emerged
among the displaced African slaves on the plantation; the ability to ridicule the
blissfully unaware plantation owner to his face in song is one that continues to
play a defining role in this society whose most distinctive feature is perhaps its
pervasive and multivalent orality. Indeed, not only in the French-speaking but
in the English-speaking Caribbean, where this art form has arguably attained
a pinnacle of perfection, the calypsonian's choice of parodic, even impossible
stage names, such as Lord Kitchener or the Mighty Destroyer, belongs to a
resistive tradition of social protest in which the core social values and figures of
the colonizing power are ridiculed and undermined, even as the physical
prowess and verbal stylings of the calypsonian himself are elevated, praised,
and even overvalued. Further, since the construction of creole society in the
Caribbean was the end product of the transformational tensions inscribed in
the colonial encounter, it stands to reason that, as Keith Warner suggests in his
history of the calypso as art form, "of the many traditions that combine to make
up the contemporary calypso, the West African griot also plays his part as dis-
tant forerunner or influence" (1982:38). This combination of storytelling,
praise singing, and the exaggerations of comic burlesque is at the core of the
deliberate indirection and polysemic patterns of double entendre upon which
so much of the calypso tradition is based, and allows the present-day calyp-
sonian, the inheritor of the tradition begun by the conteur and the griot, to
regularly and effectively articulate the people's protest and outrage, an overtly
oral gesture of critique aimed at confronting, in coded terms of social dissent,
the powers-that-be in the name of a people who cannot speak, or sing, for
themselves.
   From the beginning, then, the conteur's double role as conscience and
mouthpiece of his fellows has been at the core of his discursive appropriation




210 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


as a figure of revolt. Indeed, Chamoiseau and Confiant point out that "the
storyteller is first he who gives a voice to the group ... the delegate of a collective
imagination who adds his own art" (1991:62; emphasis in original). In an un-
canny parallel that demonstrates the long heritage of oraliture, the role of the
contemporary calypsonian renders him the community's social conscience as
well, a rebel interpreter and transmitter of the myriad complexities of the con-
temporary condition. As Warner points out, "The calypsonian constantly
monitors what is happening around him and uses the platform of the calypso
to expose to his listeners a point of view that is not only his personal one, but
more often than not is indicative of what the man in the street is thinking about
a particular situation" (1982:59). While this tellingly trenchant social and po-
litical commentary mediates unspoken but popular attitudes toward any num-
ber of regional issues, scandals, or events, of even greater importance is this
praxis of commentary, parody, and protest that goes back to the earliest days of
the plantation and the confrontational figure of the bdkd master. Quoting the
seventeenth-century West Indian historian Bryan Edwards, Warner establishes
the roots of this penchant for targeting the powers-that-be through a barrage of
verbal ridicule and indecorous innuendo often disguised as simple satiric cen-
sure: "There is, however, evidence that calypsoes-or at least the forerunners
of these songs-contained social commentary long before 1898. Historian
Bryan Edwards described the ability of slaves brought to the West Indies to give
full scope to a talent for ridicule 'which is exercised not only against each other
but also, not unfrequently, at the expense of their owner or employer"'
(1982:60). Thus, the conteur or paroleur who derides and disparages his colo-
nial master while giving the appearance of articulating another subject en-
tirely can locate plantation oral practices as the mediator of an Africa-based
tradition of oral resistance and the immediate harbinger of the contemporary
kaisonien. This verbal skill combined deception and derision, and, as Bill Ash-
croft and his coauthors point out in The Empire Writes Back, was born of the
need for plantation resistance: "Transplanted Africans found that psychic sur-
vival depended on their facility for a kind of double entendre. They were forced
to develop the skill of being able to say one thing in front of'massa' and have it
interpreted differently by their fellow slaves" (146). Far from being an Uncle
Tom figure, then, the practitioner of this brand of discursive subversion was in
reality only flattering to deceive, his primary aim being the accomplishment of
his subversive agenda; as Burton argues in Afro-Creole, "By voluntarily becom-
ing the smiling, fawning dullard that Massa or Busha believed him to be, the




Solibo Magnifique / 211


slave could adroitly turn the stereotype against them, preserving an inner free-
dom beneath the mask of compliance" (49).
   Historically, then, if the discursive resistance framed in contemporary
French Caribbean musical styles such as the traditional, Africa-derived gros-ka
and the polyrhythms of present-day zouk are the direct descendants of a covert,
clandestine plantation communication system shrouded in secrecy and
arcana and based on drumming and patterns of dissimulation, tracking this
historical trace makes it evident that far from embodying subservience and
docility, the conteur was in fact a rebel and revolutionary of the first water,
carrying out a radical program of discursive and political insurgency under the
very noses of those in authority, who saw in his innocuous inoffensiveness
nothing but an amusing apostate to be exploited and inveigled into betrayal.
Instead, such authoritarian icons were themselves made the unwitting victims
of an ongoing revolutionary practice of mockery and contempt meant to desta-
bilize the corrupt colonial edifice from within.
   Notwithstanding these complex actualities of the Caribbean postcolonial
experience, Arnold goes on to claim that the authors of the Lettres crdoles have
simply summarized the position articulated by Edouard Glissant in Le Dis-
cours antillais on the advent and evolution of "Le Detour." In fact, not content
with simply characterizing French Caribbean Creole as an "elliptical, hyp-
notic, obscure means of expression," he goes on to extricate from the text the
hypothesization of "a transpersonal motivation" to the development of creole,
located in the "collective unconscious" of the slave population (1995:31). But a
close reading of Glissant's vision of "Le Detour" in Caribbean Discourse re-
veals a construct whose very heterogeneity functions in direct contrast to the
reductive hegemonic unicity of what he terms "Reversion . . . the obsession
with a single origin.. . to negate contact" (16/30). This drive toward a mythical
oneness tends to disappear, however, when confronted with the complexities
of forced exile and the face of the unknown. In these terms, he continues, this
drive "will decline, therefore, as the memory of the ancestral country fades. ...
it will recede little by little with the need to come to terms with the new land"
(18/31). The dissimulations necessary to the slave population, then, render cre-
ole a transformative practice; "the slave takes as his own the language which his
master imposed on him, a simplified language, appropriate to the demands of
work (a black pidgin) and which pushes simplification to the limit. The end
result of creole discourse does not produce an indulgent smile but rather a
participatory laugh; it draws attention to itself, bringing together a common




212 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


practice of storytellers the world over, poetic competitors, griots, etc." (20/32-
33). As an indigenous, oppositional linguistic code of communication, then,
and the daily lingua franca of hundreds of thousands of subjects in a multiplic-
ity of Caribbean islands from Haiti to St. Vincent, creole is elliptical and ob-
scure only to those unable, or unwilling, to decipher the lexical and cultural
particulars of its standards and practices. At the same time, however, it would
be foolhardy to deny the potential identitarian and oppositional value to be
ascribed to possessing and manipulating a language whose content and form
remained completely impenetrable to the uninitiated outsider, or the con-
testatory value to be derived from concealing either vital information or, per-
versely, even the most insignificant detail from the colonial masters. It is in this
demonstrable degree of defiance that we may locate the capacity of creole to
"effect opposition to slavery, to colonial ideology, to inhumanity," as Cha-
moiseau and Confiant put it (1991:61); together, the vicissitudes of language
and the varieties of its articulation enact alternative temporalities of parody
and opposition that inscribe identity through linguistic acts of cultural contes-
tation.
   In other words, the choice of the conteur as the primary symbolic figure of
Caribbean cultural resistance is an inclusionary, rather than an exclusionary,
gesture; it acts as an affirmation of the ongoing orality of the Africa-based tradi-
tions undergirding the social whole, and grounds the specificity of its social
structure in a historical continuum of cultural transformation and opposition
that by its very nature is both plural and continually present. It is perhaps even
more important to point out that the figure of the conteur functions discur-
sively as a sign of communal opposition to the hierarchies of slavery and colo-
nialism grounded in a violence both verbal and political; indeed, it is in this
moment of differential transformation that the basis of Chamoiseau's discur-
sive praxis may be located.
   In Richard and Sally Price's recent piece "Shadowboxing in the Man-
grove," however, the insistence on prejudicial misreading that undergirds such
analyses is taken to a new level of discursive effect. Here, despite the inferences
that will likely be drawn from their opening statement that for the last decade
they have chosen to spend half of each year in Martinique, the Prices consis-
tently betray their formative vision as non-Antillean academics. Such attitudes
are put into place early on with their beginning characterization of Martinique
as "tiny" (126), the same pejorative appellation that the majority of Americans
tend to use when referring to any country that happens to be smaller than, say,




Solibo Magnifique / 213


Texas, California, or even Delaware. From here, despite the caveat that "we
are not studying people out 'there' from a home-base back 'here"' (124), they go
on to analyze the historical and epistemological foundations of the creolite
movement in terms that seem determined to posit only instability and absence
of historical rigor as the ground on which the movement is apparently
founded. But I would like to suggest that a closer look at the terms of such a
reading betrays a positionality whose claimed "Caribbeanness" must ulti-
mately be questioned.
   Such claims of the absence of a binary approach notwithstanding, the criti-
cal terms of this piece appear to pit creolit6 (creoleness) against francitd
(Frenchness), suggesting either an overinvestment in the metropole, on the
one hand, or an overvaluation of the French Caribbean-to the detriment of
the historiography of the rest of the archipelago-on the other. They open
their argument by describing Cesaire's seminal Cahier as being "written in
what was at once extraordinarily powerful, masterful, and subversive French"
(126), thereby at once establishing the implicit superiority of hexagonal
French usage over the creoliste praxis they claim to be objectively assessing.
From a larger perspective, the whole sets out to expose the supposedly flimsy
philosophical foundations of creolit6 yet does so from a decidedly referential
perspective on history and culture that quotes selectively and atemporally from
both creative and critical works in order to illustrate the innate weaknesses of
the movement's discourses. For example, their critique of the creolistes' "ex-
clusively Francophone" vision of the creole experience (128) cites cultural his-
torians who themselves engage the creole through the specificities of their
anglophone and hispanophone antecedents. To illustrate their conclusion
that the creolistes "rewrite central aspects of the Caribbean past" to "depict
maroons as somewhat uncultured isolationists" (129-30), fragments of phrases
and collections of references are thrown together across several pages from,
inter alia, Chamoiseau, and Confiant's Lettres crdoles, Chamoiseau's novel
Texaco, Bernab6, Chamoiseau and Confiant's Eloge de la crdolitd, Confiant's
Contes crioles des Amiriques and Les mattres de la parole creole, and Cha-
moiseau's Au temps de l'antan and Solibo Magnifique. But even more impor-
tant, even if we were to accept the historically referential context that claims
that "the central creolization process in those maroon societies was inter-Afri-
can syncretism" (130), the implicit interculturality of artistic expression that
the creolite of the Eloge has always reserved for itself-"full knowledge of
Creoleness will be reserved for Art, for Art absolutely" (90; emphasis in the origi-




214 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


nal)-and that renders it a symbolic, metaphoric framework, remains com-
pletely unacknowledged here. Such a reading, for example, is implicit in
Simon Gikandi's vision of the deliberate displacements and pluralisms that
comprise Caribbean modernist discourse when, in his introduction to Writing
in Limbo he posits the Caribbean maroon as "the most visible symbol of this
gesture of cultural dedoublement" (20; emphasis mine); it is the implicit exist-
ence of this symbolic framework and its intrinsic enabling of resistance that
allows the creolistes'figural shift from the maroon to the conteur to take place,
and that conversely links the Prices' positionality to that of Arnold.
   Most telling of all, perhaps, is their description of the praxis undergirding
the marqueur de paroles as "the agent of a ruse-based subversiveness compa-
rable to that of the slave-era conteur," the whole stemming from Martinique's
"deep imbrication in France and Europe" (131). Here, the inductive reasoning
that forces their insistence on Martinican francitd leads to a complete and total
misapprehension of the discursive, self-reflexive role of the marqueur. As the
figural representation of the impossibility of re-presenting the immediacy of
play and pluralism intrinsic to creole speech and social structure, the
marqueur has the goal of realism as well as resistance, a displaced re-citing of
sociocultural norms that preserves a sense of social immediacy rather than
exposing it to the codifications that are the corollaries of fiction. Such an
avowal of the limitations of their diegesis is an unconscious one and places the
coherence of the entire analysis at risk.
   The Prices go on from here to question Martinican claims to ethnic and
cultural diversity. After they define the Caribbean early on as "quintessentially
Western," this unproblematized cultural appellation is soon extended into the
area of ethnicity: "From a broader Caribbeanist perspective, however, the soci-
ety of Martinique looks anything but diverse" (132). This conclusion appears to
remain at the superficial level of "racial" attributes instead of taking into con-
sideration the complex possibilities of ethnic and cultural admixture and ex-
change. Here, however, in a vague generalization, Martinique is classified as
not "especially differentiated internally," a claim that ignores the real traces of
the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, African, East Asian, Leba-
nese, and Chinese postcolonial presence over time in the region, and the con-
comitant patterns of difference inscribed, inter alia, in language, music, reli-
gious practice, and popular culture. At the same time, such a claim implicitly
inscribes a hierarchical sliding scale of ethnic and cultural creolization in the
Caribbean in which each island and, presumably, each group would have its




Solibo Magnifique / 21


rightful and unalterable place. But even this conclusion leads to a further bi-
nary comparison, conflating "Caribbean settings" with their concomitant
"diasporic spaces like New York or Toronto, Miami, Paris or London" to then
inscribe Martinique as "relatively homogeneous" (133; emphasis in the origi-
nal), an act of discursive sleight-of-hand that insists on a metropolitan hierar-
chy of pluralism while effectively masking patterns of subversion of the
(neo)colonial site through the process of postcolonial metissage and transfor-
mation enacted by the migratory movements of its formerly subjugated popu-
lations.
   In a similar vein, a single choice quote from Derek Walcott's Arkansas
Testament is used to generalize more globally about his take on the seeming
Frenchness of Martinican culture and its "nauseous sense of heritage and or-
der" (75), an act of omission that somehow manages to ignore, or exclude, his
panegyric missive to Chamoiseau that followed the poet's reading of the former's
Texaco.6 His judgement that this "great book" (48) was a text that he would
have liked "to press . . . into the hands of every West Indian as if it were a lost
heirloom" (45), and that this re-presentation of "what [they] both grew up
with" (45) was signified by the fact that when they met, they spoke in Creole,
certainly would not have fit into this discursive and critical schema.
   These examples might suffice to demonstrate the selective claims that
ground this attempted deconstruction of the philosophical bases of creolite,
and to illustrate, as I argue, the extent to which recent readings of these authors
and their texts cannot shake off a grounding in the very metropolitan binarisms
and prejudices that they accuse the creolistes of themselves. The critique of
Martinican modernization undertaken by the Prices, while rightly character-
ized as "imposed from the metropole," is not altogether accurate in its claim
that the former is "profoundly assimilationist in spirit." Indeed, their critique of
metropolitan television programming, "electronic front gates, home security
systems, travel agents, and canned dog food" (136) could just as easily be ap-
plied to the neocolonial influences to which the anglophone, hispanophone,
and Dutch Caribbean are subject, and appears through its generalization to
implicitly negate the very possibility of modernity for the peoples of the region.
Yet it can be claimed that the very problematic of departmentalization finds its
origins in such calls for modernization, as Aim6 Cesaire points out in his Dis-
course on Colonialism: "It is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and
colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score. . . . it is the colonized man
who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back" (25).




216 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


The Prices attempt to resolve such a discursive dilemma by demonstrating a
desire to reinscribe Martinique into an impossibly mythical colonial or
precolonial past of ethnocultural purity, a position which goes against the
grain of the very process of creolization that these authors are supposedly at-
tempting to defend. Indeed, the modernization to which they refer is a global
phenomenon that in the final analysis differs little from the (neo)colonial
domination of the independent anglophone Caribbean, for example, first by
Britain and now by America; whether it be by cultural and media infiltration
meant to change the tastes and priorities of independent countries of the re-
gion, or through the ongoing fiction of the "Commonwealth" that joins Puerto
Rico and the Virgin Islands to the United States. And we should recognize that
it was colonization, and not just French television, that originally made "the
French language an omnipresent part of everyone's daily life" (136); French
has historically been the language of business and of instruction, and French
and creole have coexisted-as they continue to do-in the region for centu-
ries, whether or not the intrusions of modern-day television and radio have
extended the reach of the French language. A similar parallel of linguistic
doubling may easily be traced in the "English"-speaking Caribbean, one
whose multiple trajectories and precipitations -and their critical role in social
and discourse formation-have been most effectively described, perhaps, by
Derek Walcott. Finally, if the creolistes' "masculinist position," critiqued by
the Prices from a rather Arnoldian perspective, indeed stems from "the routine
sexism of Martiniquan daily life," in which apparently most Martiniquan
women are "complicitous" (140) (whether or not we agree that such a scenario,
like it or not, has long been a pan-Caribbean gender phenomenon, inscribed
in word, in song, and in deed, and from which no regional society is exempt),
do not the very terms of such a claim simultaneously beg the question of
French sexism? Of American sexism? Are we meant to recognize a culturally
relative sliding scale of greater and lesser sexist guilt? Or are metropolitan soci-
eties themselves exempt from this social scourge, allowing their subjects to
pass judgement on others?
   To sum up, what has been missing in this sequence of argumentation is that
very sense of intersectional pluralism that is at the core of the creolization
process. The problem with such critical approaches is that they end up re-
hearsing and reinscribing the very positions that they set out to critique,
grounding their arguments in discursive patterns and prejudices that maintain
the neocolonial binaries of self and Other. It is in the strategies that make up




Solibo Magnifique / 21


the work of Chamoiseau himself that countervailing creolized structures are
encountered, embodied, and most effectively articulated.
   I would like to suggest, then, that in the final analysis, Chamoiseau's discur-
sive gesture should be read from an inclusive and overtly plural perspective. In
this regard, the author's recent discursive reflections, in Ecrire en pays domind,
on the cardinal role writing plays in fashioning alternative multivalent strate-
gies for articulating cultural identity make the point well: "I saw myself
deconstructed to the depths in order to be reborn, flexible, with multiple ori-
gins. Writing should know the exact point of this dizziness" (123-24). From this
visionary genesis, grounded in a confident, pervasive pluralism, the important
social roles that have been and continue to be played in the French Caribbean
by women, by the metis, the coulies, and others are not ignored but can be seen
to be distributed across the discursive field such that the intrinsically plural
structures and possibilities of ethnic admixture and the continued transmis-
sion of creolized practices that together comprise this complex society are
functionally instantiated and inscribed in the narrative through the intrinsic
interplay of character and voice in its discursive and subjective structures.
   Ultimately, the value to be ascribed to the phenomenon of marronnage lies
precisely in its affirmation, despite all odds, of a communal spirit of creole
affirmation and identity in a historical context of domination and opposition
that continues to hold symbolic value for the community into the present, and
Chamoiseau and Confiant put this well in Lettres crdoles: "Even though it is
repressed, marooning has remained the only spot where the colonized creole
manages to express its defiance or its refusal of a destiny of which it has no part"
(115). With Solibo himself as textual sign of what the narrative calls "our ma-
roon way of life" (47), it is to the intersection of such indigenous patterns of
opposition with the particular polyvalence of the Caribbean identitarian
affirmation of carnival, and its role in appropriating multiple patterns and sites
of expression to elaborate effective patterns of cultural affirmations, that our
exegesis of Solibo Magnifique takes us next.


Interrogating "Vaval"

The complex network of figures and discourses that undergirds the texture of
Solibo Magnifique is impressive, at first glance, but a more in-depth interroga-
tion of its textual tropes reveals a reciprocal system of interactive signs that
functions simultaneously on several different levels to destabilize narrative




218 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


norms and to re-place select particulars of a creolized cultural tradition in the
forefront of the critical imagination. The details of these interlocking patterns
of discourse and culture emerge from a reading of the deceptively simple plot,
which can briefly be summarized here: Sometime between the evening of
Dimanche Gras and the morning of Ash Wednesday-that is, the two days that
mark the boundaries of the climax of carnival-the conteur Solibo dies before
an audience, having choked on what is termed an "6gorgette de la parole," or
fragment of the word, and having just uttered the pivotal phrase "Patat' sa!"
(8/25). Since the powers-that-be cannot allow such a mysterious and unprec-
edented form of death to go unexplained, a criminal investigation is launched
by the "Snrete urbaine de Fort-de-France," led by chief inspector Evariste
Pilon. With poison the leading suggested cause of death, a number of key
witnesses are interrogated and released, and two further deaths ensue in some-
what short order. While the testimony of these witnesses serves to illuminate
the character and lifestyle of the deceased, in the end Solibo's death remains
"mysterious from a medical point of view" (151/216); ultimately, the primary
question with which we are left is one of identity: "Who, but who was this
Solibo, and why 'Magnificent'?" (154/219).
   There is a triple-layered narrative code driving the organization of this poet-
ics of performativity, and the way that these layers reflect and refract reciproci-
ties of discursive signification also becomes the primary motor driving the ve-
hicle of the plot. In this case, by carefully timing the moment of Solibo's
demise, and engaging the disjunctures of analepsis and metacommentary to
re-present the community around its dead storytelling subject, Chamoiseau
has combined the opposition, parody, and play of the Caribbean carnival tradi-
tion both with the identitarian subversion embodied in the discourse of the
conteur and with the interrogation of the particular narrative structuration of
the detective novel. At the same time, the pressing fact of Solibo's inexplicable
yet carnivalesque death subjects the whole to a self-reflexive, metafictional
form of play that ultimately places narrator, storyteller, and tale under the sign
of a parodic mimetism that continually collapses upon its ephemeral attempts
to construct signifying contexts of social or investigative logic. The result is a
whirlpool of wordplay, a ludic interrogation of clues and content, character
and form that regressively refracts into an improbable, indiscernible infinity.
But in this narrative schema of reflection and reversal, all is ultimately subject
to the bacchanalian bravado of the Caribbean's creolization of carnival cel-
ebrations.




Solibo Magnifique / 219


   Traditions of the carnivalesque have been in existence, primarily in Eu-
rope, ever since the dawn of the modern age. It is therefore unsurprising that
fragments and remnants of these traditions should have surfaced in the Euro-
pean-held Caribbean colonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
transported to the region along with the horde of expatriate planters out to join
the ever-growing classes of the nouveau riche. Even today, carnival celebra-
tions are an integral part of the pre-Lenten festivities of such European cities as
Venice, Frankfurt, and Zurich, but, as I hope to show, the process of creoli-
zation that spawned the transformative tradition of performance that grounds
Caribbean carnival effectively separates the latter from the essentially Catho-
lic European model from which it sprang. As a result, any understanding or
analysis of the social role played by the cultural pluralisms driving the car-
nivalesque in the Caribbean must be fundamentally at odds with the pre-
modern patterns produced initially by Renaissance Europe.
   Carnival festivities, then, are seen mainly from the oppositional perspective
of the ribald, parodic, and grotesque subversion of established social norms
and religious rituals outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin. In Rabelais and His World,
Bakhtin analyzes carnival as a social practice of release, a communal extrava-
ganza of liberation and renewal: "During carnival time life is subject only to its
laws ... the laws of its own freedom" (7). This sense of social freedom produces
its own framework for self-expression; in their gloss on Bakhtin, Katerina Clark
and Michael Holquist support his contention that carnival celebrates the rec-
ognition and reversal of society's seamy underside: "Carnival is a minimally
ritualized antiritual, a festive celebration of the other, the gaps and holes in all
the mappings of the world laid out in systematic theologies, legal codes, nor-
mative poetics, and class hierarchies" (1984:300). It is this transgressional dia-
lectic between the sacred and the profane that creates a space of sedition
within which, as Richard Burton puts it, "the foundational oppositions of
'high' and 'low,' 'inside' and 'outside,' 'male' and 'female,' and the like are
joyously and extravagantly subverted to give birth to a utopian universe of play,
appetite, and unbridled sexuality and pleasure" (1997a:156). However, reloca-
tion of this essentially European subversion of the social order to a colonial
Caribbean context of the creole engenders the renegotiation and reposition-
ing of the ideological and performative parameters of carnival as it is (re)made
into a vehicle for identitarian and cultural contestation.
   The society eventuated in the Caribbean by the complex circumstances of
slavery, emancipation, ethnic admixture, and colonial subjugation ultimately




220 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


effected a complete transformation of carnivalesque principles and practices,
appropriating and refashioning its potential for subversion and liberation into
the polysemic contemporary round of revelry that is the basis for Chamoiseau's
text. From its beginnings during slavery as the monopoly of the white planter
and creole classes, carnival was slowly infused by the growth of the slave popu-
lation and the arrival after emancipation of indentured laborers from Africa,
China, India, and Europe, all of whom brought with them their own indig-
enous religious practices and social and cultural rituals. As Judith Bettelheim,
John Nunley, and Barbara Bridges point out in Caribbean Festival Arts, the
upper classes slowly withdrew from carnival, following which it increasingly
took on the trappings of masquerade competition, neighborhood rivalry, and a
religious, cultural, and aesthetic diversity embodying and reflecting the par-
ticularly Caribbean eclecticism of its celebrants: "The Caribbean's ethnic
complexion, as well as its dynamic economic and political history, are the
ingredients of its festival arts. . . . Caribbean festival arts are evidence of the
transformation worked by a creole aesthetic" (34-35). In other words, the eth-
nic and cultural pluralism that had become the defining sign of the region was
itself now reflected and refracted in the multiple manifestations and metamor-
phoses of kinship and belief systems that carnival came increasingly to convey.
   Addressing similar issues in the same collection, Rex Nettleford makes this
point well: "They adapted and adjusted, creating in the end expressions appro-
priate to their new circumstances. . . . But the sustaining lifeblood of these
events was the creation by the participants of masks to disguise, of music to
affirm, of dances to celebrate, as well as the germination of ideas beyond the
reach of those who brutishly supervised them for the rest of the year" (184).
Structuring and participating in the creole content of Caribbean carnival,
then, is an activity of a different order from briefly reversing the oppositional
dichotomies of "discipline" and "license," or "good" and "evil." It is inherently
a postcolonial celebration of resistance, of identity, multiplicity, and ethnic
and historical survival, in which parody and performance play equally critical
roles in defining and disseminating a national sense of self; it is a moment of
inordinate intensity, in Richard Burton's words, "in which the forces that gov-
ern 'ordinary' life are expressed with a particular salience, clarity, and elo-
quence" (1997a:157). Not so much a celebratory flouting and reversal of
society's accepted rules and norms as an engine of cultural empowerment, it is
a mirror held up to the intrinsic radicalism, flamboyance, and composite cre-
ativity of that society.




Solibo Magnifique / 221


   How, then, does this carnivalesque ludism impact upon the content and
discursive form of Solibo Magnifique? Or, to put this question another way, if,
as John Nunley suggests, Caribbean carnival praxis reflects "a national history
in which cultural clash, rebellion, liberation, and African heritage were most
important" (1988:116), in what sense do these forces undergird the outwardly
parodic polysemy of Chamoiseau's conflation of the drama of the conteur with
the narrative rulebook of the roman policier? I would like to suggest that this
novel functions primarily as a mirror of reversal held up to the dissonant, com-
posite temporalities and teleologies of the eternally evolving Caribbean
diaspora. To examine this aspect of the narration more closely, we must look
particularly at the way in which carnival reflects precisely the performativeness
and slippage that render its polysemic essence theoretically inadmissible to the
linear rigors of logic represented by the roman policier.
   If Chamoiseau appropriates new discursive terrain by deliberately inter-
twining the disjunctures of the carnivalesque with the themes and tensions of
the roman policier, then, let us examine the ground upon which these twin
typologies prove emblematic of the marooning that reflects the difference of
the Caribbean condition. While carnival celebrations in the French depart-
ments of Guadeloupe and Martinique are indeed marked by a conflation of
the cultural heterogeneity, costumed tradition, and performative panache
similar to the bacchanalian generalities noted above, conforming as well to a
pre-Lenten temporality-unlike some non-Catholic islands, where carnival is
explicitly linked to celebrating emancipation-they do incorporate certain
transformations and specificities that are particularly reflective of their island
experience. Chief among these is the eventual appearance of the god of carni-
val, Vaval, and the implicit importance of his likeness, or effigy, to the success
of the festivities. In a text written to accompany a photographic guide to her
native Guadeloupe, Maryse Cond6 discusses the centrality of Vaval to the cli-
max of carnival: "Carnival winds down on Ash Wednesday with the traditional
black and white figure. . . . in the waning light we praise Vaval, that dislocated
puppet Bwa-Bwa, and then we burn him. It's over" (1994:48). This construc-
tion and destruction of the god of carnival by the people themselves may be
read as symbolic of a resurgent control over this moment of pagan intoxica-
tion, when the full panorama of religious beliefs, ethnic admixture, and cul-
tural traditions that subtend this society are briefly given full rein.
   Chamoiseau's own text on Martinique in the same series reads the phenom-
enon of carnival in similar fashion: "And to end, Wednesday. . . . On this day




222 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


diablesses covered in the black and white rags of a joyous mourning.... We
danced around the effigy of Vaval, this pagan god of joy, and drowned him in
the bay while screaming our hearts out amid the flames" (1994:40). The fear-
some triad represented by Vaval, the "diablesse," or legendary Caribbean she-
devil linked to the syncretic traditions of vodou and obeah, and the implacable
approach of Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent illuminates the composite
character of Caribbean life, the creolized, cross-cultural, atemporal whole
now driven to fever pitch by the combination of license and licentiousness that
carnival brings. By positing carnival as an articulative lieu de rencontre for the
symbolic binarisms that have historically functioned to structure this society-
black versus white, African versus Indian, slavery versus freedom, birth versus
death, joy versus sorrow, Christianity versus paganism/voodoo-the intrinsic
oppositionality of these dualities is shattered, substituting instead an open,
flexible framework that functions through the pluralisms and possibilities of
the public sphere to mirror the inherent multiplicity that remains the region's
paradoxically pervasive identifying sign. As Maryse Cond6 argues: "Because of
the composite, even disparate character of its population, Guadeloupe was
seen as a 'patchwork,' a mosaic of elements from different ethnic groups living
together as well as they could. . . . the entire Caribbean should be seen as a
single entity, in spite of variations in colonizing languages" (1994:78). It is the
discursive unrepresentability of this characteristically Caribbean performative
presence, heralded by a constantly metamorphosing mosaic of peoples and
cultures, languages and religions, that leads Chamoiseau, as we shall see, to
mine the serpentine, subversive, self-reflexive terrain of metafiction.
   What renders this regional patchwork quilt essentially unrepresentable is
precisely its uncanny site in the interstices, its location outside the linear on-
tologies of the historical and social sciences that were the product of nine-
teenth-century European thought. Indeed, one of the primary paradoxes of
colonialism is the way in which its ultimate dislocation of its own driving con-
cepts such as nation and identity is the end result of the very imposition of
hierarchies of inferiority and imitation that drove the colonial process from the
beginning. As Patricia Waugh points out in her book Metafiction, the tradi-
tional linear narratives of European colonizing nations sought to reflect the
subject's inscription in the large-scale social and political processes through
which the nation was constructed, but the vagaries of an insistent modernism
would undo the fixity of these categories: "In eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury fiction, the individual is always finally integrated into the social structure.




Solibo Magnifique / 223


... In modernist fiction the struggle for personal autonomy can be continued
only through opposition to existing social institutions and conventions" (io;
emphasis in the original). Here, the issues of autonomy and authenticity that
are so critical to any characterization of Caribbean life are transmuted into
discursive structures that articulate their oppositionality through their very re-
sistance to categorization, their simultaneous, ongoing re-siting of the many
and the one. It is this unity in diversity, this ineffable creole essence that explic-
itly subverts the risk of Glissantian Reversion, that Chamoiseau himself em-
phasizes in his description of his island's capital city: "Fort-deFrance was able
to transform itself from a colonial into a creole city. . . . The city is strange,
beautiful and melancholy, youthful through composite antiquities resembling
the mosaic that governs our identity" (1994:8). Again, the concurrent com-
plexities of this Caribbean culture insist upon their innate capacity for modu-
lation and metastasis; in the intricacies of the mosaic lies the very stimulus of
its insistent slipppage.
   Chamoiseau's appropriation of the intrinsic self-reflexivity of metafiction,
then, becomes a meditation on the character of the Caribbean condition-an
ongoing interrogation and exposition of the cultural contestation and perva-
sive polysemy that are both filtered and framed by the figure of the conteur.
Thus the text opens in medias res, confronting the reader with a dead Solibo
found amid continuing carnival celebrations; by subversively fragmenting and
imploding the reverse narration of the roman policier, the narrative adopts the
search for the cause or agent of his death as the pre-text for locating the core of
an evanescent, shifting Caribbean identity. Here the salient facts are shielded
from view and principles of observation and deduction, while of overwhelm-
ing importance, may yet prove insufficient.
   His choice of detective fiction for the novel's discursive framework is thus
not simply fortuitous or incidental, for it plays a cardinal role in the contempo-
raneous processes of discovery and displacement that allow the author to at-
tempt to represent the unrepresentable. At the heart of detective fiction is an
intricate progression of inference and perception, cause and effect, tied to-
gether by the linear logic of narrative, and that, by retracing events in reverse
order, lead to the revelation of the killer's identity at the end of the novel. As
Glenn Most and William Stowe point out in the introduction to their collec-
tion The Poetics of Murder, the genre "emphasizes the relation of detective
fiction to the art of storytelling, to 'narrativity' as it is called, the structure of
stories and the nature of narration" (xii). In the same collection, Roger Callois





224 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


neatly summarizes the genre's subtle interweaving of plot and character that
leads the way to resolution: "This progression sketches out the usual structure
of the detective story: a series of hypotheses is first laboriously constructed and
then summarily rejected until one last theory is found to fit all the facts which
have forced previous theories to be abandoned and demonstrated the inno-
cence of previous suspects" (2-3). Further, along with the presence of the
overarching hypothesis, we should note that the mysterious circumstances
surrounding the death also usually demand an explanation. As Callois contin-
ues: "Rarely has the crime been committed in banal circumstances. It must be
enigmatic, and seem to mock natural law, verisimilitude, and good sense" (3).
These, then, are among the key strategies and practices that Chamouseau
must absorb, appropriate, and transform as he seeks to explore the uncharted
territory of carnivalesque creoleness embodied in the Caribbean conteur; the
mysterious demise signaled by the discovery of Solibo's body parallels the dis-
location of the narrative discourse that the delineation of this cultural conun-
drum makes necessary.
   This reverse chain of cause and effect should logically lead to that key mo-
ment of identification which is the high point of the narrative; all other things
being equal, we should expect similar sorts of overarching revelations in the
cultural sphere which should logically indicate the key political and historical
patterns that subtend the social role played by a Solibo. But these are precisely
the traces that, as we shall see, must remain unnarrated and unrevealed; the
implications of linear fixity that would follow from such resolution would
reinscribe French Caribbean culture into the very metropolitan hierarchies it
has so long been trying to escape. It is this eventuality, perhaps, that marks the
text's passage into metafiction. Helmut Heissenbfittel, in his article "Rules of
the Game of the Crime Novel," singles out the critical role of narrative in the
plotting of detective fiction; using Ernst Bloch's phrase, he points to the "re-
construction of the unnarrated" as the primary function of the discourse of
detective fiction (83) and goes on to posit the symbiotic relationship between
the corpse and the suspects: "The first characteristic shared by this group of
suspects is that they each had some relation to the corpse. . . . The ties of the
characters to the corpse reveal themselves furthermore to be the same ones
that make the characters recognizable among themselves as a group" (88).
   But the progressively orderly pattern that typically throws light on victim,
suspects, and motive will incessantly be frustrated in Solibo Magnifique, and
the ties that bind the suspects to each other and to the victim will be under-




Solibo Magnifique / 225


mined and undone by the ebb and flow of linguistic, cultural, class, and racial
differences, all of which themselves provide the foundation for the unnar-
ratable, polysemic, social whole whose discursive re-presentation insistently
and incessantly announces itself to us as a construct. Its affirmation of its own
difference reflects the composite character of its object while meditating upon
the impossibility of the task before it, a dual duty which is precisely the key
property of metafiction. As Patricia Waugh suggests, "Metafiction re-exam-
ine[s] the conventions of realism in order to discover-through its own self-
reflection-a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to
contemporary readers" (1984:18; emphasis mine). Ultimately, with metafiction
as a discursive tool of formal revision that simultaneously signifies and re-pre-
sents a plethora of pluralisms, it is this very insistence on unrepresentability, on
the impossibility of resolution and the persistence of a pervasive incommensu-
rability, that becomes the hallmark of Chamoiseau's text.
   If this novel continually calls attention to its status as a novel, as a literary
artifact or cultural object, whose rules it deliberately flouts in order to expose
the artificiality and embedded power patterns that govern those rules, it does so
with one overriding aim in mind: to suggest the possibility of an alternate tem-
porality, a different material inscription of the complex, differential tensions
and teleologies that have eventuated the Caribbean diaspora. As the rules of
the game are simultaneously observed and exposed, both convention and dif-
ference-the twin tenets of the creole-are discursively resited and rein-
forced. By constructing Solibo as an ongoing paradigm of discursive doubling
and displacement, in which fragments of language, plot, and character work
to destabilize metropolitan norms, this strategy, as we shall see, also allows
Chamoiseau to posit the multivalent patterns of the lived experience of the
French Caribbean within a framework of both immediacy and impossibility,
acknowledging the infeasibility of his discourse even as it is progressively in-
scribed.


Narrating Solibo

Perhaps the primary discursive paradigm against which Chamoiseau writes
here is the concept of the modern nation and its concomitant master narra-
tives. Recent re-visions of the constitution of the national space reveal hierar-
chies of difference rather than harmony, demonstrating, as Homi Bhabha puts
it, that "the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional




226 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies"
(1990:2). Chamoiseau's narrative feat is precisely this simultaneous, insistent
inscription and definition of difference, in which the impossibility of discur-
sively re-presenting the oral essence of the conteur's art is repeatedly expressed
to the author-narrator-and paradoxically reinscribed within the framework of
this narrative-that-is-not-one-by Solibo himself. But before turning to the
narrative implications raised by this double conundrum, let us look first at the
terms within which the narration itself is ultimately framed.
   The novel's insistent interweaving of several key patterns of dislocation con-
tinually alerts us to its ongoing status as a novel about writing a novel about a
subject so present and immediate that its secondary re-presentation is intrinsi-
cally impossible. But by far the most striking structural phenomenon is the
framing of the narrative proper not by one, but by two different, discourses: the
novel opens the body of the text with the section "Before the Word"; this is
followed immediately by a five-page "Incident Report," a formal facsimile of
the police report of the events surrounding the death of Solibo, signed by the
investigating officer Evariste Pilon, which in its turn is followed by the main
text. In this sense, the entire novel proper is simply prologue; the narrative
closes with a fragment titled "After the Word," made up of the alliterative "Se-
quence of Sucette's Solo" from the protagonist's final moments, and the col-
lection "When Solibo Spoke," constructed utterances whose status is repeat-
edly interrogated in the main text. By including these end pieces Chamoiseau
constructs Solibo as a frame narrative; indeed, the subtitle to the section "Be-
fore the Word," "Document of the Calamity," underlines the discursive aspect
of the frame while opposing it to the shifting substitutions of Solibo's verbal
performance, with the main text functioning as the primary embedded frag-
ment of the discursive schema. The result bolsters a reading of Solibo as an
archi-narrative of the francophone Caribbean tradition. Tzvetan Todorov ex-
plains the practice: "Embedding is an articulation of the most essential prop-
erty of all narrative. For the embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative.
By telling the story of another narrative, the first narrative achieves its funda-
mental theme and at the same time is reflected in this image of itself" (1977:72;
emphasis in the original). In this way, the doubling and development that
insistently occurs between the "Incident Report" and the main text tells the
story of the oral community, mirroring the disjuncture between what the
punningly named chief Bouaffesse will term in the novel "un frangais
mathemathique," reflecting the linear, universalist hierarchies that ground the




Solibo Magnifique / 22


metropolitan imagination, and the artistic blend of humor and history, com-
munity and commentary, that Solibo's interlocutors call his capacity for a
"discours sans virgule."
   The parodic discursive framework that the "Incident Report" provides also
allows the self-reflexive inclusion of the author as one of the novel's key char-
acters. The authoritative, first-person narrative voice that opens the novel
proper breaks off less than five pages into its tale to produce a bracketed list of
witnesses to Solibo's demise, a purportedly even more authoritative though
problematic subtext headed, in italics, ".. . extracted from the general report of
the preliminary investigation submitted by the Chief Inspector of the pre-
cinct" (11/29) This reincursion of the legalistic discursive frame into the novel
proper, differentiated as it is by the double sign of parentheses and italics, has
a twofold purpose: while it is meant to give credence to the admittedly suspect
account of Solibo's death by choking on an "6gorgette de la parole," it also
allows the inscription of one "Patrick Chamoiseau, nicknamed Chamzibie,
Ti-Cham, or Oiseau de Cham, claims to be 'word scratcher,' in reality has
no occupation, lives at 90 rue Frangois-Arago" (11-12/30), both as one of the
witnesses/suspects and as the discursive double of the author himself. This
creative conflation of author, narrator, and character produces not simply an
additional layer of subjective refraction but a veritable Gordian knot of self-
reflexivity, a Chamoiseau-character who figures in an ostensibly authentic
police report that is part of a novel by a Chamoiseau-author about the impos-
sibility of writing that novel. This ongoing revision of the formal structures of
metafiction, of the whodunit, and of the creolized narratives of the conteur
accounts, as we shall see, for the important professional appellation of the
character as a "word-scratcher"; the impossibility of the novel suggests, implic-
itly, the impossibility of the novelist, and of the questions of presence and
absence upon which the impossible narration of Solibo ultimately rests.
   In a sense, then, the deconstructive dichotomy between presence and ab-
sence and, more important, speech and writing is what ultimately grounds the
novel's strategic subversion of the traditional typologies of plot and narration
associated with the roman policier. While, in this formulaic approach, the car-
rying out of the crime itself must remain shrouded in mystery, in this case it is
clear to all but the police that there has been no crime; refusing to counte-
nance the death-dealing capacities of an "6gorgette de parole," they decide to
launch their own investigation. But it is this aura of the clandestine that itself
engenders the second, but paradoxically primary, act of narration, a technique




228 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


that Henry Louis Gates Jr. outlines in his important reading of the revisionary
black thriller: "The story of the crime is a story of an absence, in that the crime
of the whodunit has occurred before the narrative begins; the second story ...
the plot, generally depends upon temporal inversions and subjective, shifting
points of view" (262). These shifts in time and perspective will play a critical
role in the narrative enquete into the persona of Solibo, as the re-presentation
of the police inquiry attempts to discover, retrospectively and testimonially, the
true nature of the victim's life and times. But this inquiry itself becomes sub-
ject to the paradoxical re-visions of writing and speech that are at the core of
deconstruction.
   Given the critical interplay between writing and orality-and the impossi-
bility of the former to re-present the latter-that provides the novel with its
narrative motor, a review of their paradoxical symbiosis is perhaps in order
here. The oppositional hierarchy separating speech and writing has tradition-
ally relegated the latter to a secondary position, constructing a framework, as
Jonathan Culler succinctly puts it in On Deconstruction, "in which speech is
seen as natural, direct communication and writing as an artificial and oblique
representation of a representation." The immediacy and presence that are part
and parcel of speech, in this view, cannot possibly be recuperated by writing; as
Culler notes in the same work: "Speech is seen as in direct contact with mean-
ing: words issue from the speaker as the spontaneous and nearly transparent
signs of his present thought. . . . Writing thus seems to be not merely a techni-
cal device for representing speech but a distortion of speech" (1982:100). Such
a schema inscribes the spontaneity of speech as indicative of its incontrovert-
ible presence, with writing as the supplement that "functions in the absence of
a speaker," and conforms to Solibo's position on Chamzibi6's efforts at tran-
scription or narrative re-presentation: "Solibo Magnificent used to tell me:
'Oiseau de Cham, you write. Very nice. I, Solibo, I speak. You see the distance?
... you want to capture the word in your writing.... .Me, I say: One writes but
words, not the word, you should have spoken. To write is to take the conch out
of the sea to shout: here's the conch! The word replies: where's the sea?"' (28/
52-53). Here, then, is the crux of the matter, the spontaneity and orality of the
conteur that insists upon the irrecuperability of its gestural presence through a
displaced discursive re-presentation whose presence, in turn, is predicated
upon the absence of the very speaker whose words and actions it re-presents.
   However, the relational identity that governs the inscription of linguistic
units demonstrates that the arbitrary inessentiality separating these units from




Solibo Magnifique / 229


each other leads to the inescapable conclusion that speech is indeed a form of
writing, implying not only a reversal of the hierarchy speech/writing but an
inversion of the binary pair presence/absence. An inscription within the
framework of this now foregrounded space of absence hierarchizes writing by
placing both orality and transcription on an equal footing; as Culler puts it,
"This gives us a new concept of writing: a generalized writing that would have
as subspecies a vocal writing and a graphic writing" (1982:101). With both these
subspecies sharing the qualities of absence and misunderstanding, the laws of
supplementarity and resemblance emerge to govern the metafictional entirety
of Chamoiseau's literary undertaking; both the plot that seeks to re-cover the
trace of the absent, since deceased Solibo and the discursive re-presentation of
this paradoxically secondary story-in-reverse are ultimately governed by a logic
of absence and lack that figures the cycle of displacement and deferral that
encapsulates the unrepresentability of a creolized Caribbean difference. Ulti-
mately, in terms of content as well as form, Solibo Magnifique is determined by
an incessant slippage between its mode of re-presentation and its intended
object, engendering a discursive simulacrum, grounded in what Jacques
Derrida terms "the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the
very thing that they defer: the impression of the thing itself, of immediate
presence. . . . Immediacy is derived" (1974:157). This impressionistic palette,
with its incessant sense of doubling and ineluctable derivation, is the product
of a discursive and narrative conflation, in which, as we shall see, the use of
footnotes, of references to earlier novels by Chamoiseau, of the insertion of the
author as character, of the victim's inexplicable death from an "6gorgette de la
parole" and the mysterious changes that afflict the body after death, along with
the inclusion of the "Incident Report" and the "After the Word" fragments as
discursive endnotes, all conspire to construct constant reminders of artificiality
and improbability that undermine any surviving impressions of an immediate
realism.
   What we are left with is the impression of a text, one that itself seeks to re-
present the unrepresentable presence of the storyteller's art. Chambizi6 him-
self explains this to the Inspector during the interrogation: "The storyteller's art
encompasses the sound of his voice, but it's also his sweat, the rolling of his
eyes, his belly, his hand gestures, his smell, that of the crowd, the sound of the
ka drum and, of course, all the silences. Then there's the surrounding night,
the rain if it's raining, and the silent vibration of the world" (99/147-48). Such
a cultural cornucopia is certainly a textual impossibility; thus it engenders




230 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


impressions of the deceased victim, the witnesses, the episodic recreation of
incidents and interlocutors that stem from the inquiry that follows his death
and which, as readers, we hold in our hands. The resulting verbal and discur-
sive play precipitates a strategy of parody, erasure, cross-referencing, and sub-
stitution that, as Derrida notes, creates a carnival of signification and opposi-
tion even as it simultaneously undermines it: "Also the destruction of discourse
is not simply an erasing neutralization. It multiplies words, precipitates them
one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution
whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of the play outside meaning"
(1978:274). With this resurgent reconfirmation of the pluralistic paradigm of
play that we have already noted as the preeminent trope of Caribbean
creolization, the full import of Chamoiseau's accomplishment is now increas-
ingly apparent; given his social role as conteur, Solibo's death at carnival's
climactic moment requires that the re-presentation of this death, with all its
discursive corollaries, be read through the infinite prismatic refraction of the
Caribbean carnivalesque. As a result, both Solibo as discourse and Solibo as
narrative subject reflect the paradoxes of play, presence, and pluralism that
evoke and encapsulate the Caribbean creole, the impression of shifting ambi-
guity at its core the insistent insignia of its incommensurable difference.
   Writing, then, is simultaneously and paradoxically the death of the word, as
Solibo makes clear to Oiseau de Cham: "Stop writing, scratch scratch, and
understand: to grow stiff, to break the rhythm, is to summon death. . . . Ti
Zibi6, your pen will make you die stupid" (45/76). If the narration of Solibo,
then, is dependent upon a summoning up of the social and cultural inscrip-
tion of the carnivalesque, the importance of this ambient atmosphere is imme-
diately set by the narrator: "And so, fatal evening -after the parades, the crowd
breaks up into the smaller parties (gragd jounou, touffd-yinyin, zouks . . .) that
Carnival sows in its wake, from Balata field to the hutches of Texaco" (10/28).
Between the double gesture of "fatal" (end of carnival, end of Solibo) and the
critical personification of carnival itself through the absence of the article, the
myriad performative possibilities of this moment of cultural multiplicity are
made apparent; to locate the role of the bals, zoucs, and grajdsjounous in the
lives of the inhabitants, we would do well to turn first to the agents of that
carnival culture inscribed within the boundaries of the narrative. The wit-
nesses to Solibo's enigmatic demise are, or were, his principal interlocutors,
the conteur's primary listening audience and social counterparts who make
up, as Richard Burton puts it, "that underworld of men and women of African




Solibo Magnifique / 231


or Indian origin who barely manage to get through life" (1997b:157); these
familiar figures now are of key importance in the official investigation into his
death. The intrinsic discrepancy between the perplexing verbal re-presenta-
tion of the "scene of the crime" and the need for an "official," judicious expla-
nation provides the raison d'etre for the police interrogation that takes up most
of part 1. It is this drive for narrative testimony and its implied corollary of order
that leads us from the bare fact of "the corpse of a man under a tamarind tree
in a place known as the Savanna"(3/17) to the intriguing parentheses that insis-
tently and significantly surround the "liste des temoins" of part 1 (29) in which,
as we have seen, the author-narrator himself is interpellated and implicated as
a principal witness in his own narrative investigation.
   This list of fourteen witnesses appears, as it must, in alphabetical order,
since it has purportedly been extracted from an official document and inserted
into the narrative: it is a fragment "extraite du rapport d'ensemble" and thus
constitutes an additional-since exterior -level of discursive complexity. As a
result, the first glimpse we have of such key characters as Doudou-Menar,
Bete-Longue, and Congo is through the prism of a constructed police dossier,
complete with categories covering aliases, address, and profession. But it is
critical to note how many of these principal witnesses are listed as "sans profes-
sion" or "sans domicile fixe" (S.D.F.),rendering them, in the eyes of the police
at least, marginal and somewhat suspicious members of an already isolated
social group. And indeed, this is the principal paradox that undergirds and
inscribes this motley group of protagonists; as the invisible, borderline inhab-
itants of the DOM-TOM, they represent a vanishing era, that class of artisans and
djobeurs that symbolizes the disappearing traditional world of peasantry, small
farming, and craftsmanship whose remarkable orality reflected the Africa-based
traces of their sociocultural origins on the slave plantation.
   By choosing to focus on this little-noticed segment of the Martinican pop-
ulation, Chamoiseau endows the menu peunple with that capacity for oppos-
itionality and transformation that is their heritage from this contestatory era.
Richard Burton explains their social significance in Martinique's post-World
War II temporality: "However, at their zenith, immediately before and after
the 'Robert period,' the jobbers were resourcefulness itself, the collective
incarnation of a world and a culture of oppositionality. . . whose origins were
to be found in the survival tactics of the underclass" (1997b:158). Here, with
the name of the naval officer running the Occupation providing a convenient
nomenclature for the entire period, it is this incipient social slippage, marker




232 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


of a contestatory community in crisis, that accounts for the predominance of
S.D.F.'s among the primary characters; as Marie-Agnes Sourieau suggests,
"The witnesses of the Solibo case display the deep splits in the society of Mar-
tinique, and the ambiguities and uncertainties of its linguistic and cultural
situation that little by little obliterated oral discourse" (1992:135). By inscribing
both discourse and characters on the cusp of cultural and social change, then,
Chamoiseau is able to draw the reader into the search for lost tradition that the
inquiry into Solibo's disappearance signifies; the fact that "these beings sym-
bolize an outdated economy, a bygone era to which they try desperately to
cling" (135), as Sourieau puts it, allows him to recuperate the rhythms and
movements, the immediacy and spontaneity of this evanescent community-
one about to be erased by the approaching modernities of departmentalism-
while re-citing the unrepresentable storyteller's voice of Solibo himself.
   Through his re-creation of the conteur's final storytelling moment, the nar-
rator is able to inscribe the multiple patterns and rituals that adorn the world of
Caribbean orality, the interplay between the storyteller and his audience and
the whirlwind of sociolinguistic signification that is the Caribbean's creole.
Symbolically, it is the re-citation of the list of witnesses that breaks the signify-
ing chain linking the announcement of Solibo's impending arrival with the
eventual actuality of his presence. And appropriately, the announcement itself
is inscribed in cultural terms, with the harbinger of this almost Messiah-like
figure of cultural contestation and authenticity being played by the drummer,
Sucette; beating on the gros-ka, a traditional French Caribbean drum of Afri-
can origin, Sucette calls the company to order by simultaneously inscribing
indigenous rhythms and suggesting the conteur's increasingly rare appear-
ances; we are told that the crowd is "avid already for the appearance of Solibo
Magnificent, all the words of the old storyteller, rare these days, were good to
hear" (10-11/29). Here, the cultural significance of the reciprocal relationship
between storyteller and audience is immediately and clearly established.
   Solibo's arrival is striking in two primary respects: on the one hand, little
detail is furnished with regard to his physical appearance. This is somewhat
odd given that he is the long-awaited protagonist from whom the novel draws
the totality of its title. We are provided just the following description: "Bushy
mustache, straw-broom goatee at the tip of his chin, he had the tafia expert's
red-yellow eyes. . . . ah, Solibo had really earned his name's other half!" A few
additional details of dress then give way to the overwhelming virtuosity and
intensity of his opening "sentence": "Ladies and gentlemen if I say good




Solibo Magnifique / 233


evening it's because it isn't day and if I don't say good night it's the cause of
which the night will be white tonight like a scrawny pig on his bad day at the
market and even whiter than a sunless bek6 under his take-a-stroll umbrella in
the middle of a canefield d krii? . . E kraa! The company had replied" (13/33).
Here is perhaps the classic example of the protagonist's famed discours sans
virgule, the absolute lack of punctuation and the enigmatic cultural allusions
and references to local plantation life-incomplete, of course, without the
usual disparagement of its chief symbol of colonial hierarchy, the bdkd -fram-
ing an ocean of shared understanding between teller and listener, with the
whole culminating in the traditional question and answer, the coded "cric-
crac" call-and-response to which the waiting audience joyfully provides the
answering chorus.
   Similarly, while the core of Solibo's tale-telling that final evening is elided
in the narrative, it is the moment of his demise that draws the most attention,
not least because it is this event that permits the entire narrative to proceed. As
Solibo's narrative draws paradoxically to a close with the approach of the im-
pending dawn, there is an inexplicable break in his verbal rhythm: "And when
at last the sky paled and a foggy wind announced the dawn, that's when Solibo
Magnificent hiccuped on a turn-of-phrase" (14/34). Here, the storyteller's
words are personified, taking on the textures and teleologies of misdirection
and ending; it is Solibo as subject of the discourse whose unprecedented hic-
cup signifies an intensifying lack of control. Further, the ubiquitous narrative
commentary resurfaces, breaking the rhythm of reported events with paren-
theses this time, to underline the enigmatic importance of his final phrase:
"Patat' sa!" The explanation, which itself serves only to deepen the mystery of
the event, is rooted in the codes and rituals of creole storytelling: "However,
patat' sa does not exist in krickrack. The storyteller says E krii, asks Misticrii,
probes to find out Can someone tell me if all's abed here?.... demands his tafia,
a drumbeat measured to his speech, but never calls Pat at' sa!" (14/34; emphasis
in the original). And so with Solibo's departure from established discursive
norms, reinforced by the narrator's conflation of commentary and dialogue,
thereby himself subverting the narrative through discursive codes that have
traditionally governed the daily rhythm and resistance of French Caribbean
peasant life, the reader accompanies French police authorities as they set out
to uncover the Martinican mystery of Solibo Magnificent.
   The first witness to testify will be Lolita Boidevan, aka Doudou-Menar,
described in the police report as "a street vendor of candied sweets" (11/30).




234 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


While she is the classic embodiment of the Caribbean sweet seller, her curios-
ity and outspokenness make her stand out somewhat from the group, a charac-
teristic not without its own importance, as we shall soon learn. Physically, her
chief attribute is certainly her imposing size: "Her big breasts jumped up and
down, but the fat woman ignored them (never burdensome for a chest, these
things cannot fall, no)" (24/47). While, on the one hand, her size may to a
certain extent render her a stereotypical figure, her name aptly recalling the
subservient assimilationism of the creole doudou, on the other, Chamoiseau
again makes use of parentheses to interpose a telling paraphrase drawn on
Caribbean creole intertextuality: he inscribes an almost exact rendition of the
grandmother Toussine's verbal admonition to Telumee, taken from Simone
Schwarz-Bart's classic Caribbean text of feminine empowerment, Pluie et vent
sur Telumde Miracle: "No matter how heavy a woman's breasts, her chest is
always strong enough to bear them" (24/5). This feat of discursive cross-refer-
encing allows the narrator to tacitly inscribe Doudou-Menar as an icon of
female cultural resistance, an intertextually drawn, larger-than-life figure
whose capacity for suffering and sacrifice will soon be put to the ultimate test.
   It is Doudou, then, who, racing off to seek medical attention for the victim,
encounters the "guardian of the peace" Justin Philibon; it is he that she urges
to find a doctor for Solibo, although, in an amusing turn of phrase, she refers to
them both metonymically, by their respective professions: "Law! Call Medi-
cine, there's Solibo fighting an evil spell in the Savanna. . . . you hear me,
Law?" (25/49). This encounter inaugurates the series of interrogations and in-
troduces us to Philemon Bouaffesse, "brigadier-chef," or chief sergeant, who
will serve as chief interrogator of the unfortunate band of witnesses. Both
Bouaffesse and his boss, Chief Inspector Pilon, as black Martinican police
officers, are implicit enforcers of colonial law, signifying, in the duality of their
fragmented allegiance, the subjective splitting that increasingly pervades this
society on the brink of change. Both characters "represent the broken unity of
the Caribbean people," as Marie-Agnes Sourieau puts it (1992:135), and em-
body, as we shall see, the double disjunctures of an imposed sociopolitical
alienation that is diametrically opposed to the cultural contestation that the
figure of Solibo represents, a social role that can be summed up as "the
Magnificent's words . . . the shelter of his voice" (25/48). But for now, it is the
hint of a history between Doudou-Menar and Bouaffesse that allows us to take
a closer look at the latter.




Solibo Magnifique / 235


   As the primary agents enforcing colonial law in the community, Bouafesse
and Pilon both embody a fundamental conflict that illuminates the pervasive
social and subjective divisions generated by colonial domination. The ensuing
struggle of the two (born and raised in Martinique among the very djobeurs
they must now interrogate) strikes a resounding note of discord, announcing
and inscribing the novel's insistent dissension between the oral and the writ-
ten, between the immediate, unconstrained, performative spontaneity of creole
and the metropolitan, mathematical linearities of "official" French.
   As Bouaffesse assumes the full discursive authority of his role as chief ser-
geant, it illuminates the multilayered complexity of contemporary Martinican
cultural identity at work in the text. For identity in Chamoiseau's narrative is a
discursive construct, grounded in the antagonisms and anachronisms of class
and culture, ethnicity and language. The text is thus an interactive and trans-
actional space, in which subjectivity becomes a dialogic process that is the
product of social hierarchies and tensions generated by the colonial encounter
and its legacy of conflict and contestation. As a result, even before we encoun-
ter Bouaffesse's acrimonious exchange with Doudou-Menar, we are presented
with the complex social background of the former; a descendant of the type of
common-law relationship common in the Antilles, he is the product of one
paternal line but bears the patronymic of another (29/54). This initial social
ambivalence, a microcosmic re-presentation of the fragmented Martinican
authority he comes to symbolize, is further exacerbated by the fact of the bru-
tal reputation for massacring helpless civilians gained by his regiment in the
Algerian War of independence and his subsequent marriage to a woman of
East Indian extraction, "a coolie, they say" (29/55). Bouaffesse is thus increas-
ingly inscribed as the ambivalent icon of metropolitan domination in Martin-
ique: he is a paradoxically parodic authority figure, whose rotundity has been
blessed with the soubriquet "Ti-Coca," yet he is also importantly assimilated to
that ambiguous plantation official drawn from the ranks of the very slaves un-
der his charge, the commandeur. Indeed, he is "short, massive, almost round
like a bottle. In fact, you'd really think he was a good guy if he didn't have those
shaggy eyebrows which add an extra visor to his cap" (31/57), and it is in this
metonymical inscription symbolizing his subjective double vision that the
crux of his identity is located.
   This interstitial inscription of Bouaffesse is not without importance. In fact,
it announces a ribald, riotously funny satire of the macho West Indian "sweet




236 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


man" that occurs as a flashback at the moment that Bouaffesse and Doudou-
Menar both realize that they were once quite well acquainted during the hey-
day of their youth: "A-ah! Philemon, I didn't recognize you standing there like
that, no! So you're a policeman, a shit-guard, huh? ... You don't recognize me,
Philemon?" (32-33/59). Here Bouaffesse, revealed as a former kalieur, is com-
pelled to recognize the aging Lolita, and in so doing, to be textually re-viewed
through the lens of "a studied stride which constituted the ritual of the kalior,
the ladies' man: to see and be seen" (33/60).
   This performative moment is of overwhelming discursive and cultural im-
portance, and this on two fronts: first, Chamoiseau's detailed reconstitution of
the rituel du kalieur, of the step-by-step seduction driven by the rhythm of the
dance, evokes a well-known masculinist Caribbean tradition, in which the
seductive performance is aimed equally at the seductee as at the audience ("to
see and be seen"). As cultral praxis, it is a key aesthetic trope in the construc-
tion of Caribbean folklore. Roger Abrahams notes, "As the expressive and aes-
thetic dimension of the culture of tradition-oriented groups, folklore is made
up of items and performances that are self-consciously and artistically con-
structed" (1983:1). As a form of homosocial bonding, the carrying out of this
contest across the body of the female is geared primarily at enhancing the
social-and more particularly the prurient-reputation of the seductor: "Men
may be judged in terms of reputation, [and] reputation is established by the
dramatic performance of what are considered rude acts from the perspective of
the yard" (146). A pattern is established for the performer, one that must be
adhered to in every detail, from dress-including choice of jewelry and co-
logne-to walk to brand of cigarettes to the manner of consuming drinks at the
bar and surveying the room for prey; the visible conquest of the female serves
to prove knowledge of social codes, to elevate one's social stature, and to en-
hance male social bonding, since, as Abrahams continues, "one ma jor feature
of designation is how effectively a man handles male-female relationships"
(124). Bouaffesse, then, having proven himself a kalieur par excellence
through his earlier seduction of Doudou-Menar, will now be torn between the
sexual and social links-and their concomitant contestation of class-forged
during his youth, and the overbearing icon of colonial authority he has since
become, raising the key question of the tone of the passage itself.
   For in fact, it is the insistent irony subverting Bouaffesse's performance
that is most at issue here. By consistently undercutting the detailed, ritualistic
re-presentation of the kalieur's precise performance with a creole subtext




Solibo Magnifique / 23


made up of commentary, asides, parentheses, and understated explanation,
Chamoiseau detracts from his character's performance in such sweeping fash-
ion as to thoroughly discredit any possibility of approval or acclaim. Here, each
detail of hair, jewelry, and clothing is carefully to be assessed: "Show off the
tucked-in Pierre Cardin shirt open on a fleecy chest, the tiny Martinique
charm at the end of a gold chain, and (oh yes!) the little cross cradled under
the collarbone on a shorter chain" (33/60). And ultimately, as the rules and
ruses are scrupulously followed, from "winning her over. . . in the course of
which Bouaffesse executed the latest steps, bending his knees, chain bracelet
jangling, cologne trailing" (34/61), to their conclusion "en D.S. climatisee" [in
an air-conditioned Citroen], both Bouaffesse and the not incidentally named
Lolita are similarly and simultaneously implicated in this performative ritual:
"The decisive stage: you reappear, fresh, smiling, and invite from afar (always
get her to walk toward you, son). Either she accepts or refuses. . . . Ladies and
gentlemen, Lolita Boidevan accepted" (35/62). This deliberately dual-voiced
narration draws a divided Bouaffesse ever deeper into a labyrinth of contested
signification in which his commuted colonial authority will be pitted against
the maroon tradition of opposition symbolized by Solibo and his peasant co-
hort. And in this discursive schema, a contentious metropolitan mastery will
ultimately take full measure of its victims.
   The interrogations undertaken by Bouaffesse and Pilon are justifiably at the
core of the narrative; all else, including the liste des tdmoins, the self-reflexive
insertion of the marqueur de paroles, and the frenetic flashback that links
Bouaffesse and Doudou-Menar, is really prologue. It is here that the variations
of speech and language that act as signifiers of race, culture, and class are
recoded and rewritten into oppositional ordinances of difference and disorder.
These divisions in linguistic production illuminate the binaries that separate
the oral from the written, emphasizing the gulf of incomprehensibility that
separates an "official" French and a creole vernacular that recuperates the
resistance and authenticity that provide the novel's founding principle in the
openness of oraliture.
   If the primary function of an interrogation witness is to report what he or
she has seen, thereby corroborating or refuting the official record of events,
then the search for the trace of Solibo will independently and repeatedly en-
counter the "6gorgette de la parole" that unaccountably felled him. Bouaf-
fesse's initial response to Doudou-Menar's disconcerting presence is dissimula-
tion, explaining that "the lady in question was his cousin by his uncle's left




238 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


hand" (36/64) and seeking reasonable explanations of the incident in medical
coincidences; meanwhile, the whole paradoxical sequence is inscribed in free
indirect discourse with Bouaffesse's direct address to Doudou-Menar enclosed
in parentheses (36/64). At the same time, in a critical development, as "Lolita
took shape in front of him despite the apocalyptic evidence of the breasts" (37/
65), the social division and subjective fragmentation that the interrogation
engenders occur separately but simultaneously in contrasting locations. On
the one hand, there is Bouaffesse's assistant Justin Philibon, whose reaction to
the affirmation of authority symbolized in the locked door before him in-
scribes him as "sitting behind the bek6's counter like a cartoon character!" (38/
66), while Doudou-Menar herself, under police escort back to the scene of the
"crime," "has broken into legitimate existence, suddenly realizing that she had
been living like all of us, on the margins, on those paths which trace a country
other than that of the colonial roads" (39/67). These unannounced irruptions
of colonial power are harbingers of its insistent hierarchies of difference and
point, in the indistinct trace of an alternative topography, to the persistent per-
vasiveness of a creolized opposition in the cultural landscape. It is this ongoing
sense of opposition to the lived materiality of colonial domination, and the
cultural affirmation that emerges out of the symbolic confrontation between
the police and the people, that the verbal testimony of Solibo's cohort finally
accomplishes.
   It is significant, therefore, that the textual re-presentation of this cultural
resistance by which the core of the Martinican social whole is defined again
takes dual form. On the one hand, as the testimony of the witnesses begins,
their discursive delineation of Solibo takes place almost exclusively in creole.
At the same time, the process of metonymic re-presentation that allows
Solibo's social counterparts to recount and reanimate the key moments of his
storyteller's art-albeit in fragmented form-enacts a crucial gesture of repeti-
tion that mediates the continuum of presence and absence marking both the
text and its subjects. This critical double gesture forms the discursive core of
Solibo Magnifique, subverting the supposed coherence of these testimonies
through the apparently anomalous footnotes that subvert the narrative line
through their very presence. These glosses translate creole phrases, explain
cultural practices, supply extracts from the "official" autopsy report, and refer
to previously published efforts from the marqueur de paroles to re-present the
elusive immediacies of a cultural identity grounded in orality, (re)constructing




Solibo Magnifique / 239


an unrepresentable creoleness from the disparate divisions of colonial hege-
mony.
   Thus it is that the testimonies of Sidonise, Didon, and Charlot, each in
turn, are articulated in a creole whose tornadic turns of phrase immediately
inscribe its difference from the binary linearities of the frangais mathdmatique
that signals the pervasive presence of the colonial power structure. It is a creole
whose syntactic structures till the fertile terrain of cultural complexity, bridg-
ing the binaries that link Africa to the Caribbean while expanding and erasing
them, compounding the constituents of ethnic and cultural admixture and the
maroon tradition of slave resistance into a hybrid metaphor of discursive self-
definition. As Solibo's cohort effectively appropriates his storyteller's place in
the narrative, the warp and woof of the testimonies that they weave tell his story
as well as their own, actively inscribing them into the continuum of protest,
dissent, and difference in which they had tacitly, or even passively, participated
through the reciprocal relationship that binds storyteller to audience. For all
practical purposes, then, these testimonies re-place Solibo's narrative dis-
course of performance: the text thus confronts the entirety of the French Car-
ibbean colonial experience, the trajectory from Didon's creole de Guadeloupe
to Charlot's creole de ville tracing an inscription of authenticity and oppo-
sitionality that makes Solibo's demise a foil for the articulation of the affiliative
resonances of the post/colonial site in the Caribbean. And ultimately, as we
shall see, it is the moment at which these linguistic modalities meet that
comes to define one of the key polarities separating the metropole from its
Others.
   It is this Caribbean coalescence of linguistic and cultural opposition that
Solibo as text so effectively articulates, mining the plethora of popular
pluralisms that re-presents the region, in Michael Dash's words, through "its
history of repopulated space, the shaping force of the plantation and the result-
ing experience of marronnage, multi-lingualism and creolisation" (1995:149).
And since the symbiosis that joins storyteller and audience is both spawned
and shaped by a particular experience of opposition that its ongoing orality
makes manifest, it is this very orality that must be probed and plumbed in order
to locate the core of a transformative terrain of representation for the Carib-
bean people. These, then, are the modalities that converge in the pair of mini-
narratives through which the witnesses re-present the stunning subjectivity of
Solibo in this section: Didon's "histoire de la bete-longue" (43--44/74-75) and




240 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Chariot's "histoire du cochon" (47-48/80-82). By re-citing rather than re-pre-
senting the events of these narratives, the paradox of absence and presence that
produces the multivalences of oraliture is preserved, generating a logic of
textuality governed by displacement and doubling that is simultaneously
linked to the absence of the figure of the narrator, and the crucial appropria-
tion of his position by that of the marqueur. Thus the textual traces of the
figure of Solibo uncovered in the narrative must be framed and instituted by
the trajectory of these oral testimonies; they become the discursive sign of the
combative role that a tradition of orality and protest assumes in this polyglot
society.
   What links and undergirds both these mini-narratives, then, is a combina-
tion of confrontation and transformation that converges in that moment of
crisis upon the figure of Solibo. Both the bete-longue that attacks Man Goul in
the marketplace and the cochon fou that confronts Man Gnam signify a com-
munity without constraints, a social covenant gone so awry as to be unable to
curb those forces normally held in control. But of even greater importance
here is the way in which the forces signified in Solibo's dispersal of an immi-
nent crisis are marshaled to defuse the threat and restore the balance between
society and situation. In Charlot's account, despite his expertise, he admits his
helplessness when faced with such a predicament: "Even I, who had come as
the bleeder, despite my experience, I was shocked and helpless" (48/80). Simi-
larly, in the case of the bete-longue, we encounter a group almost frozen with
fear; none of the bystanders moves a muscle, and Man Goul herself is unable
even to scream. No one, that is, except Solibo: "Man Goul was glued before
the hissing death. . . . And the same went for us. That's when Solibo Mag-
nificent came forward" (44/75). And through the fullness signified by the
double appellation, we can finally grasp the complex significance of a Solibo
within the social whole.
   Solibo's strategy is seen to be an overtly transformative one, and it is here
that we may locate the core of his insistent orality. The key lies, perhaps, in
Man Gnam's reminder that "Mister Solibo isn't some other bleeder, but a
wordsman" (48/81); it is not simply that his words become weapons, but that
the manipulation of the word in the name of the people has the salutary effect
of warding off the forces that menace the social whole while mediating the
elimination of the threat by confronting it with its own other. Thus Didon's
incredulous insistence upon having seen two snakes: "There was no hunter




Solibo Magnifique / 241


and no prey, but-forgive me everyone, I want to say it the way I saw it-but
two hunters! In the market, at high noon, near Ma Goul resurrected, there
were two snakes!" (44/75; emphasis in original). Solibo's oral strategy estab-
lishes a signifying chain that links him transformatively to his discursive object
through the communal force of his discourse, becoming the image of the
counterpart to adulterate its power to harm; similarly, Charlot's account of
Solibo's feat inscribes his accomplishment as a purely discursive performance:
"I don't remember what he said to the pig, but even without words or stories,
Solibo was a Voice before the animal" (48/81). Solibo's feat, then, through the
personification conveyed by the majuscule, is to respond to this sign of social
pandemonium on its own terms and on its own ground; with colonialism and
departmentalization recuperated as essentially discursive acts, both Solibo and
the community in whose name he speaks are able to articulate the principles of
their difference, confronting and contesting metropolitan domination through
a transformative poetics of cultural identitarianism grounded firmly in the
plural. The history and politics of maroon opposition thus come full circle to
take up the relay, maintaining the coherence of cultural tradition for the com-
munity through a defensive gesture that shapes the differential contours of
discursive contention.
   This, then, is the legacy and the lesson of the man-of-words in the West
Indies; through his performative speech-acts of social protest, he inscribes a
double discourse of difference and dissent that protects his community even as
he speaks for it, registering its own response to the complexities of colonial
imposition. Solibo's accomplishment here instantiates this double praxis,
quelling anxiety through the telling transformation of everyday norms. Yet as
we are about to learn, this symbolic capacity for doubling and dissimulation
has always been inscribed in the very paradoxical pluralisms of his name, a
multilayered double entendre that also gives a title to our text.
   The revelation that the twin terms by which Solibo is inscribed trace the
opposing axes of an oxymoron is not without textual significance; indeed, this
construct is at the core of the problematization of creole tradition articulated
by this protagonist. Already elaborated as the symbolic center of the com-
munity's conscious apprehension of its cultural identity, Solibo is ultimately
transformed into a nucleus of relationality by the double crossings drawn
across the body of the character by his social and cultural inscription. For
name and function are conjoined in Solibo; the multiple reciprocities and





242 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


points of contact engendered by his social role make possible the linguistic
and cultural pluralisms that his nomenclature signifies through its trenchant
double discourse.
   The terms of this crucial, creative paradox are carefully inscribed by the
marqueur: "Around here, we say solibo to designate the fall. Every blackman,
and the blackwomen more often than their due, have had their solibo" (45/76-
77). During the period following the unfortunate, ironic ends of his parents,
Amed6 and Florise, the complex character we would come to know as Solibo
disappears, Christ-like, into the countryside to reemerge several years later, the
direct product of a creolized form of contemporary marronnage that symboli-
cally links him to the peregrinations of both past and present that his orality
constantly reinscribes: "It's our maroon way of life, those hours when the
blackman from around here beholds in his conscience only that echo of him-
self ... that has helped him become what he was" (46/78). Through Solibo,
then, the text sums up an essential constituent of the Caribbean experience in
both sign and act; in the alienation and disjuncture traced by the colonial
encounter we may find the transformative teleologies that are the echo of the
self. Indeed, in Le Roman marron, Richard Burton indicates that the linguistic
and cultural associations that supplement the term solibo in creole are almost
infinitely regressive: "'Fe an solibo' (faire un solibo) veut dire bien 'se cassez le
nez,' mais, en langage de laghia, 'pwan an solibo' (prendre un solibo) se dit de
la phase initiale du combat, alors que 'bay un solibo' (donner un solibo) en
designe la sequence finale" (1997b:172). Solibo as protagonist is thus increas-
ingly inscribed in unnameable creole figures of orality, protest, and resistance
to submission; later, the latent sign of storytelling subject that completes the
paradox is added to his nomenclature by none other than another conteur:
"Furthermore, he mysteriously distilled the tales in such a way that he seemed
to have derived their innermost meanings from himself. It was an old story-
teller, a serious talker, who upon hearing him at the market one Saturday
morning pronounced him Magnificent" (46-47/79). Resultantly, as Richard
Burton puts it, it is "thanks to his mastery of this miraculous weapon which is
the word" (1997b:172), along with the centrality of the experiences he has
interiorized, that now allows the discursive re-presentation through which
Solibo inscribes both himself and his others to take place; the oppositionality
of the oxymoron he inhabits erodes the boundaries that contest the commu-
nity even as it expands the resonances of the relational. But of even greater




Solibo Magnifique / 243


importance in this saga of naming and becoming is the crucial role performed
by the women of the community.
   In marked contradistinction to a number of recent iddes regues that posit the
supposedly reduced role ascribed to women in the world of the creolistes, it is
striking to note that the female elders of the community are figured here as
socially and discursively indispensable to the extent that, in essence, they make
Solibo what he is. Indeed, the marqueur is at pains to point out that not only
have these women provided him with the tales and legends through which he
re-articulates the substitutive strategies that form the core of the society's trans-
formative traditions, it is they, in a ritual of renaming, who have reengendered
the person born Prosper Bajole as Solibo. At his reappearance after his period
of marronnage, it is the women, keepers of historical tradition and guardians of
the communal memory that Derek Walcott has termed "the source, fountain-
head, and oracle of all Caribbean legend" (1997:45), who define his condition:
"A few old women at the market where he parked his distress named him
Solibo, Creole for blackman fallen to his last peg - and no ladder to climb back
up" (46/78; emphasis in the original). Thus, to be defined as the material result
of a solibo magnifique is to be inscribed in impossibility, to be framed by that
gloriously Caribbean enigma that recreates triumph from tragedy, and whose
most remarkable trait is that it cannot seem to cancel itself out.
   But even the presence of the discursive paradox of the name here precedes
the essence of Solibo as sign, such that the rebirth of Solibo the storyteller
becomes an act of matrilineal mediation: it marks a critical moment of simul-
taneity, a symbolic conflation of the feminine and the masculine axes of the
tradition of oral protest and social opposition that was first articulated in the
appearance of creole on the slave plantation and now resonates, as we have
noted, in the conteur and the kaisonien, in the tornadic teleologies of the man-
of-words: "As is done in such situations, the old women on lunch breaks of-
fered him tales, oh words of survival, stories of street smarts where the charcoal
of despair watched small flames triumph over it, tales of resistance, all the ones
that the slaves had forged on hot evenings so the sky wouldn't fall" (46/78). It
would not be in the realm of exaggeration to suggest that the implications of
this passage are literally legion: ultimately, it is clear that the women of this
community have acted over time as the guardians and inheritors of those criti-
cal practices of protest and orality that have descended from slavery and
through which the community itself constructs its larger subjective claims; in




244 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


sharing the symbolic structures of this inheritance with Solibo, they recog-
nized in him not only the signs of a level of distress, subjugation, and social
dislocation to match their own, but also the possibility of cultural reanimation
and renewal through recourse to a discourse of difference whose double dis-
junctures would ultimately reinscribe the group in whose name he would act.
On a larger scale, it is also clear that by incarnating this protagonist as a pur-
veyor of doubleness whose simultaneity articulates such multivalences of cul-
ture and difference, the text transforms Solibo into an avatar of the multitude
of sites and temporalities marking Martinique's encounter with the metropole,
distilling the disjunctures of colonialism and departmentalization into a cul-
tural signifier of polyvocalic performance.
   Solibo as protagonist thus occupies a multiplicity of positions; conteur,
marronneur, and djobeur, he is a polysemic cultural sign whose pluralism
recuperates both the multifaceted modalities of the society whose resistance
he symbolizes and the many fissures and fragments brought about by the colo-
nial encounter. He speaks both to and for those upon whom the metropole
imposes its departmental disjunctures, traversing the dislocations of both past
and present to give voice to the patterns of tradition and the tensions of protest.
"He would captivate the company with the rhythm of his gestures, no longer
spinning the word in the vanishing scene of a traditional wake, but back in the
mountain refuge of the blackmen of yesteryear, the new maroons, the lost
blackmen, the abandoned ones, the bad apples on the brink of outlawry" (42-
43/20). Yet, paradoxically, this is the character that the text will reveal as not
having existed, in any official, administratively demonstrable way, thus illumi-
nating the disjuncture between the patterns of perception that separate
metropole from colony. The occasion purports to be a note to Pilon from the
chief of records, a fragment again set off from the text that we read literally over
Pilon's shoulder: "Name of the victim (with some reservations): Prosper
Bajole. Born approximately 192? in Sainte-Marie.... Note: no official docu-
ment confirms his civil status-something not unusual around here. Solibo:
was that his only nickname? Such information would help me get further
details" (11366; emphasis in the original). Shrouded in mystery and with even
his date of birth doubly displaced into nothingness, Solibo may be as much
figment to the authorities as he is fact to the world he re-presents.
   But Solibo's particular gift is the recognition and recuperation of the gamut
of the Martinican social experience; in short, he is an overwhelmingly intersti-
tial figure, one who exists between classes, between discourses, adopting and




Solibo Magnifique / 245


adapting roles and modes of speech in order to elaborate and articulate creole
patterns of tradition, resistance, and transformation. At the same time, it is this
uncanny "in-betweenness" that provides the critical link between the djobeur
and the marqueur; since, in fact, he is neither narrator nor, despite his scriptive
presence, an active participant in the narrative, the latter occupies a limited
discursive position that deliberately distances him from the characters and
events he seeks to inscribe. If the goal of the marqueur is to record rather than
to re-present, his desire at the same time is to preserve the particularity and
immediacy of an oral discourse by refusing the secondary reengagement that is
the corollary of narrative re-presentation. The result is a textural and textual
impression of immediacy, in which the marqueur's simultaneous absence from
and presence in the text generate a signifying simulacrum of authorial omni-
science, generating a mimetic re-presentation of social reality precisely be-
cause he is neither quite narrator nor character but more than both at the same
time. And although our marqueur does, to a certain extent, explain and
present, he is at particular pains not to adulterate the discourse of Solibo; while
he cannot solve the mystery of his death, he can help to map out the traces of
the protagonist and thus provides us with differential discursive extracts which,
significantly, are always set off from the rest of the text and presented in the first
person.
   These fragmented, oral impressions of the protagonist serve to fill in the
space once occupied by Solibo while retaining both the aura of authorial
omniscience and the unmediated exposition of the marqueur. The fertile
ground of this insistent duality is perhaps most clearly exposed during the in-
terrogation, when the self-reflexive narrator again adopts a dual-voiced dis-
course to expand upon the nonmediating role of the marqueur and the simul-
taneous resemblance and difference this dualism engenders between him and
his subject, Solibo: "The writer with the curious bird name was the first sus-
pect to be interrogated. . . . No, not writer: word scratcher, it makes a huge
difference, Inspekder, the writer is from another world, he ruminates, elabo-
rates, or canvasses, the word scratcher refuses the agony of oraliture, he col-
lects and transmits. . . . he never really got interested in me. . . . He wasn't
interested either in my plans to write about his life: writing for him caught
nothing of the essence of things" (115-16/169-70). In a key moment, shifting
suddenly from a third-person self-reference to first-person direct speech, the
marqueur must take on the role of cultural translator; by explaining in linguis-
tic terms the impossible intricacies of Solibo's discourse, he instantiates a rec-




246 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


ognition of the protagonist's interactive, socially driven interstitiality that is a
reflection of his own social role as cultural chronicler: "Solibo Magnificent
used the four facets of our diglossia: the Creole basilect and acrolect, the
French basilect and acrolect, quivering, vibrating, rooted in an interlectal
space that I thought to be our most exact socio-linguistic reality" (22/45).
   This awareness of the "expansive syntax" of creole, driven both by its histori-
cal grounding in the dual experience of contestation and communication, and
a delight in an immediacy of wordplay that makes it, as Walcott explains, "a
language audibly aware of its melody, its pauses and flourishes, its direction
toward laughter even in tragedy" (1997:47), clarifies in turn the striking self-
referentiality of an earlier passage, in which the text not only refers, in footnote
form, to a previous novel by the author but also describes the routine and
technique of the work of the soi-disant cultural ethnographer among the
djobeurs: "I had known him during my visits to the market when I had a work
on the life of the jobbers in mind.* With patience, I got them to accept my
notebooks, my pencils, my little tape recorder with batteries that never
worked, my unhealthy appetite for tales, all tales, even the most trivial ones"
(20-21/43; asterisk in original, with accompanying footnote: "*See Chronique
des sept miseres-ed. Gallimard"). Thus it is precisely through their mutual
recognition and difference within this interlectal space, where the notebooks,
pencils, footnote reference, and nonfunctional tape recorder of the marqueur
function as simultaneous signs of his inscription in and distance from the very
social patterns that he seeks to transcribe, that the double, mediating role of the
marqueur comes to resemble that of the djobeur, since, in a sense, they both
function within this world without actively participating in it or subscribing to
its values. As a result, the key parallels of symbolism and functionality under-
girding both roles come to be increasingly important; as Glissant states, "The
storyteller is a handyman, the djobbeur of the collective soul" (1997:69/83).
Similarly, as Richard Burton explains, together they provide a disinterested
framework that allows cultural continuity to take place, through a critical pro-
cess of positioning that places them neither fully inside nor outside: "Strad-
dling these two worlds, distanced from them both and yet mediating them,
there is the writer, or rather the word-scratcher, whose interstitial position re-
calls that of the jobbers and other marginal beings" (1997b:157). Yet on a larger
scale, this textual mapping of the space once inhabited by Solibo simulta-
neously resites and rewrites those liminal figures with whom he interacts, and
it is to the shape and substance of their social positions that we must now turn.




Solibo Magnifique / 24


Solibo's Others

The voices that people Solibo Magnifique are collective rather than indi-
vidual; indeed, the stature of Chamoiseau's Caribbean subjects deliberately
reflects the complex resonances of their history. As Derek Walcott explains:
"The agonies it describes are not individual but those of the entire race, not
unique but those of the whole chorus of the settlement. The tribe discovers its
voice in defiance and by survival" (1997:47). And here, in these twin terms that
inscribe and frame the tensions and teleologies of the francophone Caribbean,
can be located the conflicts and contradictions that illuminate its Caribbean
characters. As the tensions of the police interrogation come increasingly to
resemble the strictures of the ongoing encounter between colonizer and colo-
nized on the Caribbean terrain of Martinique, they simultaneously assume the
disturbing, dualistic shape of the conflict between self and Other, of an oppo-
sitional paradigm of recognition and misapprehension inflected by hierarchies
of colonial alienation and domination. This history of intersubjectivity links
Bouaffesse and Pilon to Doudou-Menar and Congo, the two symbolic victims
of the interrogations, and is at the heart of the complex tensions that link
metropole to DOM and produce these patterns of Caribbean creolization. As
Chamoiseau himself explains in Ecrire en pays domind, his treatise on the
complex intersections marking writing and neocolonial domination: "Each
was present in the mind of the Other; each affected the Other without really
changing it. Everyone experienced the Other according to brutal laws which
had no consciousness of the whole. A prize for European colonists" (113). As
the interrogation proceeds apace, the succession of social and cultural
conflicts that are exposed by the encounter between the police and the wit-
nesses is reframed as a microcosm of the complex, multilayered dynamics of
contemporary departmentalization.
   We have already noted the importance of language and linguistic forms to
the processes of identity formation and self-recognition in this strategic site of
creolit6. We should therefore not be surprised to learn that the creole which is
central to Solibo's articulation of tradition and community is of similar impor-
tance in the disarticulation of self and Other, in the critical disjuncture be-
tween creole subjectivity and the imposition of metropolitan alterity. Indeed,
his death is perceived as a climactic, epoch-changing event that leaves the
community voiceless, lost, and abandoned: "In dying, Solibo plunged us
where words become worthless and things are senseless" (104/155). The insis-




248 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


tent temporality of the interrogation, then, inscribes this creoleness as a
diachronic process, in which the resulting elaboration of creole identity as a
product of conflict and confrontation both acknowledges the necessary imbri-
cation of history and articulates identity as an interstitial inscription of duality
and pluralism. As R. Radhakrishnan cogently explains: "Patterns of identity
and difference, selfhood and alterity are always historically produced in a
world where different histories respond to and acknowledge the reality of one
another. And any acknowledgment of another's reality necessarily involves the
acknowledgment of 'the self in the other' and 'the other in the self.' Neither
identity nor difference, neither self nor other is an immutable state of being:
the two are necessarily inmixed" (1996:84). The climactic events that will
shortly befall both Doudou-Menar and Congo are framed within precisely
these parameters, symbolically reiterating and reinscribing the paradoxical
patterns and tensions that link all of the players in this colonial drama. But this
time, even the investigating avatars of authority are drawn into this venomous
vortex of identity and difference.
   While we have already seen the way in which Bouaffesse's anxious articula-
tions of authority are inscribed in a complex, striated local background that
comprises, entre autres, military service for the metropole, a common-law life
with a "coulie concubine," and the praxis of the kalieur, it is important to note
that his superior, "Chief Inspector Evariste Pilon," is similarly defined by so-
cial patterns of paradox and compromise. As black males born and raised in
Martinique, they are the primary symbols of metropolitan authority in the
narrative; indeed, through the free indirect discourse that suggests to us
Bouaffesse's alienation and subjective splitting, we learn that Pilon "was from
here, a learned blackman who had combed the universities before landing in
the police force in France, then in the Criminal Brigade of this country" (66/
104). Pilon himself is so riven by conflict and contradiction that he becomes a
figural archetype of colonial mimicry and the complexes of insufficiency that
are the corollary of the encounter:

   At the time of the Solibo affair, he is living with a freckled chabine, peti-
   tions for Creole in the schools but jumps when his children use it to speak
   to him, crowns Cesaire a great poet without ever having read him, vener-
   ates the Antilleanity of the July cultural festival with its outdoor theater but
   dreams of Jean Gosselin's variety shows, commemorates the self-liberation
   of the slaves and frets at the Schoelcherian masses of the liberating God
   ... votes Progressive on the municipal ballot, abstains from the legislative




Solibo Magnifique / 249


   one and screams Vive de Gaulle! at the presidential polling places, culti-
   vates a sob for Autonomy and the rest for Martinique being made a
   ddpartement. That is to say, he lives like all of us, at two speeds, not know-
   ing whether he should put on the brakes when going uphill or accelerate
   going down. (76/118-19)

The range of tensions embodied in this extract shows clearly the extent of the
division and duality that have penetrated the psyche of Evariste Pilon. Run-
ning the gamut from language to politics and from history to culture, Pilon is
perhaps Solibo's symbolic Other; that is, nothing but a mass of creole conflicts
whose duty and defensive armor are afforded by the authority of the met-
ropole. From the personal to the political, Pilon is paradigmatic of his post/
colonial counterparts; his domestic relationship -with a "chabine," or woman
of mixed race-is common-law rather than legal, and he simultaneously ac-
cepts and rejects the cultural authenticity of creole; he fights off the sun while
keeping his feet warm with wool socks, reveres Cesaire while leaving his books
unread, and is riven between sign and act when it comes to the intricacies of
local politics. The fact that this existence "at two speeds" is significative of "all
of us" ultimately refigures Pilon into an Everyman, paying lip service to no-
tions of independence and autonomy while living the contradictions of depart-
mentalization that are recognizable to all but himself.
   These are the contradictions that ultimately collide head-on with the bru-
tality of Bouaffesse when the interrogations begin. And significantly, it is on
the shifting, problematic terrain of language that this conflict takes place; as
Bouaffesse remains silent, and, indeed, almost threatening, Pilon informs the
witnesses that they should consider themselves "in custody for the purposes of
a preliminary inquiry." The latter are immediately and overtly "frightened by
Ti-Coca's presence" (94/141), although this nervousness is somewhat nullified
by the subversive use of his youthful nickname. Both begin to question Bete-
Longue, who evinces increasing difficulty with the linear authoritarianism of
the frangais mathdmathique of the metropole, unable even to supply his
official, baptismal name to his interrogators. Bouaffesse's attempt at translation
is met with an indication from Pilon that he understands creole perfectly well,
a disclosure that gives rise to the following exchange:

   -Just trying to be helpful! You're an inspector, you shouldn't delve into
   the patois of these bums.
   -It's a language, Chief Sergeant.




250 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


   -Where did you read that?

   -Well then, if it's a language, how come your tongue is always rolling off
   such a polished French? And why don't you write your report in it? (95/
   143)

   Interestingly, the re-presentation of this age-old debate as to the linguistic
properties and status of creole has Pilon, the senior officer, defending it before
Bouaffesse's disparaging sarcasm. And sure enough, in order to bridge this
impasse of incomprehension, Bouaffesse is soon required again to translate
these linguistic linearities of the metropole into a series of comprehensible
colloquialisms, inscribed in a localized language of events significant only to
the circumscribed community:

   -Mr. Longue-Bete, what is your age, profession, and permanent ad-
   dress?
   -Huh?
   -The Inspector asks you what hurricane you were born after, what you do
   for the bek6, and what side of town you sleep at night? Bouafesse specifies.
   -I was born right after Admiral Robert, I fish with Kokomerlo on Rive-
   Droite, and I stay at Texaco, by the fountain. (95-96/143)

   This remarkable moment of discursive exchange is not simply indicative of
a temporary breakdown in the prevailing line of authority. Of equal impor-
tance is the disagreement between these two symbols of metropolitan superi-
ority as to the true status of creole, given the capacity for communication and
translation held by Bouaffesse (which Pilon, despite his spirited defense of
creole, does not share). While Pilon's position can perhaps be read as one of
enlightened condescension, the paradoxical pluralism that the material reali-
ties of Martinican life have made of their joint alienation turn the infelicities of
verbal practice into a test of authenticity and cultural allegiance. It is a ques-
tion that goes beyond a simple matter of expertise. By implying that the orality
of these creole conventions cannot be transformed into an iterable, transmis-
sible, metropolitan discourse because the necessary phonetic and lexical
codes do not yet exist, Bouaffesse is able to infer a host of cultural insuf-
ficiencies through his translation of Bete-Longue's speech, drawing on the sup-
posed inadequacies of this "language"-which defines him as well as his coun-
terparts-to engender a world of inferiority, an entire cross-section of critical




Solibo Magnifique / 251


and cultural disjunctures that, from a historical and political point of view,
separate metropole from colony through a differential pattern of critical tem-
poral and linguistic difference. It is precisely this difference that, in Marie-
Agnes Sourieau's words, "exemplifies the process of self-mutilation inflicted by
colonial domination: to express oneself in creole goes beyond depreciation; it
is not to speak" (1992:136). The re-presentation of these patterns of silence
implying cultural dependency and subordination paints a picture of that insis-
tent disjunction between metropole and DOM that is crystallized and con-
tested by the soliloquies of Solibo, and that continually subverts the ongoing
myth of metropolitan mastery.
   This cultural conflict that is waged on the terrain of language is also used as
a weapon of deception and guile by the police as metropolitan proxy against an
unsuspecting and unprepared public. The form and function of the interroga-
tion procedure lend themselves to this armature of plot with particular effect;
as it turns out, the critical and hierarchical disjuncture between creole and
metropolitan French is maintained and even exacerbated, as Bouaffesse turns
his divisive and derogatory attentions from his juridical to his social peers, from
Pilon to the unfortunate Congo. Here, Bouaffesse deliberately sets out to en-
trap Congo through the use of language, seeking to capitalize upon the limita-
tions of his orality and his complete ignorance of the niceties and nuances of
metropolitan French. The text leaves us in no doubt as to either his ultimate
aim or his insistent alterity, signaled again by the use of free indirect discourse:
"The best way to corner this vicious old blackman was to track him down in
French. The French language makes their heads swim, grips their guts, and
then they skid like drunks down the pavement. The Chief Sergeant's sixteen
years of career policework had roundly shown this technique to be as efficient
as blows with a dictionary to the head" (66/1o5). Thus the alienation that has
built within Bouaffesse is of long standing, grounded in the metropolitan
source of his authority and predicated upon the control of language or, more
precisely, upon the fact that Bouaffesse applies his dual facility with the discur-
sive domains of both the metropole and its colonial outpost to dupe and de-
lude those of his counterparts who practice only an oral, creolized discourse.
The effect of the discourse of the metropole upon these disadvantaged unfor-
tunates is like a blow to the head, a physical confrontation with the forces of
law and order which they are sure to lose.
   As Congo feels increasingly menaced by metropolitan authority, the con-
trast between discourses is couched in unmistakably binary terms, as





252 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Bouaffesse knowingly asks the impossible: "Good. Now, Papa, you are going to
speak in French for me. I've got to write what you're going to tell me, this is a
criminal inquiry now, so no black Negro gibberish, just mathematical French"
(67/105). This authoritarian conflation of linguistic and racial categories be-
comes a cultural sign of social subjection, a metropolitan discourse defining
Congo's alterity and difference from itself through discursive insufficiency and
racial dissimilarity. Congo's subjectivity is effectively erased by the poverty of
his performance, as Bouaffesse's translations of this oral "gibberish" into the
metropolitan machinations of a "mathematical French" turn into demands
for identity couched in legal terms: "I am asking you for your City Hall Social
Security name" (67/105). This position of legal and linguistic authority allows
him repeatedly to posit Congo's inability to respond in kind as proof of his
cultural ignorance and social incompetence: "You don't speak French? You
never went to school? So you don't even know if Henry IV ordered 'chicken-
pot-pie' or 'pork-redbeans-and-rice'?" (67/105). Ultimately, it is the imbrica-
tion of history and politics undergirding this confluence of identity and differ-
ence that drives the doubled alterity of Bouaffesse, divided between metropole
and colony, between a colonized, subjugated self that must face one other
denied and a second that demands absolute allegiance, separated in turn both
from Pilon and from Solibo's others, and unintentionally but inevitably high-
lighting the indissoluble hierarchies that rend this creole society.
   The pattern of colonial brutality that these metropolitan divisions inscribe
in terms of the linguistic economy articulated by Bouaffesse functions as a
harbinger of the violence soon to be unleashed by the investigative process
itself. The text leaves us in no doubt as to either his character or his proclivities;
in fact, we are warned that he is a figure "whose implacable cruelty seemed to
pour into the dark red of his gaze" (55/90-91). These violent tendencies,
through which the insistent intricacies of colonial dominion maintained their
stranglehold on this subjugated society while suborning key elements of the
colonized, are also metonymically displaced onto Bouaffesse's henchmen;
these "guardians" are like the harmoniously designated figure of Figaro Paul,
who acquires a sobriquet that sums up his fearful character: "The name of the
first was Figaro Paul, legendary for his long-lasting grudges and underhand
vengeance and thus nicknamed Diab-Anba-Feuilles" (53/87). This is the
framework for the forthcoming encounter between Doudou-Menar and the
forces of colonial authority, one that will clearly illuminate the pervasive di-




Solibo Magnifique / 253


chotomy that colonialism's double vision maintains between the suborned
and the subordinated.
   What Doudou-Menar, "still believing herself legitimitized" (55/91), re-
mains critically unaware of is that the Bouaffesse she manages to unearth is no
longer the carefree kalieur she once knew. He is now a crucially split colonial
subject imbued with the representative authority of the metropole, and it is
this divisive dislocation that will metonymically determine the merciless as-
sault meted out at the hands of Diab-Anba-Feuilles and the subsequent subjec-
tive transformation of Doudou-Menar into colonial victim. Here, we should
also note that Doudou-Menar herself is now no longer what she was; time and
circumstance have made her a pillar of the community, an icon of respect,
solidity, power, and tradition whose fleeting importance to the investigation
engenders an ephemeral sense of social legitimacy. Now, with tough super-
male ritualistically facing off against tough superfemale, even Bouaffesse hesi-
tates, and the community holds its collective breath: "Even Bouaffesse steps
back . . . the rising thirst to see the fight . . . dissipates the witnesses' fright"
(56/92). This knot of tension and misrecognition seems resolvable in only one
way, but even before that point is reached, there is an even more arresting act
of self-immolation that precedes it; in what appears as an extraordinarily con-
tingent act, Diab-Anba-Feuilles bites his own finger, draws blood, and taunts
Doudou-Menar with the resulting gore.
   This apparently inexplicable moment is itself framed by several telling ref-
erences. For essentially, Diab's verbal tirade preceding his physical assault
conflates a metonymy of colonial authoritarianism with a perceived fear of
gender reversal, resulting in a drama of debasement and denial: "Just because
I'm wearing the police blues of the Law you think: Oh yeah he's probably an
auntie! . . . Well, I'm no auntie, I'm no auntie, just you see if I'm an auntie"
(57/93). Here, it is the blue of the official police uniform that confers authority
on Diab, so that it is the Law itself that is being ignored by Doudou-Menar.
The eternal masculinity of colonialism's paternal precepts is then immediately
laid over against the arrogance of an implied absence at its core, one which
threatens to transform the authoritarian Diab-Anba-Feuilles into a ma-com-
mere/makoume, or passive homosexual, arguably the most execrable of mas-
culinist Caribbean insults.
   While acknowledging that the very use of this term has the capacity to open
up a veritable can of discursive worms, what is immediately and pellucidly





254 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


clear is that the inscription of the figure of the makoume is contextualized
against a female, rather than a male, counterpart. The rather contentious de-
bate that frames perceptions of sexuality and gender roles, as well as associated
rituals of naming and verbal performance in the region, is not really an integral
part of this study, although the term and its corollaries have been addressed
somewhat at length in a critical framework. In any event, this articulation of
one of the region's key social tropes insistently frames a critical moment in the
investigation.7 It is the social significance of being termed a makoume, or
"auntie-man," then, that most concerns us here. Essentially a figure of deri-
sion, defined in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage as "a general term
of abuse for any male considered to be lacking in the masculine qualities" (48),
the auntie-man, or mako, in the Creole-speaking territories, is above all a pow-
erless, derisory figure, a disenfranchised male who cannot even be a true fe-
male, deprived of any discursive capacity or social worth. This, then, is the fate
that ultimately threatens to dismantle Diab-Anba-Feuilles's aura of colonial
authority, erasing his masculinity and the social identity that is its corollary.
Seeing himself about to be defaced by Doudou-Menar, bested, brutalized,
and ultimately forced to admit to a lesser femininity, Diab's first thought is to
head off this double disenfranchisement, this public defrocking, so to speak,
by any means possible.
   The act of biting his own finger and drawing blood, therefore, is meant to
preempt public embarrassment and humiliation at Doudou's hands, and in-
deed, the animalistic act of self-mutilation he undertakes effectively redefines
the colonial framework: "Lips open on a set of bloody teeth, he holds his
wound out before his prey" (57/93). On a larger scale, it is apparent that this
inexplicably self-destructive act simply allows a larger bloodletting to take
place, drawing blood to beget blood, and functioning as an extreme rational-
ization of the colonial violence to follow. For Bouaffesse, true authority does
not require such antics-"He's no longer enjoying this. Diab-Anba-Feuille's
freak show slightly lacks official dignity"-while for Diab, in fact, it falls under
the rubric of a paramount, exclamatory self-sacrifice: "FOR YOU I HAVE
BLED! . . . Chief, don't get mixed up in this, squeals the mad policeman, I
have bled for her now" (67/93). And it is at this juncture that the true face of
colonial domination explodes, unexpectedly and unreservedly, proceeding, as
was the colonial wont, from vindication to violence, as the narrator enters the
discursive frame to describe both act and reaction: "And with his club he hits
Doudou-Menar, who doesn't see it coming, the meanest bash in police his-




Solibo Magnifique / 255


tory-I still weep over it" (57/93). The Otherness inaugurated by the politics of
the colonial encounter achieves its first, climactic moment of revealing truth.
   As this encounter continues, the problematics of cultural identity are once
again played out on the fertile terrain of language. Notably, Diab's verbal and
physical onslaughts are followed immediately by an outburst in creole: "I'm an
auntie? So I'm an auntie? Me, I'm going to pound you into the ground, yep!"
(58/94). This defiant repetition of the figured threat is certainly meant to force
Doudou-Menar into abject submission and an implicit acknowledgment of
the hollowness lurking at the threat's core, but even more important, given the
prominent role that language and orality, and creole in particular, have been
shown to play in this text, its appearance here is important for two reasons.
First, Diab's reversion to creole seems almost to occur in spite of himself; his
outburst is described as being "in a Creole he could no longer hold back" (58/
94), and signals the resurgence of the more familiar, mundane character who
is an integral part of this subaltern community. Given his social role as colonial
peacekeeper, his facility in both French and creole, with his critical shift from
the former to the latter mediated as it is by his attack on Doudou-Menar, this
metastasis in the communication code signals a psychic and social alienation
inaugurated by his colonial role and played out within a framework that
conflates physical and linguistic violence. His turn to the subaltern code is in
fact a return of the repressed, a double displacement of colonialism's desire for
conformity that resurfaces as an alterity inscribed in violence and repetition
where creole joins with a fear of feminization to become the verbal figure that
de-scribes the de-masculinization implicit in colonial subjection.
   Second, despite the periodic irruption into the text of other footnotes, serv-
ing other explanatory purposes, this moment of identitarian contestation re-
mains the only instance when creole dialogue has been translated at length
and rendered in footnote form. While the implications of the tonal shift com-
pulsorily enacted by the inclusion of explanatory footnotes in a purportedly
literary text have already been explored, showing that they necessarily draw
attention to and emphasize the self-reflexive, factitious, fabricated nature of
the literary artifact, the question raised by the difference between this trans-
lated creole passage and the presence of other, untranslated ones is ultimately
one of accessibility to the authorial gesture, a problematic register that medi-
ates here between author and reader. We have also seen this problematic in the
work of Suzanne Dracius, who resolves it by providing a creole glossary at the
end of the text. If, as seems clear, Chamoiseau has deliberately chosen this




256 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


passage for self-referential footnoting and secondary re-presentation in order to
highlight the problematic politics of language and creole identity as they inter-
sect with and implicitly transform both colonial authority and textual re-pre-
sentation itself, then this episode of confrontation and contestation of social,
political, and literary boundaries takes on added shades of resonance and dis-
cursive subtlety.
   Doudou-Menar is but the first victim of this pattern of displaced colonial
violence; an even more excruciating experience awaits poor Congo. His tor-
ment is parenthetically prefigured on the title page to section 4 ("Weep? For
Congo") (111/163), just as Doudou-Menar's fate was at the beginning of section
3 ("Weep over whom? Doudou-Menar") (74/115), and, retrospectively, Solibo's
as well, at the beginning of section 1 (Tears for whom? For Solibo) (7/23). By
now the representatives of metropolitan power are convinced of the existence
of a premeditated plot to poison Solibo with one of Doudou-Menar's sugary
chadecs-a confection made primarily of grapefruit whose origin is explained
in another footnote purporting this time to be an extract from the Coroner's
report-a plot with Congo as primary perpetrator, but one in which the entire
community has conspired and in whose cover-up they continue to participate.
Pilon's alienation here is clearly signaled once again through the use of free
indirect discourse, whose ambiguities penetrate even this fog of inductive rea-
soning: "It was abnormal that the listeners to the one named Solibo manifested
no surprise when, having collapsed after a cry of pain, he interrupted his state-
ments in such an illogical way. This permits the hypothesis that the listeners
knew that the man was going to die and that they came to observe the spectacle"
(102/152; emphasis in the original). Able to perceive the mote of illogic in his
counterpart's eye without taking cognizance of the plank in his own, Pilon,
whose distance from his own sun-drenched tradition is so marked that he
"stood in full sunlight like a tourist" (103/153), is determined to get to the bot-
tom of the affair.
   Yet the unplumbed complexity of the affair itself is aptly summed up in the
person of the peasant known as la Fievre, in the bus on the way to the police
station, not so much by what he says but by who he is, or, more correctly, is not:
"He's a featureless man, at the intersection of some fourteen ethnicities whose
traits he's carefully avoided. We know him without knowing him, he's from
Fort-de-France but he's not from here, and even his Creole has creoles from
elsewhere in it" (105/155). This oracle of opacity inhabits a masterful metaphor
of contradictions; a metis of undiscernible traits, simultaneously congenial




Solibo Magnifique / 25


and elusive, his racial and cultural indistinctness, coupled with a social and
linguistic inscription drawn on the unknowable, combine to make him per-
haps the ultimate icon of creole unrepresentability. It is thus more than appro-
priate that it is his plaintive query-"What's happening to us, Lord? What's
happening?" (104/155; italics in the original) -that summarizes the communal
condition upon the death of Solibo. But this turn to the Almighty is a rhetori-
cal question that finds its material response in the interrogation, beating, and
humiliation of the not incidentally named Congo.
   Although the latter's creole has been described as incomprehensible to all
but a very few, "more unfathomable than a Lorraine cliff" (68/107), the inter-
rogation is enthusiastically undertaken once again by the guardians of metro-
politan authority: "Jambette and Diab-Anba-Feuilles twist his arms behind his
back, slam him onto a chair, face under a desk lamp's incandescence.... Mr.
Bateau Frangais, inform us of the nature of the poison you supplied for Solibo
Magnificent's murder" (139-140/200-201). And again, Congo, caught in the
interstices of competence and performance, responds as before not in French
but in a creole that requires a translator, a task, as we now know, of mathemati-
cal precision, undertaken this time, immediately and unmediated by any ob-
servation of the rules of re-presentation, by the intrepid Diab-Anba-Feuilles:
"Hot ahan an hahe houazon, dit Congo, hantan-an h6 an hojet pahol la hi
hepann Holibo.". . . "In front of the faces his superiors were making, Diab-
Anba-Feuilles translated without waiting: He says that you are looking for
poison though it's a strangulation that has culled Solibo" (140/202). Diab's
recodification of Congo's "incomprehensible" non sequitur reveals the many
nuances of division that pervade this maelstrom of colonizer and colonized,
linking these various layers of colonial alienation through an incessant re-vi-
sion of the boundaries and disjunctures of colonialism's composite language
forms.
   Congo's ultimate fate requires a two-step process. In the first, his interlocu-
tors revisit the fate of Doudou-Menar with only slight changes in the cast of the
drama. Meanwhile it is Bouaffesse's turn to marshal the misrecognition of the
colonial counterpart, as he effortlessly perpetrates a supplementary colonial
violence: "Papa, listen to me, we respect your white hair, but for us, murderers
like you don't have any hair. . . . The Chief Sergeant seized a huge register he
had set aside and brought it down on the old blackman's skull like a plague
[the bad kind]" (141/202-3). This discourse emphasizes colonialism's symbolic
erasure of identity, a fragmentation and dispersal of subjective boundaries ex-




258 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


acerbated by interrogation procedures that expose the cultural void left to the
voiceless by the demise of Solibo Magnificent. Given this colonial erasure of
the collective memory and its voice that Solibo's disappearance represents,
even the very Africanness of Congo's origins is held against him, negating his
ethnic homogeneity and valorizing by default the marker of heterogeneous
admixture: "His clients called him 'Congo,' his father having been one of
those men transported to the country well after slavery. Their African purity
had seemed a defect in the middle of our mixed population, and one said
'Congo' with as much disdain as 'Negro"' (142/204). This nomenclature stands
in contrast to his "nom de securit6 sociale," Bateau Frangais, generating a
supreme sense of irony through this figure who inhabits the triple terms of the
colonial triangle; for if the search for Solibo's identity is meant to be the key
link in the chain ultimately establishing the true cause of his death, the con-
struction of Congo as primary suspect is also shown to be the catalyst that
exposes the French-framed sea of divisions and social prejudices that are en-
gendered in the wake of colonialism's construction of metropolitan authority.
   The nadir of this colonial encounter finally is reached as Congo is system-
atically tortured. But interestingly, his victimization at the hands of Pilon,
Bouaffesse, Jamette, and Diab-Anba-Feuilles marks an evolutionary stage in
his instantiation as colonial martyr, in a gesture whose accomplishment ulti-
mately comes, as it must, through an independent, contestatory act. In the
meantime, this brutal process of "chosification" continues: "They hammered
his skull and ears with thick phonebooks, they kicked him, and made him
crawl under office chairs, they knocked him in the liver, the balls, the nape,
they crushed his fingers and blinded him with their thumbs. . . . there was
nothing human around there" (143-44/2o6). But it is in the moments follow-
ing their respite-taken only to visit their colonial violence upon Sucette-
that Congo manages to seize the initiative. Already inscribed as a symbol of
social and historical resistance, he symbolizes the sufferings of slavery and the
people's survival, "for those who saw him they saw four hundred years of our
past" (143/204). From this perspective, in an act of supreme self-sacrifice that
stands in stark contrast to Diab's act of self-mortification, he hurls himself
through the window in a suicidal gesture that promises group reprieve as well
as individual surcease: "Diagram in one hand, a glass of coffee in the other, the
Chief Inspector was getting his questions in gear, when in a single leap the old
man flew right through the window. There was a brief silence before they
heard him crash two floors below" (145/208).




Solibo Magnifique / 259


   Crucially, it is the form, rather than the simple fact, of Congo's death that
renders it an act of opposition to the continuation of colonial control; by inter-
vening in the cycle of metropolitan violence, taking his own life and therefore
the moment and manner of his death into his own hands, Congo takes his
place beside Solibo as an icon of cultural independence, a symbol of opposi-
tion whose disappearance is fundamentally linked to an impending change in
regional outlook and perspective. For if, as Marie-Agnes Sourieau suggests,
"Solibo Magnifique establishes that the cultural dependence of the Martin-
ican people brought on the escheat of a tradition that is fundamental to their
identity" (1992:136), then Congo's sacrificial suicide must also take its rightful
place as a survivalist act performed for and in the name of the people, a
supplementary cultural and geopolitical inscription of an identity whose dual
protagonists signify it as African and West Indian, indomitable and indepen-
dent in its continuing struggle against metropolitan mastery. If the presence of
the storyteller is critical to the continuity of the communal identity, then the
Congos of the Caribbean are the final arbiter of colonialism's Others, mod-
ern-day maroons, if you will, who prefer the obstinacy of opposition and the
dignity of death to a life of suffering, slavery, and subordination. Through
Congo, Solibo's others attain that sense of survival as a community that was
threatened by the latter's demise, acting out the identitarian tradition of creole
enfranchisement and self-sufficiency made latent by Solibo's stories and con-
fronting the violence that was ultimately unleashed by the insistence on locat-
ing the fundamental signification underlying his death. The methodology of
the official inquiry, combined with the terrorist tactics of police procedure,
produces a series of communal acts that results in the resurgence and rein-
scription of the very maroon identity that was thought to have disappeared with
Solibo, valorizing the tradition of oraliture which he obviously not only per-
sonified but was able to vivify in his creole counterparts. As these symbols of
metropolitan authority are slowly stripped of their colonial mystique, it is
the polysemic, polyvalent character of the people, of the popular, communal
voice so long thought to be oppressed and repressed, that finally comes into its
own as a discursive articulation of oppositional identity.


Impressions of (Im)possibility

As the murder investigation inexorably approaches its end, the key issues of
identity, means, and motive paradoxically become less rather than more clear.




260 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


Indeed, if the expectation of the investigators was that clearing up the "who" of
Solibo would lead logically to the "why" of the crime, they are to be deeply and
painfully disappointed. After taking pains to ensure that the written record
reflects that "Congo's window suicide became an escape attempt" (147/211),
thereby hopefully engendering the continued security and superiority of the
metropolitan discourse through which their supplementary superiority is en-
sured, Pilon, with Bouaffesse in tow, returns to Doctor Lelonette for the results
of the autopsy. But in point of fact, since the good doctor cannot provide an
adequate response to the question of how Solibo died, he is thus equally un-
able to clarify the "who" aspect of the mystery, leaving the "how" that subtends
Solibo's life and death still an open question for the metropolitan authorities:
"The man was in perfect health, of exceptional vitality. . . . The problem for
me is that he presents all the symptoms of death by strangulation. . . . however,
on the neck's exterior, yes, yes, look, the neck shows no hematoma, not a trace,
it's perfectly normal: this Mr. Solibo would then had to have been strangled
from the inside (Whaat? Bleat Pilon and Bouaffesse) which literally makes no
sense, you'll agree"(15o/215). Both Solibo's death and Solibo as subject thus
seem destined to remain shrouded in mystery, as the metropolitan authorities
are forced to confront a logical and physical impossibility that now parallels
the discursive impossibility within which this subject is framed.
   If Solibo's beginnings are fundamentally untold, his end is no less enig-
matic, as the doctor makes clear: "This death is mysterious from a medical
point of view. . . . I can already say that there hasn't been a crime" (151/216).
Caught in this maze of cultural signification, where the solution to the enigma
of identity appears constantly elusive, Bouaffesse and Pilon proceed in a
manner that becomes ever more surprising; by turning to a quimboiseur, or
obeahman, known to Bouaffesse, they effectively abandon the logical straits of
metropolitan linearity for the syncretic strategies of the creole. This tacit rec-
ognition of the colony's pervasive polyvalence is borne out not only by the
enigmatic explanation proffered by this visionary of vodun-whose socioreli-
gious role awards him a position of power within the community that rivals,
and perhaps surpasses, that of these icons of imperialism-but through the
significant fact that he makes his response "in his ageless creole," conflating
form and function, history and opposition in a culminating moment of con-
tinuing orality. Last in a line of creole inscriptions that frame critical moments
in the narrative, the quimboiseur's linguistic, identitarian gesture is an echo of




Solibo Magnifique / 261


the ageless, slave-engendered code that cleaves Solibo to his community, and
joins language, history, and tradition in a final affirmation of pluralist mysti-
cism: "In the body, Inspekder . . . there's water and breath, speech is breath,
breath is strength, strength is the body's idea of life, of its life" (153/219). By
equating speech with the ineffable life force, the quimboiseur succeeds not
only in restating the value of the complex social role traditionally inhabited by
the conteur-with its corollary of cultural affirmation for the community as a
whole-but also in inscribing that elusive immediacy that has both character-
ized Solibo and defied discursive transcription.
   It is here, then, in the spiritual core of the community, that the true import
of Solibo's identity may finally be located; through the mediation of the
marqueur, we come face-to-face with these impressions of (im)possibility, with
the deliberate discontinuity between sign and act that ultimately transforms
the text into a self-reflexive simulacrum of discursive representability. It is
through this re-creational network that the marqueur seeks to convey his real-
ization that "to write down the word was nothing but betrayal, you lost the
intonations, the parody, the storyteller's gestures" (158/225), and that what was
lost with Solibo's demise was in fact a way of life, a world within a world. If, as
epilogue, the marqueur presents us with Pipi's performative reconstruction of
the verbal exchanges of Solibo's final moments, a displaced, othered, re-pre-
sentative translation of what Solibo was, "a reduced, organized written version,
a kind of ersatz of what the Master had been that night" (159/226; italics in the
original), then the endgame essayed by this translation, while insisting on its
constructedness, functions simultaneously to signal a coda for a society system-
atically-although perhaps unknowingly-destroying its traditions and prac-
tices from within. For with all that Solibo was, in the end "this man. . . was the
suffering pulse of a world coming to an end" (159/227); as these festivities of
bacchanalian intensity wind down, as "Vaval, in flames, reddened the whole
harbor" (154/220), the social whole seems to slowly slide into an unrecogniz-
able, impressionistic imitation of its complex, creole cultural heritage. It is this
history, this discourse, these sites of violence, tragedy, and survival, that above
all must not be forgotten.
   If, in the end, Pilon has no answer to the question upon which his investiga-
tion has been predicated-"Who, but who was this Solibo, and why 'Mag-
nificent'?"(154/219)-this need not be the case for us. Solibo's importance as
subject of this text lies both in his social role and in the arresting absence




262 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


caused by his death. As the society's storyteller, inheritor of that fierce desire for
autonomy and self-assertion symbolized from earliest slavery by the figure of
the maroon, Solibo functioned as the primary repository of a communal
memory whose orality was the defining sign of an entire era. The Caribbean
conteur was an intrinsically oppositional figure, one whose oraliture spoke in
the name of the people to inscribe and reassert the tensions and traditions that
had eventuated the community itself. In understanding the importance of
Solibo's performance, then, we find the word was the thing; as our narrator,
Chambizi6, so cogently states: "The essential thing to see and hear was Papa's
words: the things he said" (127/186; italics in the original). It was through this
performative conflation of visibility and audibility that Solibo's significance to
the community was signified; by communicating with and for the people, a
Solibo could re-cite the rituals of survival by reminding the audience of its
history of struggle and the continuity of its essential character: "For us, Solibo
Magnificent was exactly that. A light on the horizon which breathes Tjenbd
red! Tjenbd red! (Hold on tight!) and which helps you make it just by being
there" (129/188; italics in the original). By incorporating and italicizing this
indigenous rallying cry marking the identitarian spirit of the francophone
Caribbean, a phrase that historically has signaled a commitment to an opposi-
tional autonomy and cultural self-assertion in the face of unrelenting metro-
politan domination, Solibo's discourse is metamorphosed into a mythical
metaphor of endurance, mapping through his very existence a means of cul-
tural survival that encompasses and empowers the community at large.
   At the same time, however, these were the very same qualities that made
Solibo into an elusive, undefinable presence, one in whom the combination
of word and gesture, of past and present, of orality and discursivity created a
cultural phenomenon whose common currency was the Caribbean experi-
ence of creolization. Since Solibo both inhabited and inscribed the imme-
diacy and complexity of social exchange, he came to symbolize creolization
itself, re-presenting a cultural totality that could be discerned but not catego-
rized: "Solibo was like a reflection in a window, a sculpture with facets that
allowed no angle to reflect the whole" (154/220). This intrinsic fragmentation
and its corollary of difference inscribe Solibo within a framework of unrepre-
sentability, one that shields his contentious subjectivity even as it necessarily
imposes a signifying network of self-reflexivity upon the text. This perspective
enables us to better understand the remarkable episodes of metamorphosis to




Solibo Magnifique / 263


which Solibo's body is subjected during the investigation; it is the impossibility
of a vision globale informing his life that is necessarily revisited and recodified
to undergird his shifting, intangible subjectivity, even in demise.
   The efforts of the emergency personnel to transport the corpse following
their preliminary examination are met with an arresting series of transforma-
tions, first rendering Solibo's body increasingly and impossibly heavier, then
quickly accomplishing the reverse: "They couldn't lift him off the ground:
Solibo weighed a ton all the sudden, like the corpses of those blackmen un-
willing to leave this life" (91/137). As their added efforts against this incompre-
hensible phenomenon are successively met with increased weights of one and
a half, then two, and then five tons (138), charms are consulted and precau-
tions against obeah and sorcery are taken, but all is to no avail; Solibo remains
immovable.
   These developments effectively breach the boundaries of narrative credibil-
ity and verge on the magical; they can be read as an extension of Solibo's
composite, discernible, yet indefinable personality. And as if to reinforce this
scene of mythical transformation, we are soon confronted by its opposite;
Solibo's body becomes light enough to be balanced on Bouaffesse's wrist and
bounced from finger to finger, "a body lighter than sugar cane ashes. .
Bouaffesse now passed the body to his middle finger, then his thumb, from the
thumb to the index, from the index to the middle, spellbound by Solibo effort-
lessly floating in his loose ties" (103-4/153-54). Finally, if this is not enough, the
conteur's body is quickly and mysteriously infested by a species of ant found on
only two islands to the north in Guadeloupe: "They were manioc ants and not
mad ants. . . . there were four ant species, the biting, the black, the mad, and
the manioc. . .. All were gathered on Solibo. . . . He had barely articulated that
thought when he realized the strangeness of what he had just said: Good God!
The manioc ant only lives in Guadeloupe!" (101/150; italics in the original).
Triply described by these scenes of impossibility, Solibo's demise appears to
engender as much of an enigma in death as its subject did in life; indeed,
inasmuch as these episodes border on the unimaginable, they appear to work,
perhaps deliberately, to impede a fuller understanding of the insistent social
immediacy of the conteur and the dissonance created by his disappearance.
   Given that all these events are inscribed beyond the pale of possibility,
sketching paradigms of a Caribbean marvellous realism, itself a sign of a creol-
ized culture, which does not differentiate between the mythological and the




264 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


real and thus defies rational explanation, what role do they play in construct-
ing a framework for our comprehension of Solibo?
   It might be useful to begin at the level of the mystery surrounding his depar-
ture from this mortal coil; cut off in full voice after uttering the incomprehen-
sible "Patat' sa!" Solibo experienced a death generated from within, an event
marking the end of an era that had placed him at its cultural and symbolic
center. Yet at bottom his death was not a suicide but rather a curious inability
to sustain the incremental metamorphoses of a society undergoing monumen-
tal if unconscious change. If the fundamental traditions and practices of this
society were no longer to have their basis in a subaltern subjectivity secured
and supported by oraliture, then not only was there no longer a place for a
Solibo, but his increasingly untenable subjective space was being progres-
sively closed off by the very society in whose reciprocity with their storyteller
the dual hinge of their special relationship was founded: "the Magnificent had
beeen losing his listeners in his latter days.... he found himself submerged by
the reality he thought he could vanquish" (156-57/222-24). In this climate of
change, in which the role and place of the conteur were indeed becoming
increasingly incomprehensible and inchoate, only the ultimate sacrifice
would serve to transmit that final kernel of sociocultural signification. As
Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" tellingly reminds us, "It is, however, char-
acteristic that not only a man's knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real
life-and this is the stuff that stories are made of-first assumes transmissible
form at the moment of his death" (1968:94). In these terms, it is Solibo himself
that attains transmissible discursive force, his unrepresentability effectively
eclipsed, his entire existence symbolically and retrospectively transformed
into a cultural palimpsest upon which can be read-and written-the funda-
mental framework of the Caribbean creole.
   Thus it is that the end of Chamoiseau's plot leaves us literally at its begin-
ning-in a place both the same and yet different, not having solved the mys-
tery of Solibo's death but now in a position, perhaps, to comprehend the mean-
ing of his life, the people through whom he lived it, and the events leading
toward his demise. Here, the double gesture enacted by the intersection of a
self-reflexive creole style with the subtle strategies of the detective fiction for-
mat works through these narrative transparencies of cultural transmission to
inscribe new parameters and possibilities for discursive form, in which spatial-
ity and temporality are both inverted and mestastasized into a moving medita-




Solibo Magnifique / 265


tion on the Caribbean condition. We may find in these episodes traces of that
mysticism that takes "the synthesis of heterogeneous elements as the basic
characteristic of marvelous realism," as Barbara Webb puts it, generating
through discourse "a new arrangement of elements, textures, juxtapositions,
convolutions of form, and metaphor" that "attempts to capture the density and
proportions of New World realities" (1992:19-20); at the same time, these enig-
matic epiphenomena teach us the importance, in a colonial context, that the
question holds over the answer, drawing on that conflation of history and cul-
ture that was perhaps the ultimate lieu de mdmoire animated and transmitted
by Solibo: "To learn to question, no more certainties or evidences.... That's
what Solibo was about" (127/185). The questions posed all his life by Solibo's
stories-the call-and-response that framed his cultural specificity, the "what"
that makes the Caribbean people who they are, a tradition of physical resis-
tance and spiritual and verbal opposition -these are the ones that assume the
shape of mystery and enigma at the moment of his demise. Similarly, the
double discourse that forms the essential framework of this novel stresses the
striking simultaneity of its principal stories; by retracing the life of the victim
through the account of the inquiry into his death, the author produces a com-
plex act of performative narration that becomes an allegory of the act of writing
itself. It is this consciously self-reflexive turn that, in continuously drawing
attention to the status of this text as literary artifact, reiterates the ongoing role
of discourse in the contestation of cultural hegemony and the construction of
new patterns of identitarian possibility.
   Establishing and maintaining tangible links with a recognizable past forged
in resistance and opposition, and emphasizing the place of this cultural iden-
tity in the social identity of the present, has historically been the role of the
conteur. His oral mastery mirrored and memorized the heritage of his essen-
tially African ancestry: born on the slave plantation, valorized by visions of
maroon resistance, enriched by ethnic admixture, and inscribed in the imme-
diacy of cultural performance. Such a vibrant synthesis of creole invention and
social subversion is summed up by Chamoiseau himself in the introduction to
his Caribbean Folktales (originally Au temps de l'antan): "Our Storyteller
speaks for a people enchained: starving, terrorized, living in the cramped pos-
tures of survival. . . . these tales provide . . . an apprenticeship in life -a life of
survival in a colonized land. . . . the storyteller must take care to use language
that is opaque, devious-its significance broken up into a thousand sybilline




266 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


fragments ... to help camouflage any dangerously subversive content.... the
Storyteller's object is almost to obscure as he reveals" (xii-xiii; emphasis in the
original).
   Yet along with his awareness of the symbolic complexities bound up in his
social role, and the composite layers of meaning communicated by his speech,
the fleeting relevance of this relation was also supremely evident to Solibo,
who recognized the subtle social transformations that marked the advent of
modernity, and with it the painful passage from the oral to the written: "This
transition between his epoch of memory passed down orally, of resistance in
the curves of speech, and this new time, when things only survived through
writing, ate him up" (156/223). Faced with the encroaching territoriality of
"other pasts," with the disappearance of a resistance bred in the word and the
inevitable progression of a future both unknown and unreliable, Solibo essen-
tially succumbed to the internal machinations of cultural irrelevance. But, in
the final analysis, his unique conflation of memory and performance stands
guardian, in all its elusive unrepresentability, at the gates of alternative possi-
bilities; as his discourse traces a path through the challenges of departmental-
ization and the allure of autonomy, the ironic parentheses that frame the
discursive impressionism of his oral gesture signal a comprehension of geopo-
litical complexities constructed beyond, and in spite of, the hierarchies of his-
tory: "Solibo Magnificent used to tell me: 'Oh, Oiseau, you want Indepen-
dence, but that idea weighs you down like handcuffs. First, be free before the
idea. That's where it starts, that struggle of yours"' (87/33). As this oppositional
praxis undergirding the maroon tradition is steadily transformed into a differ-
ential discourse of Caribbean heterogeneity, the corollaries and constants of
Solibo's self-reflexive oraliture do not die away but are progressively reiterated
into performative patterns of infinite possibility.









Conclusion
Creolizing the Colonial Encounter


None of the people who now occupy the islands-black, brown, white, African,
European, American, Spanish, French, East Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Jew,
Dutch -originally "belonged" there. It is the space where the creolisations and
assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated. The New World is the third
term-the primal scene-where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between
Africa and the West.
Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora




It would probably be foolhardy to attempt to provide any sort of definitive
conclusion to the complex concatenation of history, politics, ethnicity, and
discourse articulated here. This exercise in the exegesis of reading and writing
began by inscribing the problematics of ambivalence posed for the peoples of
the Caribbean by the arrival of Christopher Columbus, an explorer whose
ambiguous accomplishments are perhaps best signified by the fact that a na-
tional holiday in his honor is celebrated in the United States despite his never
having set foot on the North American continent. But the true significance of
Columbus's arrival in the "New World" lies not in this act of "discovery" but in
the ethnic and cultural synthesis that was produced in its wake for the five
centuries that followed. As Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, the editors
of the volume Seeds of Change, point out: "What Columbus had really discov-
ered was, however, another old world, one long populated by numerous and
diverse peoples with cultures as distinct, vibrant, and worthy as any to be found
in Europe. Tragically, neither Columbus nor those who followed him recog-
nized this truth. . . . Only recently, in fact, have we come to realize that what
Columbus did in 1492 was to link two old worlds, thereby creating one new
world" (12). The implicit interrogations of departmentalization and its corol-
laries of cultural identity that have informed these chapters reflect these inter-
sections of the old and the new that subtend a creolization process driven, in its
Caribbean context, by the forces of slavery, colonialism, racism, and ethnic
and cultural admixture.




268 / Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel


   In analyzing these novels, I have set forth some of the themes and tensions
that tend to shape the boundaries of such creolizing discourses. Because I have
only touched the surface of this area of analysis, it is beyond question that
further consideration of the implications raised by such intersections of
relationality and re-presentation is both necessary and urgent. Indeed, I have
argued that what is at stake is Caribbeanness as the summa of a larger phenom-
enon of creolization, stressing the polysemic character of this regional palimp-
sest in which, as Derek Walcott explains in "What the Twilight Said," these
composite populations were compelled to create "a language that went be-
yond mimicry, a dialectic that had the force of revelation as it invented names
for things, one which finally settled on its own mode of inflection, and which
began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folksongs and fables" (17). It is
the ways in which this language has interacted with and has been transformed
by its corollaries of history, literature, and culture as it spawns new paradigms
for discursive inscription, that I have attempted to elucidate here.
   The performative gestures and linguistic and discursive creolization of such
texts are grounded, as Antonio Benitez-Rojo explains in "Three Words toward
Creolization," in an understanding of this phenomenon in its Caribbean con-
text, one that frames "the unstable states that a Caribbean cultural object pre-
sents over time. In other words, creolization is not merely a process (a word
that implies forward movement) but a discontinuous series of recurrences, of
happenings, whose sole law is change"(55). This insistence on discontinuity,
instability, and change works to debunk old, stereotypical ways of reading and
writing, highlighting the slippage between what is bequeathed by the praxis of
colonialism and departmentalization and the challenge of cultural and discur-
sive reinvention, and produces multivalencies of transformation out of this
conflation of creolization and intertextuality.
   The principal question here has been how to approach these modes of read-
ing and writing as differentially as their content implies, to find a way, as
Jonathan Cu puts it, "to make sense of novels which thematize the difficulties
of making sense and especially ridicule attempts to read life as if it were a
novel, in accordance with those very operations which the reader is engaged in
performing" (1985:212). The reading strategies employed here have been
geared toward highlighting the deliberate dislocation between form and con-
tent that French Caribbean geopolitics demand, as well as the differential
structural and organizational principles of language. As Frangoise Lionnet
puts it, "The otherness of the local vernacular produces hybridity, within the




Conclusion / 269


poetic text" (1998:76). It is to the conjunction of these phenomena that Benita
Parry refers when, in her article "Resistance Theory," she writes, "Identity is
now perceived as multi-located and polysemic-a situation that characterises
postcoloniality and is at its most evident in the diasporic condition" (175). The
ancient, metropolitan dialectic of self and Other, here and elsewhere, gives
way to the creative slippages and strategies of hybridization and synthesis.
   As a literary discourse that speaks for the many, French Caribbean literature
distills from the experiences of exile, slavery, migration, marooning, ethnic
and linguistic creolization, colonialism, slavery, departmentalization, and
diaspora a narrative voice of creative coherence, of a compound cultural prac-
tice that revels in its own disjunctures. Its creative conjunctures of form and
content seek, paradoxically, to embody the very discontinuities that make the
Caribbean a site of specifically multiple identities. As Chamoiseau himself put
it in a recent interview, "It's a question of constant tensions between compet-
ing identities, and that is what makes the Caribbean such a vital place"
(1999:51). In this creative newness that marks its differential modernity,
reflecting the paradoxical disjunctures both of its metropolitan diasporas and
the complex discontinuities of ethnicity, language, and place that are the result
of colonialism, departmentalization, and modern-day migration, Caribbean
creolization stands poised to extend the boundaries of its discursive praxis,
becoming as exuberantly polyvalent as the identities it re-presents.











      Notes








Introduction. Conceptualizing Creoleness:
French Caribbean "Postcolonial" Discourse
   i. The further etymological and ethnocultural implications of the word "creole," as
defined here, are discussed in detail in chapter 4; I have drawn on the 1992 edition of the
OED here.
   2. This discussion is laid out in detail in the opening sections of Edouard Glissant's
Caribbean Discourse; see, in particular, 14-26.
   3. See, for example, "The Gendering of Crdolitd," by A. James Arnold, in Penser la
crolitd, edited by Maryse Cond6 and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, 21-40, and Maryse
Cond6's closing piece, "Chercher nos verites," in the same volume, as well as her "Order,
Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer," 121-35.
   4. Indeed, attacking the creolistes on these and other grounds now appears to be de
rigueur if not a la mode, as recent exchanges at such fora as the M/MLA, Chicago 1997,
ALA, Austin 1998, ICCL, Bahamas 1998, and the MLA, San Francisco 1998 can readily
attest. See also, for example, Richard Price and Sally Price's article "Shadowboxing in the
Mangrove," 123-62, a piece whose unmitigatedly critical stance toward the approach
taken by the creolistes and, indeed, toward Martinican society at large-this from critics
who profess to spend half of each year there-begs the question of the very discursive
legitimacy of creolite. The implications of their position, as well as that of Arnold, will be
explored in chapter 5.

i. La Ldzarde: Alienation and the Poetics of Antillanite
   1. All page references for Edouard Glissant's Le Discours antillais will be made paren-
thetically in the text.
   2. Homi Bhabha lays out the basis for this idea and the range of its implications in
"The Commitment to Theory," Questions of Third Cinema, edited by Jim Pines and Paul
Willemen, 111-32.
   3. All page references for La Ldzarde will be made parenthetically in the text. Trans-
lations are taken from the English version, The Ripening, translated by J. Michael Dash.
   4. See, for example, Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles, 46; see also Frederick I Case,
The Crisis of Identity, 61. The latter's references to Glissant's insistence upon "the perfect-
ibility of the human being and the possibilities of a deepening ideological consciousness"
seem, given my own reading, particularly anachronistic.





272 / Notes to Pages 29-6,


   5. "The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs
whatever maybe made present of the subject-it is the field of that living being in which
the subject has to appear. . . . The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other ...
functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a
signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to
function, to speak, as subject.... What we find once again here is the constitution of the
subject in the field of the Other. . . . If he is apprehended at this birth in the field of the
Other, the characteristic of the subject of the unconscious is that of being . . . at an
indeterminate place." Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamantal Concepts of Psycho-Analy-
SiS, 203, 207, 208.
   6. Both Wallace Martin's Recent Theories of Narrative and Dorrit Cohn's Transparent
Minds offer the most thorough and far- reaching discussions of the implications of free
indirect discourse for the construction of subjectivity. The function of this form in narra-
tive discourse is also examined in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction and
Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse. It is the implications of these positionalities for
postcolonial discourse and the alienation of its attendant subjectivities that I wish to
emphasize in this reading.
   7. See, for example, works by Paul Jay, and James Olney.
   8. See also the introduction to White's Metahistory.
   9. See Larousse Greek and Roman Mythology, edited by Joel Schmidt and Seth
Benardete, 9.

2. En attendant le bonheur: Creole Conjunctions and Cultural Survival
   1. Maryse Cond6, En attendant le bonheur (Hirimakhonon). All page references will
be made parenthetically in the text. Translations are taken from the English version,
titled Heremakhonon, translated by Richard Philcox.
   2. In a striking anomaly, this protagonist has been given an anglicized first name, itself
linked oppositionally to a French surname. While insisting that a perfectly adequate
French equivalent for the former, Veronique, remains elided, this additional level of
symbolic duality underlines the basic pattern of identitarian alienation by which she is
framed. On the one hand, then, this form of nominalization may be read as a deliberate
discursive attempt to stress her strangeness, to inscribe the deep-rooted pervasiveness of
her alterity. But other, related issues are also at work: the French vironique also refers, on
the one hand, to a flower whose symbolic language is related to virginity, virtue, and lack
of desire; etymologically, its Greek root meaning is "authentic representation" or "true
icon." On the other hand, Mercier, the other half of the protagonist's oxymoronic nomen-
clature, is drawn from the root word mercerie, conveying an inscription in the masculine
through its meaning of haberdashery, or the purveying of men's notions. This symbolic
chiasmus, whose opposing axes are drawn across the very body of the protagonist, in-
scribes her quest for the truth of herself precisely between a pure and virtuous woman-
hood and a desire of/for the masculine, and provides an interesting commentary on
Veronica's paradoxical but compelling subjectivity. I owe these insights in part to a com-
mentary made from the floor by Dr. Pascale de Souza of the University of Maryland,





Notes to Pages 68-130 / 273


during a session of the Carolina Conference on the Romance Literatures at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 20 March 1998.
   3. This reading of Veronica's silent textual inscription was confirmed to the author by
Maryse Cond6 herself during the discussion period at a panel devoted to her work at the
African Literature Association Conference in Austin, Texas, 25-29 April 1998.
   4. If desire plays a prominent role in the construction and resolution of the narrative
of En attendant le bonheur, it is a desire for alterity, to be Other, to inscribe the subject
into the field and discourse of the (cultural) counterpart. In Lacanian terms, desire deter-
mines the relationship of the subject to the Other in whom its alienation will always
already be inscribed; it succeeds the essential lack experienced by the subject separated
from the (m)Other, and marks the alienation of the subject. But, given that the subjectiv-
ity of this (m)Other is itself also based on a lack in being, it becomes impossible for it to
respond fully to the demand for love made upon it by the alienated subject. Subjected to
and alienated by the (m)Other, who cannot furnish what the subject lacks or has lost, the
subject cannot resolve his or her lack in being. Desire comes to delineate what is barred
to the subject, and is rendered as that which can never be satisfied. Ultimately, the subject
must relinquish the attempt to fulfill the vagaries of desire, and address the inscription of
alienation on its own terms: "That is why the question of the Other, which comes back to
the subject from the place from which he expects an oracular reply ... is the one that best
leads him to the path of his own desire-providing he sets out. . . to reformulate it, even
without knowing it, as 'What does he want of me?'" See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, p. 312. See
also the chapter titled "The Subversion of the Subject," in Bice Benvenuto and Roger
Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), as
well as chapters 13 and 14 in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, translated by David Macey
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), for admirably clear expositions of Lacan's
notoriously periphrastic prose.
   5. See Mayotte Capecia, Je suis martiniquaise (Paris: Correa, 1948) and Fanon's read-
ing of its implicit theme of "lactification" in Black Skin, White Masks.

3. L'Isold SoleillSoufrieres: Textual Creolization and Cultural Identity
   1. Daniel Maximin, L'Isold Soleil. Translations are taken from the English version
Lone Sun, edited and translated by Clarisse Zimra.
   2. Documentation of this sequence of events may be found in Robert Deville and
Nicolas Georges, Les Dipartements d'outre-mer: L'Autre Decolonisation (Paris:
Gallimard, 1996), 27-35. See also Germain St. Ruf, L'Epopde Delgres: La Guadeloupe
sous la rdvolution frangaise, 1789-1802 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1988).
   3. This symbolic rendering of the colonial undertaking is not without precedent. See
Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985) and Kateb Yacine's Nedjma
(Paris: Seuil, 1956) for an inscription of Algeria as absent, nonspeaking female object of
colonial desire, a reading which draws on the binaries of bilingualism and biculturalism
produced by the colonial encounter. On Djebar, and the textual articulation of
postcolonial heterogeneity, see also my "Rewriting Writing," Yale French Studies 83
(1992):71-92.





274 / Notes to Pages 134-139


   4. Michael Richardson, "Introduction," in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the
Caribbean, translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (London: Verso,
1996), 8.

4. L'Autre qui danse: The Modalities and Multiplicities of M6tissage
   i. Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie, L'Autre qui danse.
   2. This novel, published in 1948, has achieved a certain notoriety through its apparent
insistence on Martinican women's duty to "whiten the race" by marrying white.
   3. See Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963). While
Shelton's use of Erikson's work is linked to her subsequent reading of Lacrosil, I am
attempting to juxtapose both readings in order to conflate the principle of rage against the
self with Lacrosil's important confrontation of the feminine subject with her own mirror
image. Such a double reading, I would argue, illuminates more precisely the specific
issue of Caribbean feminine alienation.
   4. For a detailed description and documentation of this process, the cardinal role
played by the state agency BUMIDOM, and an evaluation of the integration of these
immigrants into metropolitan society, see Alain Anselin, "West Indians in France," in
French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today, edited by
Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1995), chapter 8.
   5. See, for example, Claude Levi-Strauss, Race et Histoire (Paris: Gonthier, 1961), and
Nancy Stepan, "Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places," in Degeneration:
The Dark Side of Progress, edited by J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander Gilman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See also K. Anthony Appiah, "The Uncompleted
Argument," 21-37. Here Appiah discusses Du Bois's "The Conservation of Races," in
W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses,189o-i9i9, edited by Philip S. Foner
(1897; New York, 1970).
   6. See Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean Usage (New York: Oxford, 1996), for
an effective definition and contextual examples of this verbal marker of Caribbean cul-
ture.
   7. These references were confirmed to the author by Suzanne Dracius in a fax com-
munication dated 27 February 1998, and in a personal interview conducted on 16 April,
1998.

5. Solibo Magnifique: Carnival, Opposition, and the Narration of the Caribbean
Maroon
   1. Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnifique. Translations are taken from the English
version, Solibo Magnificent, translated by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov.
   2. Accounts of the extent and effectiveness of Caribbean slave revolts are widespread
and can be found not only in Michael Craton's Testing the Chains but also in David Barry
Gaspar's Bondmen and Rebels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985), Robin Blackburn's The
Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London: Verso, 1988), Eric Williams's From Columbus to
Castro, and C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1963). Taken to-
gether or separately, the analyses in these texts provide overwhelming proof of the perva-





Notes to Pages 200-203 / 275


siveness of both large-and small-scale resistance as a historical phenomenon across the
region, from slavery's inception to the achievement of emancipation.
   3. Despite claims to the contrary in some quarters, slaves were limited not so much
perhaps by the topography but by the relative size of the islands of Guadeloupe and
Martinique; marooning encompassed both the formation of large bands of escapees and
single acts of petit marronnage. The slave populations of these islands found that their
limited size was not necessarily a complete barrier to larger-scale acts of freedom; detailed
and extended maroon activity was recorded as taking place in Antigua-an island which
is both Guadeloupe's closest neighbor and one-third its size-and St. Vincent, itself also
smaller than either Guadeloupe or Martinique. It stands to reason, then, that slaves in
larger territories would have a proportionately greater chance of making good their es-
cape. The flourishing communities of maroons on the smaller islands of the Grenadines
and Grenada also convincingly attest to their widespread installation and success in the
region. See, in particular, Craton, Testing the Chains, chapter i6, 195-210, and Gaspar,
Bondmen and Rebels, chapter, 8, 171-84.
   4. It has become almost de rigueur in some critical quarters to cite Glissant's textual
rebuke of the creolistes concerning the latent risk of essentialism that lurks within their
theoretical position. This critique, which appears in the Podtique and should perhaps be
read more as a discursive act of distancing, is usually read as evidence of the irreversible
epistemological break between their position and that of Glissant. He writes, "C'est ce qui
fait notre depart d'avec le concept de 'creolit6.' . . . Les creolisations introduisent a la
Relation, mais ce n'est pas pour universaliser; la 'creolit6,' dans son principe, regresserait
vers des negritudes, des francites, des latinites, toutes generalisantes-plus ou moms
innocemment" (103). However, in this regard, the following facts may perhaps speak for
themselves: While Glissant did indeed critique the creoliste movement at the outset, its
adherents have on more than one occasion acknowledged their debt to him, although
such an act should by no means be assumed to imply approbation. Chamoiseau, in
particular, speaks of this debt in "En t moignage d'une volupte," Carbet io (December
1990):143-52, tracing it back to his reading of Glissant's novel Malemort (Paris: Gallimard,
1975). Raphael Confiant originally dedicated his novel Le Negre et l'amiral (1988) to
Glissant. Not uncoincidentally, the epigraph from Chamoiseau's first novel, Chronique
des sept miseres (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), is taken from Glissant's Discours antillais, and
Glissant provided a four-page preface to the work titled, significantly, "Un Marqueur de
paroles," precisely the term that Chamoiseau will use to define his own role as novelist,
and which will come into self-referential play in Solibo. In this preface Glissant speaks of
Chamoiseau as "d'une generation qui . . . a porte son attention sur le detail du reel
antillais," and states unequivocally in this context that "La litterature antillaise de langue
frangaise qui avait beaucoup d'6clat prend desormais corps" (3). Chamoiseau also cites
Glissant's Discours antillais a number of times in his preface to his Au temps de l'antan.
   It is also worthy of note that one of the two epigraphs to Chamoiseau's Solibo
Magnifique is taken from Glissant's oeuvre, as is one of the epigraphs to Texaco, a work
which is also dedicated, entre autres, to Glissant. Besides the publication of the Eloge in
1989 (dedicated to Glissant, Cesaire, and the Haitian writer Frank Etienne, and one of





276 / Notes to Pages 206-254


whose four epigraphs was also taken from Glissant), it should be noted that Chamoiseau's
most recent literary work, L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (Paris: Gallimard, 1997),
contains a multiparagraph entre-dire written by Glissant himself. In a recent interview
with a U.S. magazine publication (Islands, January-February 1999, 26-30), Chamoiseau
speaks candidly of "timidly" presenting Glissant with the manuscript of his first novel,
Chronique des sept miseres, at Le Diamant, in Martinique. Since that time, both families
have taken their annual vacations together at Le Diamant.
   5. See Michel de Certeau's "On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life," in
Social Text 3 (198o):3-43. I use this distinction for the basis of the discursive definitions
that inform several aspects of this chapter, drawing on the use Richard Burton makes of
this distinction in his book Afro-Creole.
   6. See Derek Walcott, "A Letter to Chamoiseau."
   7. The role of the makoume in the binary system that governs the gendered world of
the creolistes is also discussed at length in A. James Arnold's "The Gendering of Crdolitd,"
several of whose parameters and implications have been analyzed in depth above. At the
same time, it should be noted that both the historical influences on and the ritualistic
aspects of this emphasis on forms and perceptions of masculinity are given short shrift in
Arnold's argument. Alternative, more wide-ranging social analyses of Caribbean mascu-
linity, including its attendant rites, cultural practices and prejudices, and historical heri-
tage can be found, inter alia, in Roger D. Abraham's The Man-of-Words in the West Indies,
Evelyn O'Callaghan's Woman Version, and Edith Clarke's My Mother who Fathered Me.










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Index


Acceptance, 165
Admixture, 194-6, 214
Adrien (character), 117-20, 127, 138
Affiliation, sites of, 164
Affirmation, 165
Alienation, 8, 67, 84, 99, 117-8, 154-5, 158-62
Allegory, 121
Alterity, 47, 74, 79, 95
Alternative inscriptions, 100
Ambiguity, 25-29, 49, 72, 83
Ambivalence, 85, 118-9, 154, 267
Andrade, Susan, 72, 99
Antillanite (Caribbeanness), Glissant's theory
   of, 7-13, 19-25, 63
Artificiality, 229
Assimilation, 149, 156, 16o, 164-70, 190, 198
Authenticity, 148, 185, 193
Author, as novel's character, 227, 231
Autophobia, 154


Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 188-9, 268
Bete-Longue (character), 231, 250
Bhabha, Homi, 5, 103, 225
Biracial femininity, 153
Bongie, Chris, 33, 35, 114, 131, 133, 134
Bouaffesse, Philemon (character), 234-8, 248-
   254, 257, 260. See also Bete-Longue; Diab-
   Anba-Feuilles; Doudou-Menar; Pilon,
   Evariste; Solibo
Bourgeois, black, 83, 86-87, 89, 94
Burton, Richard, 15, 21, 28, 164, 189, 199-200,
   219-21, 244-6


Calypso, 170, 219
Calypsoniani, 209-10
Caribbean: carnival, 218-22, 230; colonial his-
   tory, 1, 19-25, 112-13, .5; creolization, 10-13;


   discourse of difference, 23; identity, 6, 23,
   64-65, 130, 133, 223; literature, 269; moder-
   nity, 1-3, 17-18, 101-2, 163; realism, 263; as
   single entity, 222; subjectivity, 12o; women,
   8, 155, 165. See also Creolization; Women
Caribbeanness. See Antillanite
Cesaire, Aim6, 16, 132, 134, 215
Chamoiseau, Patrick, 197-266
Cheups (Fr. tchips), 182
Collective identity, 84
Collective memory, 206, 258, 262
Colonial authority, 1o4; and brutality, 252; and
   domination, io6, 130, 238, 258, 273n3
Colonial history, 19-25, 112-13, 15
Colonization: double, 153-54, 16o; and depart-
   mentalism, 19
Colony vs. metropole, 46
Commonality, 168
Communal voice, 141
Cond6, Maryse, 8, 62-100, 98, 221
Confiant, Raphael, 197, 200, 210-12
Congo (character), 251-52, 256-59. See also
   Bouaffesse, Philemon; Pilon, Evariste; Solibo
Contestation, 15, 22, 37, 101, 105, 126, 141
Conteur, 199-210, 202-205, 208-210, 232, 246.
   See also Solibo
Counterdiscourse, postcolonial, u5
Creole, 25o; constructs, 143, 205-07; culture,
   16, 105, 125; glossary, 255; identity, 6, 98, 133,
   168, 188, 246, 265, 269; language, 182-84,
   245-46; person, 4-5
Creolistes' movement, critique of, 275n4
Crdolitd, 14-18, 197, 247; vs. antillanit6, 10-15
Creolization, 194, 247, 262, 267-68; in the Car-
   ibbean, 3-4; definition of, 5; of French, 185;
   as global phenomenon, 3, 10-13, 189; and
   jazz, 126; vs. antillanit6, 15






Index / 28


Cric-crac, 233
Cross-cultural poetics. See Poetics of Relation
Cultural expression, 131-32
Cultural possession, 85
Cultural sisterhood, 82
Cultural survival, 131-32, 139
Cultural translation, 126-27
Culture of oppression, 104

Dash, Michael, 2, 12, 47, 55, 6o, 239
Defiance, 212, 217
Departmental disjunctures, 244
Departmental doubleness, 70
Departmentalism (with France), 2, 19-21, 67,
   137, 193, 268; ambivalence toward, 101, 151;
   celebration of, 6-7; modern, 232, 247
De Roseval, Jean-Marie (character), 90-94
Desire, role of, 83
Detective fiction, 223-24
Diab-Anba-Feuilles (character), 253, 258. See
   also Bouaffesse, Philemon; Doudou-Menar
Difference: discourse of, 138; within identity,
   169-71
Discursive cross-referencing, 234
Discursive displacement, 33
Discursive doubling, 34, 37, 174-75, 177
Discursive elasticity, 85
Discursive paradigm, 225
Discursive plurality, 109-10
Discursive re-construction, 113
Discursive self-definition, 239
Discursive slippage, 49, 51-52
Discursive space, 79
Disglossia, 246
Disjuncture, 19-20
Displacement, 98, 124-26
Diversion, 11, 23, 97
Diversity, 126
Djobeur, 10, 246
DOM-TOM (department d'outre-ddpartment mer),
   144-45, 148, 151, 153, 161-62
Doubleness, 102-4, 114-15, 156, 171; narrative,
   35-36, 103-4, 108, 172
Doubling: of character and situation, 31; and
   disjunction strategies, 28, 36-38, u5; levels
   of, 36-37; linguistic, 216; performative, 136
Doudou-Menar (character), 231-238, 247, 253-


   57. See also Bouaffesse, Philemon; Diab-
   Anba-Feuilles; Solibo
Draccius, Suzanne, 9, 142-96
Dual citizens, 21

Ebonis-Vrais-Fils-d'Agar, 149-52
Embedded narrative. See Narrative, embed-
   ded
En attendant le bonheur: deriving a discourse,
   62-82; prerogatives of place, 97; Veronica,
   83-86
Epistolary form, 174-81
Erasure: of identity, 134-35, 257-58; of linear-
   ity, 48
Eric (character), 170-73. See also Rehvana
Essentialism, 15, 271n4
Estrangement, sense of, 146
Ethnic betrayal, 188
Ethnicity, 7

Fanon, Frantz, 15, 21, 68, 102
Female cultural resistance, 234
Female fecundity, 136-37
Female subjectivity, 154, 157, 274n2, 274n3
Feminine perspective of history, 121
Feminine voice, 65, 122-23, 195
Femininity, biracial, 153
Feminocentric postcolonial voice, 65
Figural approach to (re)writing, io6
Fils-d'Agar. See Ebonis-Vrais-Fils-d'Agar
Flashback, 85-86, 91
Footnotes, 239, 255-56
Fragmentation, 34-35, 46, 127, 133
Frame narrative, 225
Free indirect discourse, 33-35, 43, 48-49, 52,
   251, 256; on continuum of speech, 146-47;
   definition of, 50; functions of, 50-51; as sign
   of subjective splitting, 248; used with paren-
   theses, 238
French West Indian subjectivity, u1

Garin (character), 31-32, 38-39, 40-45- See
   also Mathieu; Tha8l; Valerie
Genealogy, u5
Geopolitics, 4, 13, 268
Georges (character), 109-11, 113, 129
Glissant, Edouard, 7, 10-13, 19-58, 102, 202-03,






288 / Index


   208, 211, 246. See also Antillanitd; Poetics of
   Relation
Gros-ka, 211
Guadeloupe, 66-68, 97, 105-6, 124, 136-37,
   200


Hall, Stuart, 5, 144, 169, 171
Hewitt, Leah, 83-84, 93
History, rewriting of, 105-6, 109, 115, 121, 131-32
Hybrid communities, 164
Hybrid cultural identity, 63, 73, 74, 75, 100
Hybridity, 5, 70, 73, 90, 104-6, 124, 142-43
Hybridization, 20


Identity, 122, 166, 173, 265, 269; construction,
   72, 75, 131-32, 171; crisis, 4o; displacement,
   124; formation, 144, 169, 247; interstitial, 17;
   root, 14, 24, 72-73, 82-83, 136, 146, 170
Imbrication, 40, 121
Independence, identitarian, 113
Indeterminacy, 56
Interconnectedness, 138
Internal monologue, 52, 68-70, 77, 97-100,
   100, 146
Interstices, 76
Irony, 178, 187


Jeremie (character), 147-49, 177-79, 191. See
   also Rehvana
Jonathan (character), 11o-11, 114, 116-17, 123-
   124. See also Adrien; Louis-Gabriel; Marie-
   Gabriel

Krickrack, 233


Lacan, Jacques, 44, 154
Lacanian model, 119
La Fievre (character), 256
La Ldzarde: and antillanit6, 46-61; Glissant's
   Martinique, 19; politics of colonial ambigu-
   ity, 25-45
Lam, Wifredo (Cuban artist), 133-34
Lambrianne, 27, 31, 38-39, 43, 58
Language: and authenticity, 182-84; Caribbean
   vernacular, 181-91; centrality of, 205-6;
   challenge of, 205-6; colonization, 21, 1o2; of
   colonizer, 102; creole, 181-91; first area of di-


   version, 22; gender, 62-64; identifier, 206;
   identity formation, 247; juxtaposition, 71;
   point of contestation, 21, 102, 249; politics of,
   63-64; protean nature of, 107; role of, 190,
   245-46
L'Autre qui danse: assimilation and alienation,
   164-74; commensurability and authenticity,
   160-64; dance and survival, 191-96; episto-
   lary economies, 174-81; exile and identity,
   145; exile and metissage, 152-53; hybridity
   and hierarchy, 142-45; language and au-
   thenticity, 181-91; misrecognition and
   unbelonging, 153-57; return, revival, resis-
   tance, 157-60
Liminality, 25, 41
Linguistic doubling, 216
Lionnet, Frangoise, 15, 21, 71, 78, 81, 130, 143,
   146, 165, 193, 268
L'Isold Soleil, 101, 1o4; doubling the frame, 117-
   30
Lost tradition, 254-55
Louis Delgres, local hero (character), 111-13
Louis-Gabriel (character), 107-9, in, 114, 127


Makoume (auntie-man). See Diab-Anba-
   Feuilles
Mandingo marabout. See De Roseval, Jean-
   Marie
Man Gnam (character), 240. See also Solibo
Marginality, 76, 94, 105
Marie-Gabriel (character), 107-10, 112-14, 121,
   124-25, 138; ancestors, 109-10, 113-14;
   change in narrative structure, 121; letters to
   and from Adrien, 107; Matouba massacre
   (1802), 112-13; and re-telling of father's story,
   107-9, 125; and telling of mother's story, 124,
   138. See also Adrien; Jonathan; Louis-
   Gabriel
Marilisse (character), 82, 84, 87-88. See also
   Valerie
Maroon figure, 201-2, 207-8. See also Maroon-
   ing; Maroons; Marronnage
Marooning, 194, 198-99, 217. See also Maroon
   figure; Maroons; Marronnage
Maroons, iio-ii. See also Maroon figure; Ma-
   rooning; Marronnage
Marqueur, 214






Index / 289


Marronnage, 11o-11, 198-99, 202, 206, 217. See
   also Maroon figure; Marooning; Maroons
Martinique, 7, 20-21, 25-26, 84, 124
Martyrdom, 258
Masculine dominance, 30, 158, 236
Masculinity (ideology), 176, 253
Maternal womb, 123
Mathieu (character), 28-31, 30, 35, 37, 53, 6o.
   See also Garin; Tha8l
Matildana (character), 164-70, 174-79, 181-84,
   189, 192. See also Rehvana
Maximin, Daniel, 101-41
Mercer, Veronica. See Veronica (Mercer)
Metafiction, 104, 222-25, 227-28
Metaphor, 187
Mdtissage, 12, 78, 84-86, 122, 142-43, 160, 166
Metropole, 6, 46, 83
Metropolitan domination, 106, 235, 258
Migration, 3, 152
Mimicry, 119, 268
Modes of speech, 146
Multiplicity of perspectives, 54
Murder investigation. See Detective fiction
Mysticism, plural, 261


Napoleon, 112
Narration, performative, 265
Narrative: creolization, 116; disjunctions, 54-
   55; embedded, 48, u16, 174, 226; frame, 225;
   patriarchal structures, 62-63, 253-56; preoc-
   cupations, 72; voice, 28-29, 52, 55, 138, 146,
   245
Narrative doubling. See Doubleness, narrative
Narrative-that-is-not-a-narrative, 226
National identity, 112-13
National resistance, 112-13
Nativism, 162
Negative heroine, 67
Negative self-definition, 73
Ndgropolitain, 147-48, 150
Nettleford, Rex, 196, 220
Number significance, 114, 127


Omniscient reporting, 52
Opposition, 205-6, 212
Oppositional casting (of characters), 146
Oraliture, u16, 205, 237


Orality, 239; vs. writing, 228
Oral resistance, 210
Oral testimonies, 240
Ormerod, Beverley, 30-31, 41-42
Other, the, 19-22, 29, 95, 140, 143, 152, 168, 247,
   273n4; Garin, 39; Matildana, 168; and self,
   29; Tha8l, 46; Veronica, 79-85, 100


Parallels, 32
Parentheses, use of, 35, 38, 47-48, 51, 71, 182
Parody, 209
Paroleur. See Conteur
Patriarchal attributes, 65
Patriarchal history, u5
Peasantry, 231
Performative narration, 265
Perry, Benita, 9, 24, 103
Pfaff, Frangoise, 74, 88
Pilon, Evariste (character), 244, 248-49, 256,
   261. See also Bouaffesse, Philemon;
   Doudou-Menar; Solibo
Pluralism, 5, 97-98, 128, 186, 188, 192, 216-17;
   postcolonial, 7, 18, 55, 239
Plurality, 55, 106-7, 128, 141, 188-90, 192, 216;
   cultural, 144, 166; sociocultural, 5, 166
Plural perspectives, 217
Poetics of Relation, Glissant's theory of, 13-14,
   23
Polarity, 29
Politics of language, 63
Polyphony, 49
Polyvalence, 260
Polyvocality, 134, 139, 171, 186, 191-92, 201
Postcolonialism, 2, 33
Postcolonial subjectivity, 27-28, n0
Postcolonial transition, 44-45
Prefiguration, 108
Price, Richard, 207, 212-16
Price, Sally, 207, 212-16
Proverbs, 116-19


Quimboiseur, 260


Race, perspectives, 142
Racial significance, i68
Racial typing, 189
Racism, u8, 142






290 / Index


Rehvana (character), 145-52; death of, 191-93;
   dom-tom (department d' outre-dipartment
   mer), 161-62; Ebonis-Vrais-Fils-d'Agar, 149-
   51; hybridity, 16o; lack of rootedness, 145;
   psychological characteristics of, 154-55; rela-
   tionship with Eric, 157, 170, 177, 179; rela-
   tionship with Jeremie, 147-49; returns to
   Martinique, 157; search for "authenticity,"
   159-60; silent about letters from Matildana,
   180, 185. See also Ebonis-Vrais-Fils-d'Agar;
   Eric; Jeremie; Matildana
Rejection of colonial desire, 56
Relation identity, 14, 24-25
Repetition, 119, 124-26, 128
Resistance, 58, 102-4, 109,1ui-15, 134, 201, 205-
   6; cultural, 132; discursive, 132, 2n1; to era-
   sure of cultural identity, 134; oral, 210; so-
   cial, 202-3; symbolic importance to, 207-8
Reversion, 22, 23, 97, 125, 136, 161, 173, 211, 223
Rewriting history, 105-6, 109, 121
Rituel du kalieur, 236-37
Role-playing, 36
Rootedness, 72, 83, 145, 170

Sandbar, significance of, 44-45
Sarcasm, 178
Sea, significance of, 43--44
Self-image, lack of, 148
Signifiers, 237
Simea (character), 120-23
Slave rebellion, 199-200, 207-8, 274-75n5.2,
   275n3
Solibo, 242
Solibo (character), 232, 239-46, 259-64
Solibo Magnifique: A Creole Caribbean History,
   200-17; impressions of (im)possibility, 259-
   66; interrogating "Vaval," 217; marooning the
   text, 197-200; and Solibo, 225-46, 247
Sory, Ibrahima (character), 73, 75-76, 95. See
   also Veronica Mercer
Soufriere (volcano), 130, 134, 137
Soufrieres, 130-41
Speech vs. writing, 228
Stereotype, 99
Story functions, 205, 245


Storyteller. See Conteur
Subjection, 122
Subjective strategies, 194
Subjectivity, 37, 50, 154, 157, 165
Survival, 131-32, 139, 265
Suzanne Cesaire (character), 120-24

Teleologies, traditional, 104, 120, 141
Text as literary artifact, 265
Tha8l (character), 29-31, 34, 40-42, 46, 51, 56,
   6o. See also Garin; Mathieu; Valerie
Third space of identity, 5, 82
Title significance, 26-27
Todorov, Tzvetan, 1, 48, 184, 226
Traditional teleologies, 104, 120, 141
Transnational identitarian affiliation, 152
Twinness, 114

Unrepresentability, 225

Valerie (character), 30-31, 56-58, 6o. See also
   Garin; Tha8l
Vaval (carnival devil), 217, 221-22
Vernacular, Caribbean, 182
Veronica (Mercer) (character), 67, 70; affair
   with Sory, 73-75, 79-80; bourgeous back-
   ground, 85-86, 94; cultural hybridity, 70, 100;
   De Roseval, Jean-Michel, 91, 94; "false for-
   eigner," 82; identity construction, 72, 75; lack
   of rootedness, 67-68, 83; marginality, 76;
   Marilisse, 82, 84, 87; return to France, 94, 99;
   return to origins, 92; seeks African roots, 70,
   85; separation from Sory, 8o; stay in Africa,
   71. See also Marilisse; Sory, Ibrahima

Walcott, Derek, 2, 215-16, 243, 247, 268
Waugh, Patricia, 222, 225
Witnesses, 231-32, 238
Women: identity of, 8, 242-43; as oral guard-
   ians, 243-44
Writing, 139, 178-81, 228, 230; as death of word,
   230; vs. orality, 228; vs. speech, 228

Zimra, Clarisse, 1o6, 120
Zouk, 170







H. Adlai Murdoch, associate professor of French and Francophone studies at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of articles in
Callaloo, Research in African Literatures, and Yale French Studies.