Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University Press

Negritude, the claim of Africa as matrix, is an affirmation of identity that finds its full significance in the context of the black world. The rehabilitation of the Storyteller as ancestor of cultural practices in societies born out of the plantation situates Creolite in the heart of the Caribbean archipelago. Negritude and Creolite thus appear as the two essential components of an achipelagic consciousness that, at the level of literary criticism, is revealed through the exploration of intertextual linkages that weave together the literary Caribbean. Patrick Chamoiseau, in Ecrire en pays domine, meditates upon his own writing quest that remains attentive to the echoes of the "sentimentheque," the collection of well-loved books and authors who have marked the author's imaginary. Chamoiseau's intertextual horizon is composed of, among others, readings of Breytenbach, Garcia Marquez, Lamartine, V. S. Naipaul, Glissant, Cesaire, the masters of the word whose Ancestor is the Storyteller on the Plantation. The transfiguration of well-loved books and well-loved authors into appreciable presences is the product of an intertextual networking that, with Chamoiseau as well as other writers of the Antilles, forms the basis of literary creation: "Et ces forces s'etaient imposees a moi avec l'autorite imperiale de leur monde qui effacait le mien. Elles m'avaient annihile en m'amplifiant. Et c'est avec ces mondes allogenes que mes ecrits fonctionnaient dans un deport total. J'exprimais ce que je n'etais pas. Je ne percevais du monde qu'une construction occidentale, deshabitee, et elle me semblait etre la seule qui vaille" `These forces imposed themselves upon me with the imperial authority of their world, which obliterated mine. They had destroyed me while enlarging me. And it is with these foreign worlds that my writings operated in a complete alienation (deport). I expressed what I was not. I only perceived the world as a Western construct, uninhabited, and it seemed to me the only one that mattered' (44). The expressions of anguish formulated by Chamoiseau as a response to the state of dependency in which Antillean literature emerges bears witness to a malaise that, beyond cultural practices, questions the very foundation of societies in the Caribbean archipelago:



Colonized for more than five centuries, quintessentially Western, Caribbean peoples face the challenge of somehow recasting the modernist paradigm of progress, which is unashamedly triumphalist and Eurocentric. How at the same time to appropriate and subvert the central ideas associated with modernity? How to write in the colonizer's language yet assert one's own vision of the world? How to both represent and resist the march of History set in motion by Columbus? (Edmondson 125)

These questions formulated by Richard Price and Sally Price ("Shadowboxing the Mangrove") in Belinda J. Edmondson's Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation seem to me to be the first principles of the fundamental problematic determined as much by the critical discourse on Antillean literature as by creation of the imaginary in the Caribbean space. The books discussed in this review essay propose, each in its own way, diverse answers to these basic questions. Following the lead of Lettres creoles by Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, which Richard and Sally Price consider "a canon-fixing history of French Antillean literature" (127), the criticism of Antillean literature, through the past decade, is a veritable exploration of the authors and foundational texts from whose ranks Aime Cesaire emerges as the tutelary ancestor. The exploration of intertextual connections, the sign of an archipelagic consciousness in its plenitude, and the genealogy of women's writing constitute the other preoccupations of the texts in this review essay.

The year 1993 was marked by an avalanche of homages to Aime Cesaire on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, from film festivals to the organization of colloquia and round tables to special numbers of journals. A founding member of Presence Africaine, the President of the Societe Africaine de Culture, a member of the editorial committee for Presence Africaine, the initiator of the Negritude movement, Aime Cesaire widely deserves the celebration of his oeuvre in the journal Presence Africaine. Cesaire, according to Mohamadou Kane ("Preface," 7-11), turned our perception of colonialism and imperialism upside down, through "l'accord d'une pensee forte et riche, genereuse, a l,'occasion tranchee, et d'une expression appropriee et originale" `bringing together thought that was strong and rich, noble, often clear-cut, and of an expression that is appropriate and original' (11). The testimony of Ibrahima Baba Kake ("Temoignage," 28-29), a former pupil at the Lycee Van-Vollenhoven (presently Lamine Gueye) in Dakar, reveals the impact of Senghor and Cesaire, the two giants of African literature, upon a generation heretofore educated according to colonialist dogma: "[L]'Antillais Aime Cesaire, nous paraissait tres lointain. De lui nous n,avions que les echos de ses tres courageuses prises de position sur la colonisation. Certains de nos aines avaient lu sa lettre de demission a Maurice Thorez et surtout son eblouissant Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Un medecin africain d,origine guineenne avait appris par coeur tout l'ouvrage. Il nous en recitait des passages entiers et nous en etions litteralement subjugues" `The Antillean Aime Cesaire seemed so distant from us. From him we had only the echoes of his very courageous stances on colonization. Some of our elders had read his letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez and especially his dazzling Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. An African doctor of Guinean origin had learned the entire work by heart. He would recite entire passages from it to us and we were literally enthralled' (29). Lilyan Kesteloot, "en suivant un roi dans son ile" `following a king in his island' (this is the title of her presentation in the Presence volume, pages 17-22), testifies how departmentalization saved the scrawny bodies of the black shack alleys from the ravages of the poverty that proliferated elsewhere in the post-independent world, and discovered a Papa Cesaire who was attentive to the daily sufferings of the little people of Fort-de-France. Lucien Lemoine ("Maitre, prenez la parole," 35-47) remembers the rounds of conferences set up by Cesaire in Haiti, and their second encounter in that main gathering place for the rallying of the black intelligentsia that is Presence Africaine. Lemoine sees in the Cesairean approach an integration of racial consciousness, artistic creation, and poetic action in an ethical demand forged in the postslavery colonial reality, against imperial order, and in a belief in the humanity of each community of human beings.

Rene Depestre, revisiting "Le petit matin d'Aime Cesaire" `The dawning of Aime Cesaire' (152-60) begins with Cesaire's visit to Haiti in 1944, which set the liberation of the Haitian youth in motion. For Depestre, "le parcours de ce `contemporain capital nous parait l'un des plus exemplaires de l'intelligentsia mondiale du XXe siecle. Son oeuvre aura ete le journal de bord de plusieurs generations d'Antillais et d'Africains" `the journey of this "major contemporary" seems to us one of the most exemplary of the world's intelligentsia in the twentieth century. His work was the logbook for several generations of Antilleans and Africans' (153). Mamadou Ba ("Il faut en passer par Cesaire," 92-114) maintains that the Cesairean oeuvre sets itself forth as the "paradigme de reference de toute litterature `negre" `paradigm of reference for any `black' literature' (92) because of its crystallization around the foundational project of an autonomous writing and an autonomous identity. Georges Ngal observes that the arboricentric imaginary denotes the nostalgia for the mythical landscape, but also an obsession with roots in the Antillean landscape. The centrality of the African matrix in Cesaire's work is at the heart of controversies that have been relaunched by the resounding irruption of Creolite.

The immediate past decade was to be marked by a veritable critical rebirth of the Cesairean oeuvre, and especially of the Cahier in the world of anglophone criticism. We can mention Gregson Davis's Aime Cesaire, Abiola Irele's annotated edition of the Cahier, Mireille Rosello's translation of Cahier, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith's new translation of the Cahier--which offers the reader a translation of the famous preface by Breton and makes felicitous use of preceding translations--and of course the publication of the complete works of poetry brought out by Seuil. The translation by Abiola Irele, which formed part of the tributes for Cesaire's eightieth birthday, is geared to an anglophone university audience engaged in French studies. The translation unites a remarkable mastery of the poem and the Martinican landscape with a constant instructional concern that makes the text more readily comprehensible. Published first in Nigeria, then by The Ohio State University Press, Abiola Irele's edition, like that of Mireille Rosello, Clayton Eshleman et Annette Smith, or even like Davis's work, confirms the increasing fortune Cesaire in anglophone scholarly circles. Unlike Antillean criticism, and to a certain degree francophone criticism, which has felt almost an obligation to respond to the insolent discourse of Creolite, the criticism from the anglophone domain operates away from polemics, according it a certain academic and analytic serenity to the tone of its processes. The controversy engendered by the "elogistes" of Creolite has resulted in a renewed interest of...

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