Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean.(La poetique du renversement chez Maryse Conde, Massa Maka Diabate and Edouard Glissant)(Book review)

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-08

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2008 Indiana University Press

Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone

Caribbean

BY RENEE LARRIER

Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006.

x + 185 pp. ISBN 0-8130-3005-6 cloth

La poetique du renversement chez Maryse Conde,

Massa Maka Diabate and Edouard Glissant

BY DEBORAH HESS

Paris: L Harmattan, 2006.

294 pp. ISBN 2-296-0100081-4 paper

It is almost a commonplace to speak of the problematic nature of the genre of autobiography in literature as a whole. Because of the increasing sense that autobiography and fiction are intimately connected, if not indistinguishable, there is great suspicion of the autobiographical text's ability to convey a truth any more than a work of fiction can. This challenge to the genre's distinctiveness has not been helped by modern criticisms claim that the author is dead or the impossibility of uncovering a true coherent identity behind events narrated. Needless to say, the modern francophone Caribbean writer is equally aware of the problematic nature of literary autobiography. The question of truth and biography is raised by Maryse Conde in Renee Larrier's study of Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean as she asks, "One adds, retrenches, embellishes despite oneself where one thinks one is grasping the truth. The problem of truth has always interested me. Where is it? Who holds it?" (129). With the boundaries between autobiography and fiction increasingly blurred, the critic has a difficult time accounting for the pervasiveness and the importance of the genre in francophone Caribbean Literature.

Mary Gallagher has lucidly treated the prevalence of autobiography in French Caribbean literature in her wide-ranging study Soundings in French Caribbean Writing since 1950, to which there is, surprisingly, no reference in Larrier's study. In approaching autobiography through the place of memory in French Caribbean Writing, she demonstrates the importance of witnessing in establishing...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.