DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

This is a sample of one of the presentations I have made on the subject 

 

« Sons of Negritude:  The New Generation of Writers in the French Antilles », C.L.A.C.S. Conference,St John’sUniversity, Nov. 1997

Abstract:

 In the post Negritude era, French Caribbean literature seems to have embarked upon a new course while keeping the same aims as the negritude movement of the 1930's.

In form, poetry, once the favorite genre, has given way to the novel or the essay as the most efficient means of formulating and illustrating thoughts in order to reach out to its audience. 

In content, “Negritude” has now evolved into “Caribbeanness” or “Creoleness”, a realization that the culture is a cross-cultural one;  though goals essentially remain the same:  the definition of a specific identity coupled with a search for more authenticity. 

The new literary production emerging from Guadeloupe and Martinique, after all two tiny islands, shows remarkable signs of vitality.  As the works of Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Schwartz-Bart and Condé attest, the premises of a truly authentic Caribbean literature of French expression are well under way.  It looks as if we can look forward to more masterpieces from the creators of “Tout-Monde”, “Texaco”, “Eau de café”, “Pluie et vent sur Télumé-Miracle” and “Segou”, works which have and will bring their own testimony to the multi-faceted aspects of Francophone  literature, for it is true, to quote the French poet and essayist, Victor Segalen, that “it is through difference and in diversity that Life is exalted”.

                                        

SONS OF NEGRITUDE:  THE NEW GENERATION OF WRITERS IN THE FRENCH ANTILLES

  

The term Négritude was coined in the early thirties by Aimé Césaire from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, before he became a celebrated poet, at a time when he was only a scholar-ship student attending one of the elite graduate schools of Paris.  The concept was then made known through L’Etudiant Noir, a newspaper run by his Caribbean and African schoolmates.

What exactly was Négritude?

In its heyday, the 40’s and 50’s, the word became the symbol of a cultural revolution and in a broader sense, the symbol of the fight against imperialism and oppression.

A number of black and creole intellectuals, who were living and studying in Paris, had come to realize that they shared a common heritage and common values different from the values of Western civilization.  They undertook to voice their beliefs and to rehabilitate African civilization which had been denigrated by the colonial system.  The timing was right:  African history was becoming known through the works of the German scholar Leo Frobenius, and its pictorial art beginning to fascinate avant-garde artists such as Picasso.  It was also the great age of jazz.

The key figures of Négritude formed an inseparable trinity:  Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léopold Senghor from French Western Africa, and Léon Gontran Damas from French Guiana.

With them a new type of literature was born, francophone literature; no longer a literature of imitation as had been the case since colonization, but a literature which, while keeping the French language as its vehicle, reflected the preoccupations of the countries from which it originated, and thus developed new themes.

The first works to emerge all belonged to the genre of poetry.  A few historical dates: 1937, Damas’s Pigments;   1939, Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, (Notebook of a return to the native land), which became the national anthem of French speaking Blacks around the world.  Finally, in 1948, came the birth certificate of this new literature with Senghor’s first Anthology of black poetry, launched with the blessing of none other than the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in his famous introduction to the book, Black Orpheus.  The symbolism was clear: Orpheus seeking his Eurydice, black civilization.  And the return to the native land of which Césaire spoke in his Cahier, beyond nostalgia for the homeland, for the Antilles, was metaphorically the return to roots, to Africa as the matrix of Black values, as the giver of an identity, as a source of inspiration and a trigger to the creative process.

Politically engaged, the fathers of Négritude were also men of action.  At the outcome of the second World War all three found themselves on the benches of the French National Assembly as representatives of their homeland.  It was Césaire who initiated a law giving the status of Overseas Districts of France to the former colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guiana, while Senghor took it a step further and in 1960 became the first president of the Republic of Senegal.

 

What has happened to the movement since then?  Judging from the literary production which has emerged from the French West Indies, it appears that the spirit of Négritude is still alive and well at the dawn of the third millennium, albeit under different names, with different key words and a few variations, but essentially with the same aspirations and the same claims, namely the expression of a specific identity, separate from the tenets of Western Europe, in the name of a right to cultural and linguistic diversity.

 

Today, Papa Césaire, as he is affectionately known throughout the West Indies, is enjoying semi-retirement in Fort de France.  But his spiritual sons, the disciples he has formed in the course of his teaching career, are now following in his footsteps.

The first of those sons, Edouard Glissant, came to the limelight after the publication of his first novel, La Lézarde, which was awarded the prix Renaudot and has been translated into English as The Ripening.  The title is derived from the name of a river which runs through Martinique.  The plot?  the planned murder by young revolutionaries of the man whose job it is to suppress political uprisings on the island.  As in all of Glissant’s fiction, the land plays an important part.  We can almost say that it is elevated to the rank of character, since the young protagonists finally take their cue from the river itself.

Glissant’s role in defining the identity of the man from the Caribbean has been crucial.  A student of ethnology, it is he who has diverted the Négritude quest for identity from Africa to what he calls “antillanité” or caribbeanness. 

What is caribbeanness, the underlying raison d’être of all of Glissant’s works?  In Le Discours antillais, (Caribbean Discourse), a collection of essayswritten at various times throughout his career and published in 1981, he defines it as the ferment of a Caribbean civilization, a process of americanization of European and African elements throughout the Caribbean archipelago. 

Caribbeanness is an extension of Négritude.  For political, economic and cultural dependency on the “motherland”, France, has resulted, he believes, in total alienation in the French West Indies.  Glissant considers it his duty to restore the collective memory erased by colonial ideology in order to bring back a sense of belonging to the people.  His work aims to bridge the gaps of a history subordinated to European events.  He wants to place the Caribbean in context, in relation with time and space, history and the land, a premise which he has developed in La Poétique de la relation, (Cross-cultural Poetics)[1], and which he has illustrated in his poems and novels.

To that purpose, his long epic poem, Les Indes, takes the counterpart of French poet Saint-John Perse’s Vents which sang the conquest of the West Indies from the point of view of the conquistadors, by telling the story from the point of view of the slaves making the same crossing for their discovery of the New World in the holds of slave-ships.

His historical novel, Le Quatrième siècle, (The Fourth Century), explores four centuries of Caribbean history from the two poles of black society on the islands:  those who remained on the plantations as slaves, and the runaways, the maroons, who opted for a precarious but free existence in the woods. 

From 1975 on, his tone becomes more pessimistic with Malemort, (ViolentDeath), Mahagony (a play on the English words “my agony” and “mahogany”), and La Case du commandeur, (The Foreman’scabin).  All three novels denounce the mirage of a purely French identity.  Yet “Malemort” paved the way for a new generation of novelists on the islands:  a rich almost baroque prose, full of images, recreated for the first time the way of speaking of the islanders.  It was Glissant’s demonstration that repossessing the language constituted one more step towards regaining one’s identity, and it clearly illustrated what authentic Caribbean literature could be.

To Glissant, the Caribbean is “the estuary of the Americas”[2], an exemplary model of the intense patterns of mutation that are affecting the world.  Tout-Monde (Global World), his latest novel, extends the concept of caribbeanness to what he calls “creolization”, or the synthetic culture resulting from the confrontation of different races brought together by history within a narrow confine: “ Our planet, Glissant says, is a chaotic world and the writer only has at his disposal a cross cultural way of writing to express multiple diversity.  The creolization of languages opens new vistas of sensitivity and preserves us from intolerance.  We must abandon the idea of a literary work which would have the transparence of a universal model. The literary text has become “creolized”.  All nations are in the process of becoming “creolized”.  We finally realize that it is an advantage, a strength.”[3].  Today Glissant has broken with his former mentor, for Césaire has composed with the French political system while he refuses to.  He has recently moved from the University of Baton Rouge to join the faculty of the graduate Center of CUNY.

 

In 1989, another trinity from Martinique, consisting of Patrick Chamoiseau and two of his friends, Raphael Confiant and Jean Bernabé, signed an essay entitled Eloge de la Créolité, (In Praise of Creoleness).  In this essay, they acknowledged their debt towards Césaire for giving creole society its African dimension, and towards Glissant for his philosophical reflection on Caribbean society.  They also substituted the term “créolité” or “creoleness” for Glissant’s “caribbeanness”.  They equated cesairian negritude to a baptism and claimed to be “forever sons of Césaire”[4]. But lately, the tone has turned bitter.  In a biography of the father of Negritude called Césaire, a Paradoxical Crossing of the Century published three years ago, Confiant criticizes the legendary figure and accuses him on two counts:  politically for having sacrificed to French assimilation policies the dream of a Caribbean Federation, and culturally for having remained a prisoner of Western literary values, a lover of Greek and Latin humanities, and of the French language.

Chamoiseau echoes this criticism.  In a passage from his novel Texaco, 1992, which spans two centuries of Martinique’s history, one of the main characters , who has been looking forward to a public meeting with Césaire and expecting to come face to face with a “mentô” or magician-sorcerer, flatly summarizes the whole experience in these words:  “He’s a mulatto”[5].  The meaning is clear:  he is not one of us;  he speaks the language of the colonizer.

It is true that if Césaire was a cultural revolutionary, he was no linguistic rebel.  Both he and Senghor were always more at ease in French than in their respective mother tongues, and they are brilliant masters of the language, generally recognized as two of the foremost French poets of this century.

The co-signers of In Praise of Creoleness, claiming that there had never been a real poetics of Négritude, set out to define a new aesthetics for a more authentic Caribbean literature.  French, they say, is only a second language, while creole is “this vehicle of our deep self, our first language, the one in which we dream”[6].  However the laws of pure economics impose upon the French Caribbean writer to write in a language remaining intelligible to millions of readers.  Choosing to write mainly or only in Creole, as does Frankétienne in Haiti or as did Confiant at the beginning of his literary career, considerably narrows down the field of readership, and lessens the impact of the message.

Chamoiseau’s solution?  A basically French discourse spiced with creole terms, syntax and imagery, resulting in a new and original language.  Reading Chamoiseau’s prose is like a trip to the islands.  From his first novel, A Chronicle of seven Woes in 86, which recreates the world of the “djobeurs”, errand boys living a hand to mouth existence in Fort de France, to Solibo the Magnificent his second novel in 88 which evokes the forgotten world of Caribbean storytellers, those masters of the Word, and to Antan d’enfance, his Childhood Revisited, in 1993, he has become the leader of a new school of French Caribbean novelists. This young career was crowned in 1992 with the most prestigious of France’s literary awards, the prix Goncourt for his third novel, Texaco. 

His fiction is perhaps the best illustration of Glissant’s ideal of a literature “à la lisière de l’oral et de l’écrit”[7], balancing written expression, as in Western culture, and rythmical speech, as in the African oral tradition.  Chamoiseau wants to be a storyteller, a safekeeper of Caribbean folklore and traditions, the equivalent of the African griot, this errant entertainer who used to bring the timeless tales of the ancestors from village to village.  But at the same time, his attempt to recreate a language is also reminiscent of Rabelais’, who, in early sixteenth century France, tried to fashion a new tool out of the nascent French language.  Like Rabelais, Chamoiseau is an inventor, the proponent of an open language, one that can be revivified with new words, coinages, borrowings, not codified and frozen for posterity.  It is not pure coincidence if, in Texaco, the father of the narrator harbors in his library, next to the literary masterpieces of the world, the works of Rabelais whom he holds to be “perhaps the greatest of them all.”[8]

 

Next to Chamoiseau, the most promising young new talent to emerge from Martinique is Raphael Confiant.  After a literary apprenticeship that took him through five novels written in creole, Confiant has now turned to the cross-cultural type of writing advocated in In Praise of Creoleness.  His latest novel, Eau de café, 1991, has been unanimously hailed by the critics.  Staging very colorful characters in the Caribbean tradition,  it is a sort of autobiographical return to the homeland to explore Martinique’s past and present as a way of finding one’s identity, an attempt not altogether different from Césaire’s Notebook in purpose, although certainly very different in form and content.

In spite of the newly found success, there is a caveat:  like Chamoiseau’s, Confiant’s prose relies heavily on creole vocabulary, imagery and syntax.  This can, at times, be challenging to the reader unfamiliar with creole.  It is certainly a daunting task to the translator who practically has to recreate a language, or at least find equivalents in other creole languages of English origin.

 

The fact that their fiction lends itself more easily to translation may be the reason why the women novelists from the French West Indies are generally better known abroad than their male counterparts.  And from the other French island, Guadeloupe, traditionally a rival of Martinique, two women writers of international fame have surfaced.

The first one, Simone Schwarz-Bart, came to literature in 1967 with Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, a novel written in collaboration with her French husband, André Schwarz-Bart.  In 1972, she signed alone her second novel, Pluie et vent sur Télumée-Miracle, her masterpiece, which has been translated into English as The Bridge of Beyond and into some twenty languages.  It gives a vast historical fresco of Guadeloupe by retracing the story of a family of talented and courageous women from the time of the abolition of slavery to the present.  History in Schwarz-Bart’s novels plays a key role in helping define an elusive identity, as it does in Glissant, Chamoiseau and Confiant.  She is also aware, as they are, of the importance of the oral tradition in Caribbean culture. Her florid style is full of creole imagery.  She loves to use metaphors to illustrate abstract concepts, but unlike the writers from Martinique, her language remains perfectly classical.  Here’s a sample from Pluie et Vent:  “Here as everywhere else laughing and singing, dancing and dreaming do not give a full measure of the reality, and when a ray of sunshine falls upon one home, the rest of the village remains in darkness.  While the preparations for the wedding were under way, the same turpitude reigned at L’abandonnée, the same human relentlessness in bringing down, notch by notch, the level of the earth, the same weight of wickedness clinging to the auricles of the heart.”[9]

 

Like Schwarz-Bart, who had gone to study in Dakar, Maryse Condé’s search for her African roots took her first to Guinea, then to Senegal where she taught for several years.  The title of her first major novel is taken from a malinké expression, Heremakhonon, meaning Waiting for Happiness.  It describes Guinea under the communist regime of President Sekou Toure.  The heroine, Veronica, who, like the author, has gone to Guinea to discover her past,comes to the realization that this past is of no avail when the present spells malnutrition, dictatorship and corruption.  Back on the American continent after the disillusionment of the African dream and taking her inspiration both from Africa and the Caribbean, Condé then embarked on a productive literary career which has given us, among others, the popular historical novels of Segou, a saga on the cultural clash resulting from the confrontation of animism and islam in the 18th century kingdom of Segou, and I, Tituba, a fictitious account of the life of the one black woman accused of witchcraft in the famous 1692 Salem trial.  Condé is also a famed literary critic who has given us essays on Caribbean literature, particularly on Césaire, and on Caribbean civilization with La Civilisation du Bossale.  After a stint at Berkeley, she is presently professor of French literature at Columbia University.

 

What final considerations can we draw from this survey?

It seems that, in the post Négritude era, French Caribbean literature has embarked upon a new course.  In form, poetry, once the favorite genre, has given way to the novel or the essay as the most effective means of reaching out.  In content, “Negritude” has now evolved into “Caribbeanness” or “Creoleness”, a realization that the civilization is a cross-cultural one.

But the goals essentially remain the same:  the definition of a specific identity coupled with a search for more authenticity.

What is clear is that the new literary production emerging from Guadeloupe and Martinique, after all two tiny islands in the midst of the Caribbean, shows remarkable signs of vitality.  As the works of Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Schwarz-Bart and Condé attest, the premises of a truly authentic Caribbean literature of French expression are well under way.  We can look forward to other interesting titles from the creators of Tout-Monde, Texaco, Eau de café, Pluie et vent and Segou, works which have brought their own testimony to the multi-faceted aspects of French-speaking literature.  For, as the French poet and essayist, Victor Segalen has put it:  “It is through difference and in diversity that Life is exalted”.

 

Michele H. Jones

Department of languages & Literatures

St John’s University, Jamaica, NY

 

 

NOTES


[1]Le Discours antillais, Paris:  Seuil, l981, pp.246-253

[2] Ibid, p.249

[3] Interview by Patrice Delbourg in L’Evènement du jeudi, 2-8 december 1993:  Tous les peuples sont en train de se créoliser, p.112-113

[4]Eloge de la créolité, Paris:  Gallimard, 1993, p.18

[5]Texaco, Paris:  Gallimard, 1992, p.276

[6]Eloge de la créolité, p.43

[7] Preface to Chronique des sept misères, Paris:  Gallimard, 1987, p.6

[8]Texaco, p.356

[9]Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Paris:  Seuil, l972, p.18

 

WORKS CITED

 

Bernabé, Jean, Chamoiseau, Patrick, Confiant, Raphael, Eloge de la créolité, Paris:  Gallimard, 1993

Césaire, Aimé, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Présence Africaine, l939

                        Discours sur le colonialisme, Présence Africaine, l956

Chamoiseau, Patrick, Chronique des sept misères, Paris:  Gallimard, l987

                           Solibo le magnifique, Paris:  Gallimard, l988

                           Texaco, Paris:  Gallimard, 1992

                           Antan d’enfance, Paris:  Gallimard, l993

Confiant, Raphael, Le Nègre et l’amiral, Paris:  Grasset, 1988

                            Eau de café, Paris:  Grasset, l991

                            Aimé Césaire:  une traversée paradoxale du siècle, Paris:  Stock, l993

Condé, Maryse, Heremakhonon, Paris:  Seghers, l988

                            Ségou:  les murailles de la terre, Paris:  Laffont, 1984

                            Moi, Tituba sorcière, Paris:  Mercure de France, 1986

Glissant, Edouard, Les Indes:  poèmes, Paris:  Seuil, 1956

                            La Lézarde, Paris:  Seuil, 1958

                            Le Quatrième siècle, Paris:  Seuil, 1965

                            Malemort, Paris:  Seuil, 1975

                            La Case du commandeur, Paris:  Seuil, 1981

                            Le Discours antillais, Paris:  Seuil, 1981

                            Mahagony, Paris:  Seuil, 1987

                            Tout-Monde, Paris:  Gallimard, 1993

                             Caribbean Discourse:  selected Essays, translated and with an introduction by J. Michael Dash, Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1996

Nathan and Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique, Littérature francophone:  Anthologie, Paris:  Nathan, 1992

Senghor, Léopold Sedar, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, Paris:  PUF 1948, introduction by Jean Paul Sartre:  Orphée noir

Schwarz-Bart, Simone, Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle, Paris:  Seuil, 1972

                            Ti Jean l’Horizon, Paris:  Seuil, 1979

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.