Accueil
Aimé CESAIRE
Frantz FANON
Paulette NARDAL
René MENIL
Edouard GLISSANT
Suzanne CESAIRE
Jean BERNABE
Guy CABORT MASSON
Vincent PLACOLY
Derek WALCOTT
Price MARS
Jacques ROUMAIN
Guy TIROLIEN
Jacques-Stephen ALEXIS
Sonny RUPAIRE
Georges GRATIANT
Marie VIEUX-CHAUVET
Léon-Gontran DAMAS
Firmin ANTENOR
Edouard Jacques MAUNICK
Saint-John PERSE
Maximilien LAROCHE
Aude-Emmanuelle HOAREAU
Georges MAUVOIS
Marcel MANVILLE
Daniel HONORE
Alain ANSELIN
Jacques COURSIL

THE MARTINICAN CONCEPT OF "CREOLENESS":

A multiracial redefinition of culture.
THE MARTINICAN CONCEPT OF "CREOLENESS":

Professor Beverley Ormerod, born in Jamaica, introduced French Caribbean literature courses at the University of the West Indies where she lectured in the 1960s. She is now Associate Professor of French at the University of Western Australia, specializing in Francophone literature (Caribbean and African) and French Renaissance poetry. She is the author of An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (London: Heinemann, 1985) and co-author, with Jean-Marie Volet, of Romancières africaines d'expression française (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994.)

xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">





In the 1930s, black and coloured intellectuals from the French Caribbean<br /> colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane sought

In the 1930s, black and coloured intellectuals
from the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane sought
for the first time to define their cultural identity in terms of their
historical and racial affiliations with Africa, rather than their political and
educational ties with France. During centuries of colonial rule, class barriers
had effectively separated darker-skinned from lighter-skinned West Indians; the
school system had reinforced European aesthetic norms, and had demanded the
repudiation of Creole, the language associated with black slaves, in favour of
French. The Negritude movement, inaugurated with L.-G. Damas' Pigments
(1937) and Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to
my Native Land
, 1939), rejected this cultural predominance of France and
emphasized the writers' membership of the African diaspora. To the Martinican
Césaire is attributed the neologistic term, Négritude, which stressed
the vital importance to the poet's ideology of his adherence to the black race.
He and Damas brandished the terms "Negro", "Africa",
"instinct" and even "savage" in their verse, delineating a
new Caribbean cultural profile in truculent defiance of the prejudices of their
likely public. For their message was addressed not only to French readers, but
(and perhaps primarily) to the Francophile coloured and black bourgeoisie in the
West Indies which had acquiesced in Europe's dismissal of Africa as a site of
racial and cultural inferiority.

For the Caribbean inventors of Negritude, Africa
was more than simply an emblem of ethnic authenticity. Their invocation of this
distant, unknown continent was intended to heal psychological wounds passed
down from the first black West Indians, those generations of Africans exiled
from their native lands and forced into captivity in a white-dominated society
on the far side of an uncrossable ocean. In praising Africanness, early
twentieth-century Caribbean writers were rejecting European stereotypes of
race, colour, mental and physical attributes. Their belief in a cosmic
connection with Africa expressed the hope of future acceptance in a spiritual
homeland. Their blackness of skin, traditionally devalued by the white race,
became the passport to kinship with a newly valorized African world of cultural
difference.

Where did this leave the substantial part of the
Caribbean population that, after centuries of African-European sexual relations
and the 19th-century importation of Indian and Chinese labour, was neither
white nor black? Césaire, whose demands for social justice were as eloquent in
his literary as in his later political career, claims in his Cahier an
affinity with all victims of racial oppression, asserting his solidarity with
"the Jew-man, the Kaffir-man, the Hindu-man in Calcutta, the Harlem-man
who doesn't vote" - the worldwide victims of prejudice, verbal abuse,
famine, torture and pogroms.[1]
But, speaking from the viewpoint of a black West Indian, Césaire holds up
African culture as the single great alternative to European culture, the
sovereign remedy for the alienation provoked by European colonialism. The
founders of Negritude make an unspoken assumption that the Caribbean non-white
individual will opt to be assimilated into the African cultural sphere. While
invoking the Hindu in Calcutta, for example, Césaire does not consider the
different cultural position of the large number of West Indians descended from coulis
or "East Indian" indented labourers, whose syncretic life-style may
combine Eastern religious practices with West Indian social elements. href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn1">[2] It is noticeable that
French Creole, the linguistic link between the diverse elements of the French
Caribbean population, is given no role in Negritude. Even standard French, for
that matter, has an ambiguous status in the Cahier: linguistically it is
a showcase for Césaire's verbal subtlety and erudition, but thematically it is
rejected as Césaire ostentatiously turns away from the French rationalist tradition
towards the kinetic energy of African sorcery. African culture is equally
embraced by Damas: it is symbolized by the banjo that his Guyanese mother
vainly attempts to make him replace by the more socially acceptable violin
("mulattos don't do that/leave that to blacks"); this
imposition is angrily refused by the poet, just as he refuses identification
with the white side of his ancestry: "How can they possibly dare/to call
me "whitened"/when everything in me/aspires only to be Negro/as black
as my Africa/that they stole from me". href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn2">[3] Only a rare voice, like
that of the mulatto poet Gilbert Gratiant, expresses a divergent view at this
time - choosing to celebrate the double fusion (cultural and biological) of
Africa and France in his veins, and at the same time making Creole his literary
language of choice.[4]

However, Negritude's African solution was to be
questioned in later decades. As more West Indian intellectuals had the
opportunity of actually visiting Africa, some began to express doubts about the
practical feasibility of Caribbean integration with African society: according
to them, Africans tended to consider West Indians as foreigners, judging them
on their national origin, religion and customs, rather than their skin colour. href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn4">[5] As a cultural
prescription, too, post-Negritude generations were to find Césaire's vision too
restricted. To Edouard Glissant, the most influential Martinican writer since
Césaire, it seemed that Caribbean consciousness needed to change direction:
ceasing its vain attempts to plunge downward towards African roots that in
reality had become too remote to recover (an idealized African tree of
purification had been a key symbol in the Cahier), it should instead
imitate the rhizome or tuber, spreading sideways and outward in a movement
signifying its relationship and interaction with other multiracial New World
cultures.[6] Glissant
pointed out that Latin America and the southern United States had also
experienced the meetings of indigenous peoples, European colonialists, imported
African slaves and labourers from Asia. Thus, although retracing folk memories
of past generations of slaves is an important theme in Glissant's fiction,
racial affiliation with Africa is not a major issue in his cultural concept of Antillanité
("Caribbeanness"). Indeed, race itself is a notion almost incidental
to the writer's preoccupation with the political question of France's
quasi-colonial economic and cultural dominance in Martinique, Guadeloupe and
Guyane, which in 1946 exchanged the official status of colonies for that of
overseas departments of France. Glissant sees this continuing French dominance
as the major factor in the Francophone West Indian's inability to achieve a
sense of his true cultural identity.

Influenced by Glissant's doctrine of Caribbeanness,
a more recent group of writers, led by the Martinicans Patrick Chamoiseau and
Raphaël Confiant, has spearheaded a literary movement known as Créolité
or "Creoleness". In their essays and fiction, they pay homage to
Glissant's vision of Caribbean reality. However, they are more specifically
concerned with promoting the importance of racial diversity and the literary
value of the Creole language. These ideas are implicit in Glissant's work, but
they are not central to his theory, which is above all committed to defending
the individuality and complexity of Caribbean culture against the invasive
political and media presence of France in her overseas departments.

Present-day racial diversity in the Caribbean
illustrates the continuous reshaping of the society in the century and a half
since slavery ended, not only with the arrival of indentured labourers from
India and from China, but also with the coming of other ethnic groups such as
the Lebanese, in search of freedom from poverty or intolerance elsewhere.
Chamoiseau, Confiant and their Guadeloupean collaborator Jean Bernabé were not
the first to focus on the heterogeneous nature of West Indian society, whose
differences of ethnic origin had been extended by the many mixtures between
racial groups. Already in 1964 a contemporary of Césaire's, René Ménil, had
defined French Caribbean culture as "neither African, nor Chinese, nor
Indian, nor even French, but ultimately West Indian". href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn6">[7] Glissant had begun to
introduce characters of Indian descent alongside the black Martinican working
class in his novels from the mid-1970s.

However, the Eloge de la Créolité
("In Praise of Creoleness") published by Bernabé, Chamoiseau and
Confiant in 1989 is not only the most recent, but also the most explicit
attempt to redefine Caribbean culture through the language and folkways that
are the common denominators of this diverse population.

This slim manifesto sets aside Negritude as an
"African illusion" that encouraged, no less than did French
colonialism, the West Indian's mistaken tendency to seek his identity outside
his island and through a foreign culture. It praises Caribbeanness allusively
through some of its chosen terminology ("we were the anticipation of the
relations of cultures"), but considers Glissant's vision of a Caribbean
linked to the Americas to be too vast in its framework. Creoleness focuses
sharply on Martinique and small countries resembling it, describing itself as
"the interactional or transactional aggregate of Caribbean,
European, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural elements, united on the same
soil by the yoke of history". href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn7">[8] Creole culture is seen
as the result of a process of adaptation that started with plantation days: a
mixed culture that arose from the forced, nonharmonious confrontation of
different languages, customs and world-views. Its manifestations are perceived
beyond the Caribbean and American regions: the authors claim to have Creole
affinities with the Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, and other African, Asian
and Polynesian peoples. On the other hand (and unlike Glissant) they recognize
only a limited, geopolitical solidarity with the Caribbean archipelago as a
whole, since they consider the process of creolization not to have taken place
in certain regions like Andalusian-influenced northern Cuba or the
Hindu-dominated canecutting areas of Trinidad.

Chamoiseau and Confiant are novelists as well as
essayists, and their manifesto is partly concerned with recommendations for
expressing Creoleness in literature. They view the Creole language as the great
unifying force which has arisen from racial diversity and resisted centuries of
imposed education, despite the official policy of "assimilation" to
France. Logically, this language should be the unique literary vehicle of
Creole culture. But the reformers have had to concede that there is a practical
obstacle here: namely, the very small public able to read, or willing to buy,
works in Creole. Confiant's first novels were all published in Creole, but he
was obliged to start writing in French, and he is now also publishing some of
his Creole novels in French translation. However, he and Chamoiseau have displayed
a dazzling ability to circumvent the linguistic problem by combining French
with a continuous undercurrent of Creole speech rhythms, figurative
expressions, and even some direct lexical borrowings, in order to preserve the
flavour of Martinican popular culture in their novels. This
"creolized" style may not yet have won general acceptance from a wide
reading public, but both authors have achieved considerable critical success
and won distinguished literary prizes in France.

The theory of Creoleness also concerns the
content of literary works, maintaining that Creole fiction should express the
true experience and the collective voice of the Martinican working class in all
its diversity: multiracial and interracial. Here the greatest challenge has
perhaps been to avoid existing stereotypes when depicting racially mixed
individuals or members of minority groups. In giving greater prominence to the
diversity in Martinican society, the Créolité school has undertaken a
certain revaluation of the character of the métis, the person of mixed
race. The ambivalence with which this figure has often been presented in
Caribbean writing dates back to the hierarchies of plantation life, which
accorded a position of uneasy privilege to the child of mixed race (often, in
early days, the product of a union forced upon the female African slave by a
white male on the slave ship or the plantation). In European eyes the métis was
racially superior to the pure African slave, an attitude which is still visible
in the work of those early 20th-century coloured Caribbean novelists who gave
their heroines black skin, but the long curly hair and Europeanized nose of the
more "acceptable" mulatto beauty. href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn8">[9] Thus the mulatto (just
one of a large number of Caribbean terms revealing the colonialists' obsession
with precise degrees of mixed blood), struggling to survive in a
white-dominated society, often became the enemy of the black person: lighter
skin colour offered the hope of personal advancement, but also the likelihood
of black resentment, as well as white ridicule. href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn9">[10] This ambiguous social
situation is reflected in colonial writing through stock figures such as the
mulatto master who mistreats his black slaves, the brown-skinned beauty on the
look-out for a rich white lover, or the coloured nouveaux riches
clumsily imitating European social manners. 20th-century writers who have
avoided such stereotypes have still tended to portray the métis
negatively, as an individual doomed to social alienation, incapable of finding
personal happiness because of her or his physical deviation from a white
aesthetic norm which was historically identified, in the West Indies, with the
highest good.[11] The
only positive alternative presented in recent fiction is rather like the
solution of Negritude: the mulatto decides to cleave to an African identity, as
is the case with Maryse Condé's slave heroine in Moi, Tituba,
sorcière...noire de Salem
(1986) who defies white society by practising
witchcraft and attempting to foster a revolt of plantation slaves.

Chamoiseau and Confiant have revalorized racial
diversity in French Caribbean literature in order to illustrate their
conviction that modern "Creole society" cannot be encompassed by a
simple black-white definition. They themselves are not always innocent of
stereotyping. A standard Confiant female protagonist, for instance, is a métisse,
who may not be as venal as convention would have it, but who unmistakably
incarnates sensuality. Her smooth brown skin, big breasts, long legs and
provocative air are always seen through the external gaze of multiracial males
enthusiastically united in lust. When writing autobiographically, however,
Confiant offers unique insights into the figure of the West Indian chabin,
the mixed-race person with light, freckled skin and crinkly fairish hair,
sometimes also with green eyes. The female chabine is traditionally
considered a sexual prize in the French Caribbean - a blonde chabine is
the stereotypical reward of the upwardly mobile black police inspector in
Chamoiseau's satirical novel Solibo Magnifique (1988) - but her male
counterpart is regarded in a less flattering light. Confiant's physical
appearance - the result of a mixture of black, white and Chinese blood - places
him in this category. His serio-comic memoir, Ravines du devant-jour
(1993), tells of his early childhood years spent with his mulatto grandparents
in a country district, with playmates mainly of African or Indian descent. At
the age of five or six, he becomes confusedly aware that his appearance sets
him apart: "Black and not black, at the same time white and not white.
However, you haven't yet become aware of the huge distance that the colour of
your skin and hair creates between ordinary people and yourself". href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn11">[12] The Creole insults of
irritated adults give him his first glimpse into the abyss of colour and class
resentment: Mové chaben! Sakré vyé chaben! Chaben tikté kon an fig mi! (Wicked
chabin! Damned ugly chabin! Chabin spotty-faced like an
overripe banana!), but on the other hand his playfellows' acceptance of his
bullying is a heady lesson in the persistence of Caribbean skin hierarchies.
Through the child's precocious gaze, moving from initial incomprehension to the
development of a lively sense of self-preservation, Confiant shows us the
Creole milieu of rural Martinique, with its blend of four races, its
intersecting religions and beliefs, and its complex and often divisive social
structure. And ever present in the narrative, whether indirectly through the
transformation of French turns of phrase, or in direct snatches of reported
speech, is the Creole language that holds together this multi-faceted society.

Chamoiseau's fiction seeks to do justice to
characters of humble social origin, the sort that used to be largely background
material in the works of middle-class West Indian novelists. His matter-of-fact
inclusion of a mixture of races and skin shades is an aspect of his fidelity to
Creoleness, with its commitment to portray Martinican society as fully and truthfully
as possible. His wry, poignant Solibo Magnifique, which is essentially
about the life and symbolic death of a black teller of folktales, surrounds the
protagonist with a group representative of the multiracial diversity of the
Martinican working classes. Mainly black, the gathering also includes a farm
labourer who is depicted tongue-in-cheek as being "at the interface of
fourteen race mixtures and uncharacteristic of them all". Another
ethnicity is that of the "Syrian bastard" shopkeeper: the implicit
allusion here to an absentee father evokes the generally wealthy Lebanese
merchant class, widespread in the Caribbean, that may set up its half-black
sons in business but prefers to marry within its own race. The "red chabin"
who has twelve children, works in a factory and complains all the time is a
humorous exaggeration of the chabin stereotype, as is his female
equivalent, the cosseted blonde chabine who has married the rising black
police inspector. Creoleness is the domain of the antihero, and an unromantic
figure is that of the terrified couli market porter who goes to pieces
in the police interrogation room. But the world of Indian Martinique is not
present merely in this character: images such as the one of the black drummer
resting between takes, his "arms dangling like coolie's hair",
indicate the constant multiracial range of reference in Chamoiseau's handling
of metaphor. And while the major action of the novel is sustained by
traditional black West Indian characters (policemen and itinerant peddlars),
these other figures emblematic of difference - each foregrounded at a
particular moment in the narrative - serve as reminders that Caribbean society,
ethnically mixed, is perpetually in a state of cultural interaction.

While Creoleness, which exalts interrelation,
deplores the single-minded African focus of Negritude, it is evident that
without Negritude there might have been no escape from the cultural hegemony of
European colonialism. The end of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1848 did
not mean liberation from black servitude, nor from oppressive white-imposed
moral and aesthetic values. Negritude was a necessary stage in the long
political and psychological struggle of black West Indians to gain mental
freedom and personal dignity. In forcing recognition of African culture, in
insisting on the validation of racial difference, it created a moral space that
would later enable Caribbean writers to take stock of their increasingly
multiracial society, and to take for granted their right to depict it. href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fn12">[13] It is this space that
has now been exploited by Césaire's distant heirs to formulate the theory of
Creoleness, a particular language and life-style unexpectedly born of the
reluctant proximity of several non-indigenous peoples, in order to affirm and
celebrate the present cultural diversity of Martinique.

Notes

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB0">[1]Aimé Césaire. Cahier
d'un retour au pays natal.
[1939] Présence Africaine, 1956, p.39. All
translations in this paper are my own unless otherwise stated.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB1">[2]The later Créolité
movement was to criticize Césaire for this apparent neglect of the West Indian
of Indian origin: see Raphaël Confiant's Aimé Césaire: Une traversée
paradoxale du siècle.
Paris: Stock, 1993, pp.69-72.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB2">[3]L.-G. Damas. Pigments.
[1937] Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962, p.36, p.57.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB3">[4]Jack Corzani assesses
the status that Gratiant accords to racial and cultural mixing, as opposed to
Africa-orientated Negritude, in La Littérature des Antilles-Guyane
françaises.
Paris: Désormeaux, 1978, vol.3, pp.222-35.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB4">[5]Ti Jean L'horizon.
Paris: Seuil, 1979, and Maryse Condé's Une saison à Rihata. Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1981.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB5">[6]The notion of a
multiplicity of relations and the rhizome analogy, developed in Edouard
Glissant's Poétique de la Relation. 1990, are discussed by J. Michael
Dash in Edouard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995,
pp.179-181, and by Richard D.E. Burton in "The Idea of Difference in
contemporary French West Indian Thought." In Burton and Reno (ed.). French
and West Indian.
London: Macmillan, 1995, pp.147-9.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB6">[7]Ménil, in an article
"Problèmes d'une culture antillaise" discussed in Burton, p.146. It
is interesting to note that Ménil, who shared Césaire's ability to consider his
society with a more equitable vision than that of colonialism, was (like Césaire
until 1956) a member of the Communist Party.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB7">[8]In Praise of
Creoleness.
Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar (trans.). In Callaloo 13, 1990,
pp.891-92.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB8">[9]See, for example, the
discussion of Haitian male novelists in Guerda Romain's "Before Black was
Beautiful: The Representation of Women in the Haitian National Novel" French
Review
71, 1997, pp.55-65.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB9">[10]Some of the tensions
surrounding mixed-race characters in poetry and fiction are illustrated in G.R.
Coulthard's pioneering study Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Chapters 7 and 8.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB10">[11]See, for example, the
novels of Michèle Lacrosil, particularly Cajou.1961 and Demain
Jab-Herma.
1967.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB11">[12]Raphaël Confiant. Ravines
du devant-jour.
Paris: Gallimard, 1993, p.35.

href="http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/#fnB12">[13]While the theory of
Creoleness is particularly associated with Chamoiseau and Confiant, other
contemporary Caribbean novelists have in practice recognized and depicted the
plurality of their society; this is reflected, for example, in the Guadeloupean
novels of Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau.

 

Connexion utilisateur

CAPTCHA
Cette question sert à vérifier si vous êtes un visiteur humain afin d'éviter les soumissions automatisées spam.

Pages