Countenuodernisni and THE Francophone Literary GAME Culture OF SLIPKNOT Keith L. Walker Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture NEW AMERICANISTS A Series Edited by Donald E. Pease Countermodernism and THE Francophone Literary GAME Culture OF SLIPKNOT Keith L. Walker Duke University Press Durham & London 1999 © 1999 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper @ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Plantin Light with Futura Bold display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. An abbreviated earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as “Le rire chez Damas,” in Rencontres litteraires francophones Leon Gontran Damas, ed. Jacqueline Leiner (Paris, 1988). A version of chapter 5 appeared in Post¬ colonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. Mary Jean Green et al. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). To DJ, Alma, my father, William E. Walker, and my mother, the most passionate and luminous Gwendolyn Valora Walker Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/countermodernism01walk_0 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction In the Denunciatory Tradition i I Countermodernism 1 The Game of Slipknot 19 2 Toward a Sociology of Humor: Leon Gontran Damas and Body Talk 67 3 Counterexertions: Theorizing the Francophone Condition 93 II Counterstorytelling 4 Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstor>l:elling 103 5 Postscripts: Mariama Ba, Menopause, Epistolarity, and Postcolo¬ nialism 126 6 Moroccan Independence: Status Inconsistency, Role Conflict, and Consciousness in Tahar ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child 148 7 The Blossoming of the Undeflned Self: Ken Bugul and Le Baobab fou 173 III Counterconfession 8 Words Proffered in Pain: Gerard Etienne, Shame, and the Counter¬ confession 213 Conclusion The Francophone: Coming out from under the Sign of Persephone and “the Dark Night of the Postcolonial African World” 266 Notes 277 Index 295 Acknowledgments Interactions with so many friends, teachers, and colleagues and their work have constituted a major part of the pleasure of the realiza¬ tion of this book. I wish to thank Michael Riffaterre, whose thinking on the w’ork that rhetorical figures, signs, and texts do has sharp¬ ened my understanding of the power exerted by words, images, and theories in the way we perceive ourselves; Edward Said, the most Ce- sairian of postcolonial scholars, whose incomparable eloquence on the subjects of colonialism, imperialism, and culture during a semi¬ nar at the School of Criticism and Theory has profoundly inspired my work; Homi Bhabha, w'ho read the first draft of chapter 7 and offered much appreciated organizational suggestions; Leon Francois Hoffman, alw’ays my professor, and whose study Le Negre romantique, as will become evident, is for me personally a haunting w’ork of re¬ search into the French literary imagination; Sylvia Wynter, whose committed and rigorously intellectual scholarship is a model of think¬ ing and engagement in the tradition of C. L. R. James and Aime Ce- saire; Donald Pease, whose excitement about this project remains for me a galvanizing force; John A. Rassias, whose philosophy of language teaching and study since the 1960s has always embraced the universals —what makes us human —as well as the defining particulars of franco¬ phone literary culture; Raymond Hall, a sociologist who appreciates literamre and who invited me to present an early version of chapter 6 at his University Seminar on Social Domination and Subordination; Elaine Jahner, colleague and team teacher who is always working at the borders of cultural exchange; Raoul Bueno-Chavez, who has shared with me the comparatist’s enthusiasm for the study of the multilingual realities of Latin American and Caribbean cultures; Graziella Parati, W'ho has broadened my understanding of women’s autobiography and X Acknowledgments of the eventual intersections of the francophone with the cultural and linguistic complexities of italophone literary culture; Gerard Etienne and Natania Fuerbacher, who have supported my research and pro¬ vided me with texts, background materials, and no small amount of encouragement; Euzhan Palcy, who has been an inspiring example of artistry and intellectual commitment to francophone literary culture; and finally, Aime Cesaire, with whom it all began and who gave me “La force de regarder demain.” Introduction In the Denunciatory Tradition There are many successful ways of thinking about francophone lit¬ erature. Most approaches, and university presses, group literature strictly according to region; French West Africa, the Caribbean, North Africa, or Southeast Asia, as in Jack Yaeger’s important smdy The Vietnamese NoveU There is the thematic approach, which traces a theme such as the journey in a set of texts from a particular region of the francophone world, as in Mildred Alortimer’s Jowrwey'i through the French African Novel or Eileen Julien’s suggestive work African Novels and the Question of Orality? Notions of race often separate, artificially. North African literature from Black African literature. Gender studies and cultural studies have produced collections and analyses that focus uniquely on texts by women from varying cultural backgrounds; the contributors to these studies are, for the most part, women, as in Post¬ colonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers^ by Mary Jean Green et al. Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot seeks to move across the traditionally imposed boundaries of geography and race by studying six representative francophone writers and the interrelated preoccupations of their works. This study is not intended to be a panorama of francophone literature but rather, first of all, a close reading of the works of Aime Cesaire, Leon Gontran Damas, Mariama Ba, Tahar ben Jelloun, Ken Bugul, and Gerard Etienne. Second, this study considers the rich and instructive rela¬ tionships between the works of these six authors. Finally, it traces the literary legacy of Aime Cesaire, charting in particular the extent to which the authors and texts selected develop aspects of the agenda his works established. It is Cesaire’s work that is studied in counterpoint 2 Introduction to certain modernist principles of Charles Baudelaire and that serves as the primary source for the notion of the countermodern. One of my objectives is to write of this literary culture in terms that are accessible to nonspecialists. From the immanence of the experience of six dif¬ ferent writers to the transcendence of the francophone experience, what emerges is a study that bridges the present-day divisions in the study of francophone literature, for colonialism and neocolonialism are global projects of domination, exploitation, and consequence. This study is driven by a notion of culture, of francophone cul¬ ture in particular, and the sociogenetic formation of the colonialized and postcolonial subject. As Fanon points out, “Besides ontogeny, there is sociogeny.” A Fanonian notion of culture, characterized by a fluctuating and creative instability, requires one to consider culture in its multifacetedness in order to grasp, to some extent, the com¬ plexity of the whole. Francophone culture is that all-embracing reality in which questions of language, economics, politics, gender, religion, and the consequences of the moral relativism and false ethnography of the colonial project are intertwined. What it means to be White or Black, to be the colonizer or the colonialized, to be a man or a woman—and, ultimately, what it means to be human —constitutes an intricate slipknot of relations. Thus, in the same vein as the criti¬ cal stance of Black American feminist critic Valerie Smith, this study will attempt to hold in balance the cultural variables of race, lan¬ guage, history, gender, class, and so on, in order to “destabilize” the “centrality of any one” of them, and to move toward what Sylvia Wynter would designate “a unified theory of culture.” ^ Finally, if there is an overarching theme in Countermodernism, it is, as the pre¬ fix counter suggests, what I shall call the denunciatory tradition. It was neither the hard sciences nor theology nor the social sciences that questioned the pseudoscientific claims and the false ethnography used to rationalize expansionist, economic, commercial, and human exploitations. Rather, literature and literary figures first effectively expressed the counterhegemonic position and the counterdiscourse that undertook the task of historiographical repair, analyzed the racist philosophical underpinnings of the policy of assimilation, exposed the lie of the civilizing mission, denounced the moral relativism of colonial policy, championed decolonization, posited the dream of a new enlightenment characterized by an all-inclusive counterhuman- Introduction 3 ism, and denounced the postindependence ethnic leaders who be¬ trayed the people’s trust. From its inception in 1921 with Rene Maran’s publication of Ba- touala, which included a preface critical of French colonial practices, francophone literary culture has been marked by a denunciatory tradition. Most exciting are the writers who take up their pens to break through silence and solitude in order to resist and to denounce publicly through literature the oppressive ideologies that mark the lives of colonialized and postcolonial subjects. Mariama Ba, whose work epitomizes this tradition, has declared the necessity of the de¬ nunciatory stance and the writer’s responsibility': Dans I’cEuvre d’edification d’une societe africaine democratique liberee de toute contrainte, I’ecrivain a un role important d’eveilleur de con¬ science et de guide. II se doit de repercuter les aspirations de toutes les couches sociales, surtout des couches sociales les plus defavorisees. Denoncer les maux et fleaux qui gangrenent notre societe et retardent son plein epanouissement, fustiger les pratiques, coutumes et moeurs archaiques qui n’ont rien a voir avec notre precieux patrimoine culturel, lui reviennent, comme une mission sacree a accomplir, contre vents et marees, avec foi, avec tenacite.^ [In the task of building up a democratic African society freed from all forms of constraint, the writer has an important role as awakener of con¬ sciousness and guide, with the duty of reflecting the aspirations of all social classes, especially the most disadvantaged. To denounce the ills that plague our society' and delay its full development, to assail archaic prac¬ tices, customs, and mores that have nothing to do with our precious cul¬ tural heritage, this is the sacred mission that the writer must carry out, come hell or high water, with faith and perseverance.] (emphasis added) From this denunciatory tradition of francophone literature, I have chosen to study six representative writers from Martinique, French Guiana, Senegal, Morocco, and Flaiti. Aime Cesaire denounces French colonialism and studies its lingering effects upon both the colonizer and the colonized. Leon Gontran Damas rejects the alien¬ ating effects of French politics and French socialization processes of assimilation. Ken Bugul warns of the disillusionment that can fol¬ low overidealization of the European Promised Land as well as the 4 Introduction disillusionment among the pitfalls of postcolonialism. Manama Ba criticizes man’s excesses, his abuses, and his distortion of the Islamic ideal of polygamy, which is based on equal sharing; and she laments women’s complicity in perpetuating polygamy for reasons of egoism, vanity, and material gain. Tahar ben Jelloun exposes the layerings of French, Islamic, royal, and clan patriarchy in Moroccan society and elaborates the condition of Moroccan women in postindependence Morocco as well as the condition of Moroccan men as guest workers in France. Gerard Etienne bears wimess to the paradoxes of the his¬ tory of the “First Black Republic” and the immiserization of the Hai¬ tian people. Etienne dreams of a future of democracy in Haiti while documenting the atrocities of Haitian life under a Black totalitarian kleptocracy. Some readers might associate the title and subject matter of this book, Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot, with the work of James Arnold and Fran^oise Lionnet, two scholars in francophone studies. Arnold is the author of the insightful intertextual study Modernism and Negritude (1981) and Lionnet of, among other essays, “Metissage, Emancipation, and Female Textu- ality in Two Francophone Writers.”’ In her essay, Lionnet advances a concept of transcultural, linguistic, and literary hybridity {metis- sage) related to a “braiding” of the paternal and the maternal that gives rise to a created metis, or hybrid, through a rewriting of the past and an annihilation of dichotomies.* At best, the association between my work and theirs is a free one, for my readings of francophone literature are not opposed to theirs but rather are modulated by a very different voice, perspective, and goal. Some scholars proceed by accepting and rejecting the work of others, inevitably making value judgments and thereby establishing their intellectual position, terri¬ tory, or, worst of all, their turf. To my mind, this procedure is neither very sophisticated nor helpful in establishing a collaborative commu¬ nity of scholars. At the same time that I greatly appreciate the work of these scholars, it is my goal to contribute my own view on the ques¬ tion. My reading could be characterized neither as a Euro-American perspective that views Negritude as an outgrowth of modernism nor as the particularly French and feminist perspective of Lionnet, who aptly and eloquently uses the image of the braid, which is formed by intertwining three strands of hair. It occurs to me that the braid sug- Introduction 5 gests tightness; a three-part harmony of order, symmetry, and unity; and reconciliation. As an image, the braid provides a limited idea of the dynamics of francophone culture. For example, in Eloge de la creolitejln Praise of Creoleness, Bernabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, in attempting to define Creoleness, move very quickly from using the braid (“our history is a braid of histories”) to using images of “original soup,” “primitive chaos,” and the “mangrove swamp of virtualities.”® Alongside Lionnet, the French philosophical writer Michel Serres offers a complementary analysis of “metissage culturel” that functions incisively in the analysis of the francophone condition. My perspective is that of a Black American who sees something in addition to the tension between the maternal and paternal traces.'® In most of the texts I deal with, the characters “w'restle with truth,” as James Olney would suggest." Things come undone, and the braid does not hold! There is much awe, anguish, conflict, resistance, death, and survival in the francophone texts I read. Instead of cultural braids, one might be tempted to speak of cultural “dreads,” not only in terms of defiant Rastafarian politics and aesthetics, but also in the affec¬ tive, psychological, and existential senses of the word. The profuse disarray of the knotty’ Rasta dreadlocks embodies a protest against and poignant counterstatement to the colonial structures of physi¬ cal, political, moral, psychological, and spiritual containment fostered by the military, police, economic, pedagogical, and religious institu¬ tions. Rastafarian dreads represent the calibanesque unraveling and reconceptualization of the order. On the other hand, the braid evokes the seductive golden Rapunzel rope inviting one to climb into the tower of Western beauty’, assimilation, and control. In Ken Bugul’s The Abandoned Baobab, the narrator does not describe the colonial and postcolonial world in terms of reconciliation but rather in terms of teeming yet potentially productive contestation: Les formules se choquent. Perdu, I’etre cavale dans la reflexion, la me¬ ditation. Les notions initient, les idees foisonnent, les projections s’epar- pillent, les comparaisons comparent. Chacun essaie un chemin dans le vide, mais la fuite incite a la creation et creer c’est combler le vide, le seul vrai adversaire de I’homme. [Formulas collide. Lost, human beings roam around inside thoughts, meditations. Notions introduce themselves, ideas are born, plans grow 6 Introduction profuse, comparisons compare. Each one tries a new path in emptiness, but flight inspires creations, and to create is to fill the void, humankind’s only true enemy.] The poetry of Leon Damas inspired the title of this study: the term countermodernism emerges from the poems “Contre notre amour qui ne voulait rien d’autre,” “Pour sur,” and particularly “Black-Label,” in which the poet declares unambiguously his counterposition con- tre/against the conspiracy of silence all around him and against West¬ ern morality with its procession of precepts, preoccupations, pre¬ sumptions, preconceived notions, and prejudices. I characterize as countermodernist much of the production of francophone literary culture since the Negritude poets. Arnold focuses on the poet Aime Cesaire, as I did in my book La Cohesion pokique de Voeuvre cesairienne. In this text, however, the work and thinking of Aime Cesaire serve as the starting point, as does the concept of Negritude, in order to proceed to an embrace of francophone literary culture in its com¬ plexity as well as its unifying issues. This constitutes a very different, broader project than a one-author or one-genre study. I wish to dis¬ cuss modernism by focusing on the resistance, critiques, and counter¬ moves not only of Cesaire but also of six other writers, including Antenor Firmin, the Haitian intellectual and author of De I’egalite des races humaines (1885). Francophone literary culture is neither modernist nor antimodern¬ ist: refusing and slipping the knot of binary oppositions, it asserts itself as countermodernist. The imperative for francophone literary culture was to reconceptualize, restage, and redescribe the themes of modernism. This was not an outright rejection of modernism but rather a desire to recapture black subjectivity by salvaging, qualify¬ ing, and above all modulating through a systematic readjustment and fine-tuning of the themes and techniques of European aesthetic mod¬ ernism so as to bring them into harmony with the realities of the colonialized subject’s experience. Modulation is perhaps the key ma¬ neuver, for it suggests the counterpoint of the differing voice, rhetoric, affect, pitch, and melody of a counterpoetics. The counterimage of the Martinican Narcissus gazing into the mirror framed by the speci¬ ficity of Antillean culture makes this point: Introduction 7 Nous cherchons notre vrai visage. Nous avons suffisamment condamne la litterature artificielle qui pretend nous en donner I’image: poetes at- tardes, heros du poncif, superstitieux faiseurs d’alexandrins, tres laches diseurs de rien. Narcisse martiniquais ou done te reconnaitras-tu? Plonge tes regards dans le miroir du merveilleux: tes contes, tes legendes, tes chants. Tu y verras s’inscrire, lumineuse, I’inaage sure de toi-meme.'^ [We are searching for our true visage. We have sufficiendy condemned fake literature which claims to give us a reflection of ourselves: behind- the-times poets, heroes of hackneyed convention, overly scrupulous crafters of alexandrines, quite cowardly sayers of nothing. Alartinican Narcissus, where then will you recognize yourself? Plunge your gazes into the mirror of the marvelous: your short stories, your legends, your songs. You will see inscribed therein, luminous, the unfailing image of yourself.] The short stories, legends, and songs refer to a Creole tradition and cultural wellspring that has given rise to today’s discussions of crhlite, or Creoleness. Creoleness is not so much new as it is a part of a cyclical process of redefinition and unifying cultural aflfirmation. Creoleness is a renewal, a reinvention, and, in many ways, an avatar of the identity politics of Negritude. Unfortunately, its exponents do not see it as an elaboration of Negritude but rather as its displace¬ ment. Nonetheless, the authors of Eloge de la creolite are inspired by a counterdiscourse and agree that Aime Cesaire did not simply “ap¬ propriate” European modernism or one of its avatars, surrealism: With Cesaire and Negritude w’e were steeped in Surrealism. It was obvi¬ ously unfair to consider Cesaire’s handling of the “Miraculous Weapons” of Surrealism as a resurgence of literary bovarism. Indeed, Surrealism blew to pieces ethnocentrist cocoons, and was in its very foundations the first reevaluation of Africa by Western consciousness. But, that the eyes of Europe should in the final analysis serve as a means for the rising of the buried continent of Africa, such was the reason for fearing risks of reinforced alienation which left few chances to escape from it except by a miracle: Cesaire, thanks to his immense genius, soaked in the fire of a volcanic idiom, never paid tribute to Surrealism. On the contrary, he became one of the most burning figures of this movement, one of these 8 Introduction figures we cannot understand without referring to the African substrate resuscitated by the operating powers of the verb. Yet African tropism did not prevent Cesaire from very deeply embedding himself in the Carib¬ bean ecology and referential space. And if he did not sing in Creole, the language he uses remains, as revealed namely by a recent reading of Et les chiens se taisaient, nonetheless more open than generally thought to the Creole emanations of these native depths.'** According to the authors of the “Eloge,” resistance to colonial dis¬ course and politics, countermoves against European aesthetics, and a system of countervalues of Caribbean discourse are to be discov¬ ered in the oral tradition of the French West Indies: “Creole orality, even repressed in its aesthetic expression, contains a whole system of countervalues, a counterculture; it witnesses ordinary genius applied to resistance, devoted to survival.” As Aime Cesaire perseveres, after more than fifty years of public service as mayor of Fort-de-France in Martinique, it is instructive to assess some of the salient issues of his writing. Cesaire is no stranger to us here in the United States. For the last forty years, with increasing interest and intensity, Americans have been reading, teaching, and translating the seminal work of this Afro-French thinker, writer, states¬ man, and visionary. He has been such a compelling figure for us be¬ cause, more effectively than anyone else in the francophone world, he has dreamed of, articulated, and defended on the world stage the de¬ colonization and liberation of Africa, redefined what it means to be human, and developed new concepts of Black self-esteem, solidarity, culmral affirmation, and human rights. Many have sought to answer the question, “Who is Aime Cesaire?” Perhaps no one has answered it better than the eighty-five-year-old poet, playwright, historian, mayor, national assemblyman, statesman, and awakener of consciousness, Aime Cesaire himself. After studying in Paris he wrote: I would go to this land of mine and I would say, “Embrace me without fear. . . . And if all I can do is speak, it is for you I shall speak. . . . My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice, the freedom of those who break down in the solitary confinement of despair.” And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of as- Introduction 9 suming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a proscenium, a sea of miseries is not a stage, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.'® Since these utterances in his inaugural work. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939), Aime Cesaire has consistently addressed in his writings and active political life the economic, social, cultural, psychological, and moral consequences of European colonialism on the destiny of Black people in the modern world. Cesaire’s lifework has been to rouse the modern world from its indifference to human suffering and to expose the lie of the European civilizing mission in Africa, as, for example, in his “Discourse on Colonialism” (1950). Cesaire’s position as a man of culture has always been that the art¬ ist has moral and social responsibilities and should be the most useful citizen of his “tribe.” Throughout the 1950s, the artist’s duty was not only to hasten the decolonization of the old French colonies but also to promote the decolonization of the mind of the formerly colonized subject, who had internalized the systematic ideological devaluation of Black humanity and culture. Cesaire’s agenda has been the recon¬ struction of Black nations after independence and the development of new concepts of the self. In the postindependence moment, artists become inventors of being, propagators of a new spirit, engineers of souls, multipliers of new men and women. Aime Cesaire has a profound intellectual and culmral connection to the United States and to Black America. For his thesis at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Cesaire wrote on the South in Black American literature. Although Negritude is associated with the Guyanese poet Leon Gontran Damas, the Senegalese poet and statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Cesaire, who coined the term, for Cesaire Negri¬ tude is an American concept in that, as a cultural affirmation, it emerges from the research and artistry of \X’. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Not an essentialism nor an antiracist racism, Cesaire’s Negritude in¬ volves three simple affirmations: Black identity; solidarity through time and space with all people of African descent; and identification with cultural values of African origin. Cesaire’s emphasis is on the culture and the cultural heritage. For Cesaire, biology is only truly interesting if considered and transmuted in the specific cultural con- lo Introduction text. He is interested in the “plasma” of the accumulated, inherited experiences of people of African descent, the plasma of Black cul- mral memory. Cesaire has asserted, “Chromosomes are of little im¬ portance to me. ... I believe in the value of all that is buried in the collective memory and even that which is buried in the collective un¬ conscious. ... I do not believe that one arrives in this world with the brain empty as in arriving with empty hands.” Cesaire’s Negrimde would lead to a counterhumanism. Cesaire is a humanistic critic of European imperial practices, a critic of the Euro¬ pean imperial will to power, and a critic of its corollary will to de¬ scribe, define, represent, interpret, translate, and textualize colonized peoples and places through the Western gaze. He would thrust an alternative all-inclusive universal humanism back at Europe: Qu’on le sache: en articulant notre effort de liberation des peuples colo¬ nises, en combattant pour la dignite de nos peuples c’est en definitive pour le monde tout entier que nous combattons et pour le liberer de la tyrannie, de la haine et du fanatisme. . . . Alors et alors seulement nous aurons vaincu et notre victoire finale marquera I’avenement d’une ere nouvelle. . . . nous aurons aide a fonder I’humanisme universel.*® [Let it be known: while articulating our effort of liberation of colonized peoples, while fighting for the dignity of our people, it is definitely for the whole world that we are fighting and to liberate it from tyranny, hatred and fanaticism. . . . Then and only then shall we have been victorious, and our final victory will mark the coming of a new era. ... we shall have assisted in founding universal “humanisme.”] Cesaire’s poetry, theater, and his writings on history, and politics form an extraordinary lens through which to ponder the sense of francophone literary culture. Cesaire privileges the vegetal as the tor¬ tured ontological expression of the history of uprootings, re-enracina- tions, and survival of Black culture. The laminaria is a form of algae that can extend for many miles into the open sea and yet remain at¬ tached to its natal rock or land formation. This algae is one of the many vegetal forms in which Cesaire sees mirrored the dramas of the existence, particularly the wandering, of colonized and postcolonial subjects. Typically, the Cesairian vision grasps in a poetic instant the complexity, anxiety, hybridity, and liminal quality that mark the legacy Introduction 11 of the transcultural contacts between the Euro-American societies and the nations they have colonized. The preface to Moi laminaire is a good example: Dans toute vie il y a un nord et un sud, et I’orient et I’occident . . . au carrefour . . . I’inegale lutte de la vie et de la mort, de la ferveur et de la lucidite, fut-ce celle du desespoir et de la retombee, la force aussi tou- jours de regarder demain. Ainsi va toute vie. Ainsi va ce livre, entre soleil et ombre, entre montagne et mangrove, entre chien et loup, claudiquant et binaire. 2 ° [In every life there is a north and a south, and the east and the west... at the crossroads . . . the uneven struggle of life and of death, of fervor and of lucidity, be it that of despair and of repercussions, the strength also and always to look toward tomorrow. Thus goes every Life. Thus goes this book, between sun and shadow, between mountain and mangrove, at the uvilight hour of the dog and the wolf, limping and binary.] Elsewhere, as in his poem “Dit d’errance” (Tale of Wandering), Aime Cesaire speaks of lost bodies, mutilations, fragmentations, dis¬ memberment, tearings away, the split self, the unresolved, unexploited spaces, and the invention of the self. These images and topics all con¬ verge in the image of the most beautiful awaited night sun with its attendant phoenicism and suicidal gestures of immolation for rebirth. The poem maps the issues that haunt the pages, images, and meta¬ phors of francophone literary production, such as the poetics of the uprooted, shipwrecked, and wandering self; cultural schizophrenia; the violent dark days of decolonization; and the sunlight of indepen¬ dence. As mentioned earlier, francophone literary culture, being neither modernist nor antimodernist, refuses and slips the knot of binary oppositions, thereby asserting itself as countermodernist. Cesaire makes the point in his Discourse on Colonialism that the colonized masses are not an “either-or” people: Once again, I systematically defend our old Negro civilizations: they were courteous civilizations. So the real problem, you say, is to return to them. No, I repeat. VCe are not men for whom it is a question of “either-or.” For us, the prob¬ lem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to 12 Introduction go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.^i Francophone literary culture is neither a shortsighted solipsistic identity politics nor lyricism. Strictly speaking, it is not antiurbanism, anticommodification, or antiprogress. Rather, it seeks to confront, to contest, and to counter the dehumanizing excesses and legacies of colonial domination. The affix counter is crucial in describing franco¬ phone literary culture’s inflection of modernist aesthetic practices and vision. As a prefix, counter posits a relationship of proximity between one action and another, and it declares an oppositional stance within that relationship. Counter suggests the substitution of an action as a reply to that other action, condition, narrative, or discourse already in existence and considered inimical. The reply is a critique, at times a denunciation, whose purpose is checking or frustrating, correcting or redefining, rivaling or outdoing the inimical Western/colonial dis¬ course by working in particular within the realm of the unacknowl¬ edged, the unrecognized, and the unrealized. Such counterexertions of the denunciatory tradition as counter¬ modernism, counterhumanism, counterstorytelling, countermemory, counterstories, and counterconfessions define the productions of francophone literary culture and contribute to the elaboration of a dis¬ course of counter that organizes this study. Part i lays the groundwork for highlighting certain enduring characteristics of francophone liter¬ ary culture in general, certain francophone women writers, and some francophone literary production dating from as early as 1885 to as re¬ cently as 1991. The discussion of countermodernism in Part i prepares the way for discussing in Part 2 the fundamental narrative force in franco¬ phone literary culture that is counterstorjhelling, along with its re¬ lated dependent genre, the counterconfession. As detailed in Part 3, for the subjugated the counterconfession represents a form of sur¬ vival effected through a linguistic project and productivity occurring outside the confessional scenes of the prescribed and coercive spaces Introduction 13 of the courtroom, the torture chamber, or the church confessional. Colonialism entailed not only the power to annex and exploit other races, but also to textualize the racial Other (see Part 2, chap. 4). It is this textualization against which francophone narratives must always work. Thus, Part 2 further defines the formalist qualities of counter- storjtelling by examining samples of early French colonial discourse, politics, and narrative depiction of the subjugated Other. Finally, there are topical organizing principles in this study, such as the consideration of slavery and colonialism, which informs the entire text. Colonial narrative depictions that reveal obsessions with the body of color constitute another major focus, as does that of the inscribed body in the francophone text. I undertake an analysis of the colo¬ nized person’s body experience as it relates to the colonial experience in chapter 2, which is devoted to the neglected Guyanese poet Leon Gontran Damas and his distinctive “body talk.”^^ This examination of the inscribed body continues with a discussion of Mariama Ba and the shared rhetoric of menopause and decolonization (chap. 5), Tahar ben Jelloun and his tale of contrasexuality' (chap. 6), Ken Bugul and her search for culmral moorings and an anchored identity (chap. 7), and, finally, Gerard Etienne and his witness to tortured flesh of the political detainee (chap. 8). The themes of exile and return provide another organizing prin¬ ciple for this study. The texts studied reveal that in francophone liter¬ ary culture the fundamental modernist preoccupation with exile and return is elaborated into a meditation on transitional social realities, migrancy, internal exile and imprisonment, role reversal, status in¬ consistency, and, ultimately, cultural schizophrenia. The notion of community and connectedness is yet another thread that binds the diverse texts from varied regions and cultures of the francophone world. Humor, trauma, and books form the core of col¬ lective consciousness and contribute to the building of local commu¬ nities, nations, and transnational communities. Leon Gontran Damas demonstrates how the secret codes of the in-group’s humor act as a sociocultural glue for individuals sharing a given community or collec¬ tive experience. Gerard Etienne reveals that trauma and the unspeak¬ able unite people in their experience of those awesome and awe-ful experiences that can never be contained in words. Since books estab¬ lish communities as well, Mariama Ba’s assertion that “books knit 14 Introduction generations together” is especially poignant for students of literature and in relation to this study, which moves back and forth between centuries and generations of francophone writers. Cultural braiding is not the only notion that the subtitle of this study. The Game of Slipknot, is meant to suggest. In fact, my subtitle has much more to do with the lifelines motif in Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Germaine Bree explains the sense of that title: Life/Lines; the metaphor is ambiguous and invites us to ponder its rela¬ tion to the subtitle. Lifelines, ropes thrown to ships or persons flounder¬ ing in deep waters nearby; lifelines, ropes that link the deep-sea diver to the mother-ship; lifelines, more metaphorically, essential routes of com¬ munication between mutually dependent communities, but again, and differently, lifelines, those lines in the palm of the hand that in palmistry, dictionaries tell us, supposedly reveal facts about a person’s life to the person who can decode the meaning. More than a metaphor, it defines a space or scene and suggests a purpose.^^ The inspiration for my subtitle comes from “le jeu du noeud cou- lant,” the concluding line of the poem “Pour toi et moi,” by Leon Gontran Damas. The slipknot is also a recurring image in the writings of the Cesaire-Damas generation, as we shall see. Like the lifelines metaphor, the slipknot has much to do with the sea and survival. It is polyvalent in its signifying power and multilayered in its richness and aptness to the history and experience of new world Blacks, evoking a string of verbal associations that plot the legacy of the middle passage, colonial domination, plantation experience, and postcolonialism: cap¬ ture, bound hands, nautical voyage, bondage, suicide, lynching, stran¬ gulation, triangulation, struggle, ties, knots, prestidigitation, escape, freedom, and survival. The colonial or the postcolonial subject is always challenged to negotiate between two worldviews, two cultures, and often two competing sets of values. The game of slipknot de¬ fines, on an existential level, the challenges, difficulties, fascination, exhilaration, dangers, and snares of the inevitable circulation of the individual between two cultures. In Damas’s poem “Pour toi et moi” the words slip and coil around one another in a process that creates new meanings. The collision, reversal, and mirroring of the elements of the poem threaten, destabilize, and undo the original assertion. The Introduction 15 images speak directly of the tying, binding, knotting, and unbinding of a “self” with an “0/other.” The game of slipknot imagizes and evokes the psycho- and socio¬ cultural snares involved in the dramas and traumas of colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism. These snares include the chal¬ lenges for francophone subjects inherent in negotiating their identity in the in-between zone of cultures where conceptual frameworks col¬ lide, and the challenge of residing in a liminal present between an obliterated past and the imagining of a fulfilling democratic future. The slipknot suggests the figure eight, a circuit of journeying, quest¬ ing, and returning, and a cycle of contesting emotional and intel¬ lectual states: triangulated African American-European destinies; the enchantment and disenchantment with the native land; displacements; the enchantment and disenchantment with a Euro-American Prom¬ ised Land; infinity and the circular trap of self-aversion and mimetic desire. The slipknot concretizes the life challenge for the colonial and postcolonial subject: strangulation or liberation—to tighten the noose the more one struggles to free oneself or to slip the knot. The authors and texts dealt with in this study bear witness to the fact that margin- ality, oppression, and great pain can lead to extraordinary creativity and achievement. Such are the snares, such are the stakes, and such are the challenges with which francophone literary culture grapples in its game of slipknot. I Counter modernism 1 The Game of Slipknot Poetry was for me the only way to break the stranglehold the accepted French form had on me. Martinique . . . around its neck the slipknot of assimilation. —Letter to Maurice Thorez (emphases added) . . . “Odd how the climate has changed. Cold on this island . . . Have to think about making a fire . . . Well, Caliban, old fellow, it’s just us two now, here on the island, only you and me. You and me. You-me . . . me-you!”—Aime Cesaire, H Tempest For you and for me who one and the other were yesterday but one still caught in the game of slipknot — Leon Gontran Damas, “Pour toi et moi” You know that before leaving I had undone the noose around my neck—Gerard Etienne, Cri pour ne pas crever de honte Perspectives: Anterior Firniin and Rene Maran Francophone literary culture begins with a denunciation. In 1921 the prestigious French literary Goncourt Prize was awarded to Rene Maran, a Guyanese French colonial administrator in the Central Afri¬ can district of Oubangui-Chari, for his work Batouala,^ considered the first novel to be written about Africa in French by a Black. In 20 Countermodernism the preface to Batouala, the author condemned French colonial prac¬ tices in Central Africa and appealed to his “brothers of France” to recall France to her revolutionary, egalitarian, and fraternal dignity. The preface and the novel itself were banned in the colonies, and the Goncourt committee was severely criticized for bestowing the prize upon such “dangerous,” inflammatory literature. It was not until 1987 that the Goncourt Prize would be awarded to another francophone writer, Tahar ben Jelloun, for La Nuit sacree, the sequel to L’Enfant de sable (The Sand Child) ? Prior to Maran, however, away from Paris in the relative obscurity of Port-au-Prince circa 1885, the Flaitian intellectual Antenor Firmin published De I’egalite des races humaines {On the Equality of the Human Races)? In 1855, seven years after the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French colonies, Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau’s L’Essai sur I’inegalite des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) had been published.'* Gobineau’s essay was not only an a pos¬ teriori “scientific” justification of slavery but also an a priori justifi¬ cation for modernity’s continuation of colonialist practices of exploi¬ tation, which in the postslavery period took the form of oppressive debt systems and the forced labor, servimde, and indenture of Afri¬ cans, Asians, and Amerindians. Firmin wrote his essay as a counter and a reply to, as well as a denunciation of, the physical, medical, intellectual, and moral anthropology of the period, a discourse con¬ sidered inimical, or in his terms “iniquitous.” Firmin was addressing not only the rhetoric of Gobineau but also that of others, including Ernest Renan in Philosophical Dialogues: Les hommes ne sont pas egaux, les races ne sont pas egales. Le Negre, par exemple, est fait pour servir aux grandes choses voulues et conyues par le blanc. [Men are not equal. The Negro, for example, is made to serve the great things conceived and desired by the White man.] ^ Firmin’s 662-page project has three major organizing goals. First, with an overabundance of evidence, Firmin eloquently defends Eg^'p- tian, Ethiopian, and sub-Saharan civilizations, enumerating their con¬ tributions to human progress. Firmin thus anticipated the twentieth- century research of Jean Price-Mars and other Black Africanists. The Game of Slipknot 2i Second, Firmin analyzes what he considers the prompt evolution of the Black in the New World from slavery to independence, privileg¬ ing the case of Haiti and the example of the intellectuals, military figures, and heroes of its independence movement. Firmin states: Nous aliens voir ce qu’ont pu faire dans les hautes regions de I’esprit les arriere petits-fils tires de la Cote-d’Or, du Dahomey, du pays des Aradas, des Mandingues, des Ibos et des Congos, pour etre jetes en Haiti con¬ verts de chaines et maudissant leur destinee! (P. 438) [We shall see what in the lofty regions of the mind has been accomplished by the great-grandchildren of those dragged from the Gold Coast, from Dahomey, from the land of the Arada, the Mandingo, the Ibo, and the Congo peoples, to be cast down into Haiti covered in chains and cursing their fate.] Third, Firmin’s goal is to denounce the moral, intellectual, and sci¬ entific relativism of Europe: first, through a systematic refutation of the false ethnography of slavery and postslavery racism and second, through a grandiose affirmation, with examples, of the humanity of Blacks. According to Firmin in 1885, one must detruire les pretentions que la race caucasique affiche au monopole de I’intelligence et de toutes les aptitudes superieures.” (P. 452) [destroy the claims flaunted by the Caucasian race to a monopoly on intelligence and all superior aptitudes.] In Firmin’s phrasing, one discerns the beginning utterances of Aime Cesaire’s assertion in Notebook of a Return to the Native Ijznd: “Et au- cune race ne possede le monopole de la beaute, de I’intelligence, de la force . . . et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquete” [And no race posesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, strength . . . and there is space for everyone at the rendezvous of victory]. In fact, much of Firmin’s heroic defense of Black humanity prefigures many of the revolutionary positions later taken by many twentieth-century francophone writers. Throughout De I’egalite des races humaines, Firmin qualifies as “spe¬ cious,” “suspicious,” “perverse,” “monstrous,” “stupid,” and “fanci¬ ful” the contemporary scientific claims that asserted the differences between Black and White humanity. Before Cesaire’s Discourse on 22 Countermodernism Colonialism (1950) and his denunciation of “the big lie” of the civiliz¬ ing mission, of anthropological hypocrisy, and of the dishonest equa¬ tions that tried to prove that Christianity equals civilization and that Black culture equals savagery and paganism, Firmin had asserted that the work of Gobineau and others was in no way une reponse scientifique, c’est un pur jeu de rhetorique a reduire a sa juste valeur. . . . j’aurai droit de lui dire, a cette anthropologic menson- gere: Non, tu n’es pas une science! (Pp. 227, 230) [a scientific response, it is a pure game of rhetoric to be reduced to its just value. ... I shall reserve the right to say to this lying anthropology: No, you are not a science!] Before the Martinican ethnopsychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote his 1961 sociodiagnostic Black Skin, White Masks, in which he analyzed much of the behavior of the colonized as a consequence of colo¬ nial processes of socialization and brutalization, Firmin had posited a similar analysis: Les Europeens qui ont le courage de reprocher a I’esclave noir son in- feriorite intellectuelle ne se rappellent-ils done pas d’avoir employe tous les artifices pour empecher que I’intelligence ne se developpat jamais en lui. Apres avoir brise tous les ressorts de la volonte, toute energie morale, toute elasticite de I’esprit, ne laissant que la brute la ou I’homme mena- gait de s’affirmer, ne savait-on pas, sans I’ombre d’un doute, qu’il ne restait plus rien d’eleve dans cet etre methodiquement degrade? C’est pourtant en s’adressant a lui, le prenant comme terme de comparaison qu’on a etabli les bases du jugement par lequel on declare que les races ne sont pas egales, que les Nigritiens sont au-dessous de I’echelle et les Caucasiens au dessus! Une science qui s’est edifice au milieu d’un tel renversement de la nature et qui y a cherche ses regies d’appreciation et de raisonnement ne pouvait offrir rien de serieux, rien de solide. Dans cette penible occurrence, la science, par une lache complaisance ou par insuffisance d’observation, s’est rendu complice du plus sot des prejuges et du plus inique des systemes. (Pp. 488-89) [Those Europeans who have the audacity to reproach the black slave for his intellectual inferiority do not therefore recall having employed every ingenious device in order to prevent intelligence from ever developing The Game of Slipknot 23 in him. After having broken all the resilience of his willpower, every bit of his moral energ>', all elasticity of the mind, leaving only a brute there where a human being threatened to affirm itself, did they not know, with¬ out a shadow of a doubt, that there remained nothing more of the lofty’ in this methodically degraded being? It is, however, in addressing that being, taking him as the basis of comparison, that they have established the bases of judgment by which they declare that the races are not equal, that the Negroes are at the bottom of the ladder and the Caucasians are at the top. A science that erects itself in the middle of such a reversal of nature and that searches therein its rules of appraisal and reasoning can offer nothing serious, nothing solid. In this painful instance, science, by a cowardly connivance or a lack of observation, has made itself com- plicitous with the most stupid of prejudices and the most iniquitous of systems.] Before the poet Leon Gontran Damas denounced the highly imita¬ tive form and unexamined content of early-twentieth-cenmry Carib¬ bean literamre, Firmin had already begun a critique of the state of Haitian literamre in 1885: Malheureusement dans cette premiere floraison de I’intelligence des Noirs, on ne s’occupa que de la litteramre. On aima mieux cultiver la forme dans laquelle les idees doivent se presenter que d’etudier le fond de ces idees. Beaucoup de brillant litteraire et presque pas de science. Louis-Philippe disait de Villemain qu’il faisait ses phrases tout d’abord et cherchait ensuite I’idee qu’on pouvait y mettre. C’est une saillie qui contient plus de finesse que de verite; mais il n’est pas moins vTai que les hommes de 1830, en France, sacrifiaient souvent trop a la forme. Imi- tant tant done I’eloquence fleurie avec laqueOe les doctrinaires franqais parlaient de la liberte et des principes, les Hai'tiens se mirent a parler ad- mirablement du droit, sans y croire aucunement, sans meme s’occuper de ce qui le constitue, ni dans quelles limites il doit s’exercer, ni a quel point, il est respectable. (P. 584) [Unformnately in this first flowering of the intelligence of Blacks, one was interested only in literamre. One preferred to cultivate the form in which ideas must be presented rather than smdy the substance of these ideas. Lots of literary brilliance but almost no science. Louis-Philippe used to say of Villemain that he fashioned his phrases first then searched 24 Countermodernism for the idea that one could put into the phrase. It is a witticism that con¬ tains more finesse than truth; but it is no less true that the men of 1830, in France, often sacrificed too much to form. Consequently imitating, to quite an extent, the florid eloquence with which the sententious French doctrinarians spoke of liberty and its principles, Haitians began to speak admirably of law, without believing in it in the least, without even deal¬ ing with what actually constituted it, nor in what parameters it should be exercised, nor to what extent it is honorable.] While pondering the bloody past of the slave trade, the wretched conditions of slave life, and the self-serving claims of nineteenth- century anthropology, Firmin resists melancholy and draws strength, pride even, from the slave past and the survival and progress of New World Blacks, thus anticipating the Negritude movement of the 1930s and 40s. Pour moi, j’avoue bien franchement que je ne puis m’empecher d’etre fier de mes peres, quand je me reporte par la pensee a cette epoque de misere ou, rives a une existence infernale, ayant le corps brise par le fouet, la fatigue et les chaines, ils gemissaient en silence, mais con- servaient dans leur poitrine haletante le feu sacre qui devait produire I’explosion superbe de la liberte et de I’independance! (P. 533) [For me, I must confess quite frankly that I cannot keep myself from being proud of my forefathers, when through thoughts I am transported back to that period of misery during which, tied to a hellish existence, being broken by the lash, by weariness and chains, they moaned in silence but preserved in their panting breast the sacred fire that would produce the splendid explosion of liberty and independence.] While the word “negrimde” is of twentieth-century coinage, Ce- saire maintains in the Notebook that it “stood up for the first time and declared its humanity” during the Haitian Revolution of 1802-1804. With that in mind, it is perhaps later in the same century, in 1885, with the publication in Haiti of Oti the Equality of the Human Races by Antenor Firmin—in direct response to the indictment of Black humanity by European physical and moral anthropology—that one can place the beginnings of a francophone literary consciousness and the countermoves of the denunciatory tradition. The Game of Slipknot 25 In 1921 Maran’s existence dramatized a variation of the double consciousness explicated by W. E. B. DuBois in 1902. In DuBoisian double consciousness one is dealing with the tensions between indi¬ vidual racial or ethnic identity and values and collective national iden¬ tity and values. Specifically, the conflict in DuBois emerged from the existential twoness of being: “One ever feels his twoness, —an Ameri¬ can, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; tw'o warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” In Maran’s case, it is the two¬ ness of being Negro and French. Maran’s life in 1921 was one of remarkable mobility. His dilemma, knowing colonial history while not identifying with Africa and Africans, prefigures today’s dilemma of Parisian-born Blacks who have no memory or experience of Africa or the West Indies. This predicament crosses linguistic boundaries to include anglophone and other francophone Blacks who have been in¬ culcated with Western values and are living in world capitals. Maran’s dilemma is expressed today by writers like Caryl Phillips, who shuttles between St. Kitts and London and captures the sense of the contem¬ porary manifestation of Maran’s experience: The question leaps out: “When will it end?” The problem occurs when you don’t have any memory of the Caribbean, and you have been told that’s where you are from. That’s why Alvin in Strange Fruit goes back to the Caribbean, returns to England and actually discovers that the Carib¬ bean is not for him. It’s a real problem to have no memory of the Carib¬ bean, and it’s a problem to have a memory of the Caribbean. If you seek to discover the Caribbean in somebody growing up in North America or Britain, then nine times out of ten, you will be disappointed.^ In Maran’s Batouala, the tension between the vision in the preface compared to the contents of the novel is of particular interest, as is the psychoculmral location of Maran himself. There is a dissonance or contrapuntal discontinuity between the probing and denunciatory analysis of colonialism in the preface and the content of the novel proper. Maran the novelist is unable or unwilling to write himself out of the traditions, gaze, aesthetics, and position of a European¬ ized Black looking upon Africans as an outsider. With a French heart and worldview, Maran sensed that he was in the land of his ances- 26 Countermodernism tors, ancestors from whom he distanced himself because he did not share their condition, mentality, or tastes, but whom he recognized, nonetheless, as his ancestors.^ Today many successful minorities have difficulty recognizing themselves in the socially, educationally, and economically disenfranchised members of their racial or ethnic group, and class asserts itself. Subtitled in French Veritable roman negre (A True African Tale), in the English edition the novel is subtitled. An African Love Story? Essentially, it describes a love triangle between Batouala, the chief, Yassigui’ndja, his ninth wife, who is, however, “first” among equals, and the robust young hunter Bissibi’ngui. Yassi and Bissi are sexu¬ ally overdetermined as characters, and Batouala is “naturally jealous, vindictive and violent.” The African woman is portrayed as being of easy virme and is condemned to promiscuity and infidelity because she acts only according to instinct. In fact, the text states, “The only law is instinct.” Thus, Africans cannot rid themselves of innate sav¬ ageness, and relationships between the African men and women are one-dimensional—reduced to sexual pursuit and satisfaction. Rela¬ tionships between men in the novel are competitive and deadly; the same is true of the relationships between women. Perhaps the only moment in which the novel echoes the anticolonialist criticisms and preoccupations of the preface is when Batouala pronounces an ex¬ tended discourse on the character of the Boundjous, or Whites, during preparations for the celebrations of Ga’nza, the ceremony of circum¬ cision and excision. Maran’s writing is important because, although his depiction of Africa in 1921 reinforces the colonialist textualization of Africa as pagan and savage, the novel and, in particular, the preface constimte the beginning in francophone literamre of deterrent dissent against French colonial practices. Maran’s honesty is uncompromising, at times disturbing, heroic, and instructive. Maran is caught between two competing sets of impulses that contribute to the slipknot of the assimilation process.^ The slipknot of the assimilation-alienation pro¬ cess manifests itself in crises of alternating admiration and revulsion, national identification and racial identification, self-identification and social classification, mimetic desire and self-aversion, blindness and insight. The often resultant sense of alienation and shame is contem- The Game of Slipknot 27 plated in the image of the complicitously dirty hands of a colonialized cultural elite in the poem “Solde/Sellout” by Leon Damas: “les mains eflfroyablement rouges du sang de leur ci-vi-li-sa-tion” [my hands hor¬ rifically red with the blood of their ci-vi-li-za-tion]. In his burgeoning but unsustained consciousness, Maran’s 1921 preface foreshadows aspects of Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. In his person and in his literary dilemma as wTiter-thinker, Maran presages the crisis of double consciousness in the novel The Ambig¬ uous Adventure. Maran and his work are instructive lenses through which to view many of the fundamental preoccupations of franco¬ phone literary culture, of this smdy, and indeed of issues in African, Caribbean, and American societies as they struggle with questions of class, social mobility, assimilation, memory, self-identification, classi¬ fication, and allegiance to race and nation. Maran’s work is significant because it sketches many of the dilem¬ mas with which future francophone writers would have to contend, as well as the positions they would assume: a condemnation of colo¬ nialism; a condemnation of complicitous silence; a double conscious¬ ness on the part of the Afro-French person; an awareness of the double standard of libertarian, egalitarian European domestic values and the practice of brutality, inequality, repression, and exploitation abroad; and, ironically, a recurrent need to believe in the perfectibility of France. Consciously or unconsciously, many major African novelists con¬ cerned with African tradition and the status of African women would rewrite the chapter concerning the circumcision-excision rimal, most often depicting the practice in its extremely dehumanizing and brutal¬ izing dimensions.Yet, certain impulses would set Maran apart from most of his successors, most notably his tendency to what might be called “deracialization,” the desire in the words of his novel’s title to be Un Homme pared aux autres (A Man Like Any Other Alan)." As an act of defiance against the banning of literature, certain Afri¬ can and French West Indian students, such as Joseph Zobel, the future author of La Rue Cases-Negres (Sugar Cane Alley),'^^ felt duty-bound to read Batouala. From among these students a political and liter¬ ary movement emerged that, on the eve of World War II and the French occupation, would be highlighted by the publication in 1937 28 Countermodernism of Pigments by Leon Gontxan Damas and in 1939 of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) by Aime Cesaire.'^ Beginning with denunciation and defiance, francophone literary culture is inaugurated, also, under the sign of tragic struggle. The Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, for example, was torn be¬ tween his passionate embrace of French culture and the love that bound him to his colonized Madagascar homeland. Deep in finan¬ cial debt, rejected for promotion in a French administrative post, and ultimately unable to reconcile his painful conflicts, Rabearivelo com¬ mitted suicide on June 22, 1937. Thus, the years from 1885 to 1921 and from 1937 to 1987 consti¬ tute historical frames around my study, with particular focus given to the latter fifty-year period. As I attempt to map some of the issues of this period as exemplified by six writers, my point is not to be ency¬ clopedic but rather synthetic.*^ Cheik Hamidou Kane orients the be¬ ginnings of this effort as his protagonist. Samba Diallo, philosophizes on the complex and tragic process of self-discovery and transforma¬ tion that permeates this literature: II arrive que nous soyons captures au bout de notre itineraire, vaincus par notre aventure meme. II nous apparait soudain que, tout au long de notre cheminement, nous n’avons pas cesse de nous metamorphoser, et que nous voila devenus autres. Quelquefois, la metamorphose ne s’acheve pas, eUe nous installe dans I’hybride et nous y laisse. Alors, nous nous cachons, remplis de honte. . . . Quand j’y reflechis maintenant, je ne puis m’empecher de penser qu’il y a eu un peu de I’attrait morbide du peril. J’ai choisi I’itineraire le plus susceptible de me perdre.'^ [And so it happens that we arrive at the end of our itinerary, vanquished by the adventure itself And, suddenly, it appears to us that all along as we were making our way, we were in a process of metamorphosis. So here we are . . . becom[ing] something other. Sometimes the metamorphosis is not complete and it propels us into a space of hybridity and leaves us there. And so we try to hide ourselves, filled as we are with shame. . . . When I reflect upon it now, I can’t help but think that there was a bit of the morbid appeal of danger. I chose the itinerary the most likely to confuse me.] (emphases added) The Game of Slipknot 29 The metamorphosis, the hybridity, and the shame will be principal preoccupations in the writing of Ken Bugul and Gerard Etienne. The preoccupation with the shame that results from a sense of complici- tous participation in the process of one’s own alienation is a recur¬ ring motif, echoed thirty-four years after The Ambiguous Adventure in Tahar ben Jelloun’s novel L’Enfant de sable (The Sand Child): Aux point et lieu ou je suis arrivee je m’arrete un moment, je me de- pouille de mes oripeaux, j’enleve une a une toutes mes peaux, tel un oignon je m’eplucherai devant vous jusqu’a I’ultime substance pour dire la faute, I’erreur et la honte. (P. 179) [At the point and place I’ve come to, I pause for a moment, take off my finery, remove all my skins one by one; like an onion I’ll peel away be¬ fore you until I come to the ultimate substance—sin, error, and shame.] (P. 140) The paradoxical reversals of fortune and threats to psychologi¬ cal well-being during the colonial and postindependence moments made authors and their characters aware of having undergone an ad- venmre (Kane), of having followed an itinerary (Jelloun), of errancy (Etienne), and of beings and a world turned upside down (Bugul). These insights in turn lead Cesaire, in poetry, and later Bugul, in a novel, to contemplate the baobab tree (“the upside-down tree”) as an apt image. As an image of heroic survival against disproportion¬ ate odds, the baobab is part of the network of images associated with the slipknot and will be helpful later in forming a theory about the francophone condition. The adventure of francophone literature is, in many respects, com¬ posed of deadly and passionate fascination, suspicion,'® and struggle with the French language and the system of values it implies. In my view, the discussion must begin with three primary observations: I. Language is a powerful tool of acculturation, assimilation, and domi¬ nation for the colonizer in that it is the primary means for the implantation of culture and, perhaps more important, for the implantation of a system of command, persuasion, coercion, and exploitation. Language includes and excludes individuals in ways that have a pervasive set of consequences for individuals “outside the power language.” 30 Countermodernism 2. The power of language is like that of a double-edged sword, for it also provides a potent means of empowerment for the oppressed. 3. In a multiethnic shared environment where the subordinate class is ex¬ cluded from the status and the material benefits conferred by the economy on the superordinate class, the imperative for the oppressed is to expropriate the language imposed upon them. The process and adventure of linguistic expropriation, as well as political and psychological empowerment through language, consti¬ tute, in my opinion, the essence of the short history of the emergence of francophone literature since the 1930s. This expropriation is a therapeutic process of disalienation. It implies the modeling, engineer¬ ing, and dissemination of new concepts of self—both male and female, native and European. In studying francophone literature, one cannot avoid confronting the complexity of transitional social realities. To speak of “francophone” literature or of the “francophone” world is to raise a host of complex and interlocking questions that in their totality capture the idea of a geography, a sociology, and a psychology of the French language in contact and in contestation with other cultures. An understanding of francophone literature begins with a consideration of the implantation of French administration, culture, and, above all, language outside of metropolitan France. Only then is it possible to study the voluminous body of literature written in French that is ex¬ travagant in the way it interfaces with multiple ethnic, geographic, and cultural variants and temporalities. A few examples of such interfaces are French with Polynesian, Asian, North African, West African, Caribbean, and Canadian; Catholicism with Islam, Voodoo, and Protestantism; tradition with modernity, surrealism, and African worldviews —specifically Dogon notions of continuity, transcendence {muntu), and language (nommo); gender; assimilation; alienation— as well as the interface of native, colonial, postcolonial, and mod¬ ern temporalities. These interfaces give rise to perplexing spaces of historical, geolinguistic, and cultural instability, hybridity, conceptual fusion, and confusion. People, life, and cultural moorings become “unhinged” and, in turn, give rise to the francophone expression of status inconsistency, role conflict, and divided consciousness. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes, “Culture has The Game of Slipknot 31 never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification.” Per¬ haps one could go even further and suggest that culture —especially francophone cnXxmt — defies simplification. This caveat notwithstand¬ ing, Fanon poignantly characterizes culture as “the fluctuating move¬ ment that the people are just giving shape to.” According to Fanon, there exists “this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come to; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light” (p. 227). He points out that “it has always happened in the struggle for free¬ dom that such a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action” (56). Francophone literature, as a body of literary expression, is funda¬ mentally concerned with what Erikson called, in Everything in Its Path, “the axis of variation” that is, the wandering from culture to culture in the wake of regional catastrophe and the “in-betweenness” that re¬ sults from competing ethnicities, nationalisms, and the expression of cultural differences. It is, therefore, precisely this “axis of variation,” “fluctuating movement,” and “zone of occult instability’” that orient signification and representation in francophone literature.^® Evenmally a relationship evolved between francophone literary cul¬ ture and French modernism as a consequence of the juxtaposition of the French poet and theorist of modernism, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), and the francophone poet and theorist of Negritude, Aime Cesaire (1913-). It is fitting to explore that relationship here. CygnejSignesISinge, or Modernism and Signs of Cultural Difference Je pense a la negresse, amaigrie et phtisique, Pietinant dans la boue, et cherchant, I’oeil hagard, Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique Derriere la muraille immense du brouillard; A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve Aux captifs, aux vaincus! ... a bien d’autres encorl^i 32 Countermodernism [I think of the lean consumptive negress trudging through the mud, with her haggard eyes peering in vain through the huge wall of fog for the absent palm-trees of her noble Africa; I think of all those who have lost what they can never, never hope to find again; Of those who are captive, those who are defeated—and of many another] In the poem quoted above, “Le Cygne” (The Swan) by Charles Baudelaire, the reader encounters the poet as decipherer and trans¬ lator of the universe as text. The focus is particularly on the cityscape of Paris with its crowds of people parading in misery, marginality, and alienation through the urban streets. The title of the poem is sug¬ gestive of sound-sense and homonymy. CygnejSignes (Swan/Signs) are represented identically in phonetic transcription, and in fact, con¬ tain and predict the drive of the poem’s creative impulse: signs of difference and sameness. Of special interest is the double action or simultaneous postulations of the poem. On the one hand, the poem acknowledges the haggard and tubercular Black woman as a sign that is in dramatic counterpoint to the white and wandering swan, both of whom are out of place in the streets of Paris, and signs of death and misery. And yet the poem levels the Black woman’s difference as a sign and inserts it into the generalized state of exile, loss, nostalgia, and desire to effect an Edenic return to some original state of bliss as lived and represented by the poet Victor Hugo, to whom the poem is dedicated; by the swan, the ostensible subject; by Andromache, the widow wandering in exile; and all captive and lost souls. In using the Black woman, Baudelaire inserts the colonized subject into the general symbolic social order; difference is represented and promptly sub¬ sumed, approached only to be absorbed. The poem can be read as an aestheticization of the colonial politics and sociology of assimilation, a process of dedifferentiating that Francophone literamre will resist. One must, however, recognize what seems to be Baudelaire’s ambi¬ guity on the subject of mystical correspondences. In the article entitled “L’Exposition universelle de 1855,” Baudelaire is careful to character¬ ize his system as one that “courait sans cesse apres le beau multiforme et versicolore qui se meut dans les spirales infinies de la vie” (p. 955) The Game of Slipknot 33 [was chasing ceaselessly after the multiform and variegated beauty that moves about in the infinite spirals of life]. Baudelaire states in this article on Victor Hugo that “tout, forme, mouvement, nombre, couleur, parfum, dans le spirituel comme dans le naturel, est significa- tif, reciproque, converse, correspondanG (p. 705) [ever>’thing, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual realm as well as in the natural realm, is significant, reciprocal, converse, and analogous]. Charles Baudelaire, it would appear, was aware of the consequences of his vision of correspondences, equivalences, and analogies and its nullifying double action. For abstract and systematic critics, writes Baudelaire, “tous les types, toutes les idees, toutes les sensations se confondraient dans une vaste unite, monotone et impersonnelle, im¬ mense comme I’ennui et le neant” (p. 956) [all character types, all ideas, all sensations would melt into one another in a vast unity, mo¬ notonous and impersonal, as all-encompassing as boredom and noth¬ ingness]. The Martinican poet Aime Cesaire would agree with Charles Baudelaire that the true poet is a decipherer and translator. How¬ ever, as a counterpoint to dedifferentiating equations of sameness, analogy', and correspondences into which signs of difference dissolve and lose their specificity, Aime Cesaire wishes to cultivate and invoke and convoke particularity and precision. The modernist Baudelairean or Swedenborgian system of homologies and correspondences is ulti¬ mately a system of containment. Cesaire’s goal is to recover that which signifies difference and to tease it out into the highest relief that grasps Black francophone difference in all of its irreplaceable specificity'. Disons que si je nomme avec precision (ce qui fait parler de mon exo- tisme), c’est qu’en nommant avec precision, je crois que Ton restitue a I’objet sa valeur personnelle (comme quand on appelle quelqu’un par son nom); on le suscite dans sa valeur unique singuliere; on salue sa valeur de force, sa valeur-force. Ici, c’est le vague qui dissout, qui aneantit, c’est la precision qui indiv'idualise. En nommant les objets, c’est un monde enchante, un monde de “monstres” que je fais surgir sur la grisaille mal differenciee du monde; un monde de “puissances” que je somme, que j’invoque et que je convoque. En les nommant, flore, faune, dans leur etrangete, je participe a leur force; je participe de leur force.^^ 34 Countermodernism [Let us say that if I name with precision (which makes for talk about my exoticism), it is that in naming with precision, I believe that one re¬ stores to the object its personal value (just as when one calls someone by his name), one calls it forth in its unique value; one hails its quality of strength, its value-strength. Here it is vagueness that dissolves, that destroys—it is precision that individualizes. In naming objects, it is an enchanted world, a world of “monsters” that I cause to surge forth on the poorly differentiated grayness of the world, a world of “powers” that I summon, that I invoke and that I convoke. By naming them, flora, fauna, in their strangeness, I participate in and of their strength.] Cesaire wishes to underscore the importance of the sign that is lost against the disorienting background of the world. There is resis¬ tance on all levels in francophone literature, but here it is specifically the refusal of insertion into the dominant symbolic social order, for there can be no such insertion without the loss of the specificity of experience. The transformation of the specific into the generalized makes for the leveling of difference, a subsuming of the specificity of the colonized experience into the totalizing first-world view. In its countermoves, francophone literature resists the digestive, intestinal, assimilating, political, social, and aesthetic processes of first-world modernism. Cesaire would appear to be addressing this point in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956. The letter, addressed to Maurice Thorez, protests the slipknot of assimila¬ tion that European Communism has put like a noose around the neck of Martinique, Cesaire’s country: Singularite de notte “situation dans le monde” qui ne se confond avec nulle autre. Singularite de nos problemes qui ne se ramenent a nul autre probleme. Singularite de notre histoire coupee de terribles avatars qui n’appartiennent qu’a elle. Singularite de notre culture que nous voulons vivre de maniere de plus en plus reelle. . . . C’est assez dire que pour notre part, nous ne voulons plus nous con- tenter d’assister a la politique des autres. Au pietinement des autres. Aux combinaisons des auues. Aux rafistolages des consciences ou a la casuis- tique des autres. L’heure de nous-memes a sonne. . . . The Game of Slipknot 35 Ici que Ton me permette de penser plus pardculierement a mon mal- heureux pays: la Martinique. J’y pense pour constater que le communisme a acheve de lui passer autour du cou le noeud coulant de I’assimilation. . . . Je previens une objection. Provincialisme? Non pas. Je ne m’enterre pas dans un particularisme etroit. Mais je ne veux pas non plus me perdre dans un universalisme decharne. II y a deux manieres de se perdre: par segregation muree dans le particulier ou par dilution dans 1’ “universel.” Ma conception de I’universel est celle d’un universel riche de tout le particulier, riche de tous les particuliers, approfondissement et coexis¬ tence de tous les particuliers. Alors? Alors il nous faudra avoir la patience de reprendre I’ouvrage; la force de refaire ce qui a ete defait; la force d’inventer au lieu de suivre; la force “d’inventer” notre route et de la debarrasser des formes toutes faites, des formes petrifiees qui I’obstruent.^^ [The exceptional nature of our “situation in the world” which is not to be compared to any other. The peculiar nature of our problems which can be likened to no others. The remarkable namre of our history fraught with enormous avatars peculiar only to it. The uniqueness of our culture which we wish to assume in a more and more genuine way . . . Suffice it to say that for our part we no longer wish to content ourselves with witnessing the politics of others. Wimessing the marking of time of others. The arrangements of others. The adjustments of consciences or the casuistry of others. Our time has come . . . Here do allow me to pause to focus more specifically on my unfortu¬ nate country: Martinique. I think about my country in order to point out that communism has succeeded in putting around its neck the slipknot of assimilation. . . . I can foresee an objection. Provincialism? Not in the least. I do not intend to bury myself in a narrow particularism. But nor do I wish to lose myself in some bare and fleshless universalism. There are two ways of losing oneself: by a walled- up apartheid sense of identity or through dilution into “universals.” My conception of the universal is that of a universal rich with all par- 36 Countermodernism ticularity, enriched by all the details, a deepening and a coexistence of all individualities. And so what? And so, we must have the patience to get back to work; the strength to redo what has been undone; the strength to create rather than to follow; the strength to “invent” our way and to rid it of ready¬ made formulas, those petrified ideas that can obstruct our path.] The imperative for francophone literature is to reevaluate, to re- stage, and to redescribe the themes of modernism. This does not represent an outright rejection of modernism, and certainly not of Baudelaire, but rather a desire to recapture Black subjectivity by sal¬ vaging, qualifying, and above all, modulating the themes of modern¬ ism in harmony with the realities of the colonized subject’s experience. Modulation is perhaps the key maneuver, for it suggests the counter¬ point of a differing voice, rhetoric, affect, pitch, and melody. This francophone voice is the articulation of difference that refuses the imposition of the dominant imaginary and proposes different signs. Thus the image of the Martinican Narcissus gazing into the mirror framed by the specificity of Antillean culture makes the point. Nous cherchons notre vrai visage. Nous avons suffisamment condamne la litterature artificielle qui pretend nous en donner I’image: poetes at- tardes, heros du poncif, superstitieux faiseurs d’alexandrins, tres laches diseurs de rien. Narcisse martiniquais ou done te reconnaitras-tu? Plonge tes regards dans le miroir du merveilleux: tes contes, tes legendes, tes chants. Tu y verras s’inscrire, lumineuse, I’image sure de toi-meme.^"' [We are searching for our true visage. We have sufficiently condemned fake literature that claims to give us a reflection of ourselves: behind-the- times poets, heroes of hackneyed convention, overly scrupulous crafters of twelve-syllable verses, quite cowardly sayers of nothing. Martinican Narcissus, where then will you recognize yourself? Plunge your gazes into the mirror of the marvelous: your short stories, your legends, your songs. You will see inscribed therein, luminous, the unfailing image of yourself.] The specular invitation extended to the Martinican Narcissus is to desire and seek the self, to delve systematically into the amorous captivation of the Black self. I began with the Poet as translator and decipherer of the universe as text. The sphere here is restricted: The The Game of Slipknot 37 Narcissus is Black and declared decipherable. The mirror suggests the will to isolate a set of signs and significances necessarily perceived in a cultural frame. The frame isolates the gaze and defines the text. The realizations are that the observation of sameness is disabling and that the articulation of difference is enabling. Exile, Language, and Consciousness The existential and economic themes of francophone literature eluci¬ date such events and experiences as the deracination and marginal¬ ization of populations, migration, the bordering of cultures, the sense of loss, displacement, lost harmonies, lost communities, homeless¬ ness, traditions redefined, survival, experimentation, and the attempts to recover a wholeness from cultural fragments. The overwhelming sensation communicated in this literature is that of being neither, of residing berv\’een two worlds, of being neither here nor there. The am¬ biguous experience of life and language is that of the “plate glass win¬ dow” of syllepsisreflection, transparency, opaqueness, and, espe¬ cially, separation at the moment of contact. There is a yearning for reconciliation of the warring strivings and paradoxical impulses as one lives on the hyphen of cultural identity. Ultimately, francophone literature is a representation of a liminal state. With words, song, desperation, wisdom, and music. Black Ameri¬ cans have expressed in the blues their depression and alienation when the world, life and the self seemed to have come unhinged. Leon Gontran Damas expresses his sense of desperation as he recognizes his geographically, culturally, and psychologically dislocated state in a poem entitled “Limbe” (Blues). Rendez-les-moi mes poupees noires qu’elles dissipent I’image des catins blemes marchands d’amour qui s’en vont viennent sur le boulevard de mon ennui . . . Donnez-moi I’illusion que je n’aurai plus a contenter le besoin etale de misericordes ronflant sous I’inconscient dedain du monde . . . 38 Countermodernism Rendez-les-moi mes poupees noires que je joue avec dies les jeux nai'fs de mon instinct reste a I’ombre de ses lois recouvres mon courage mon audace redevenu moi-meme nouveau moi-meme de ce que Hier j’etais hier sans complexite hier quand est venue I’heure du deracinement^^ [Give me back my black dolls to dissipate the picture of pallid wenches merchandising love who stroll along the boulevard of my ennui . . . Give me the illusion I shall no longer have to satisfy the sprawling need for mercy snoring beneath the world’s disdainful nose Give me back my black dolls so that I might play with them the simple games of my instincts instincts that endure in the darkness of their laws with my courage recovered and my audacity I have become myself once more myself again out of what I used to be once upon a time once without complexity once upon a time when the hour of uprooting came. . . .] The Game of Slipknot 39 The liminal state emerges as a consequence of the difficult pro¬ cess of assimilation, the failed integration into the European language — meaning culture and the repression of one’s original condition — which implies alienation from languages, history, and ethnic culture including attitudes, beliefs, norms, values, aesthetics, lifestyles, accu¬ mulated knowledge, actions, and material objects. In “Blues,” Damas insists on this consciousness of the loss of culture for the Afro-French assimilado: Le sauront jamais cette rancune de mon coeur A I’oeil de ma mefiance ouvert trop tard ils ont cambriole I’espace qui etait le mien la coutume les jours la vie la chanson le r>thme reffort le sender I’eau la case la terre enfumee grise la sagesse les mots les palabres les vieux la cadence les mains les pietinements le sol {Pigments, p. 44) fW'ill they never know the rancor in my heart opened to the eye of my distrust too late they did away with what was mine ways days life song rhvthm 40 Countermodernism effort footpath water huts the smoke-gray earth the wisdom the words the palavers the elders the cadence the hands the feet marking time upon the ground] This condition of assimilation, marginality, alienation, and disloca¬ tion leads to the predicament of “double consciousness,” so deftly de¬ fined and eloquently expressed by the twentieth-cenmry Black Ameri¬ can intellecmal W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963): After the Egj^^tian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double¬ consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; tw'o war¬ ring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the other selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a mes¬ sage for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by The Game of Slipknot 41 his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.2* At the center of the adventure of francophone literary culture is the self-contradictory double consciousness of the formerly colonized writing subject. DuBois articulates the ambiguous identity of the American who is Negro. This DuBoisian state of double conscious¬ ness embraces the condition of the Black or colonized being worldwide in the twentieth century, for DuBois insists on the antagonism, inco¬ herence, and contradictions at the core of the articulation of identity when identity of self w'ith race is in some measure in conflict and in contestation with identity of self wdth nation: “Herein lie buried many things which, if read with patience, may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the twentieth century. This mean¬ ing is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader, for the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (359). DuBois’s binocular analyses insist on the paradoxes of the dynam¬ ics of nation, race, and, ultimately, narration. The tensions between nation and race are parallel and separable, yet inextricably bound, oppositional yet permeable, elevating yet humbling, empowering and stifling, enabling and disabling, leaving the subject compartmental¬ ized and, thus, conscious of being simultaneously inside and outside the nation, a condition that gives rise to a kind of “double vision.” To be an American Negro, to be Afro-French, burdened and endowed with a double consciousness and double vision is to be, in a certain sense, “a twisted signifier.” DuBois’s color line analysis is sociological, and yet it is also of linguistic and psychoanalytic consequence, since it anticipates a Lacanian analysis of the division and unity of conscious¬ ness and repression, using the Mbbius strip as illustration. Lacan uses “signifier” in a contextual theory of meaning, and would obviously subscribe to Wittgenstein’s slogan: “The meaning is the use.” Thus he also uses “signifier” to avoid the implication that any given word “contains” or “has” a meaning of its own, outside its diacritic reference to other signifiers. In this sense, even Saussure’s distinctions give rise to ambiguides, for if the meaning of a signifier is its differendadon from other signifiers, it can nevertheless be defined by them. Thus the loose use of signified to mean “significadon” is just another way of saying the signified is a signifier after all. 42 Countermodernism Saussure likens the relationship of signifier (sound) and signified (sense) to the two sides of a single piece of paper. This image brings to mind the analogy of the Moebius strip sometimes employed by Lacan to describe the subject, where the apparent division of conscious and re¬ pressed turns out to be the unity of the writing on one continuous side. Analogies are of course the weakest and most dangerous form of argu¬ ment, however valuable they may be as illustration. It is in this restricted latter sense that one might liken the relationship between signifier (word- concept) and reality, which is the essentially irresolvable problem here, to that between a map and the countryside it represents. One might then recall the assertion of topologists that if a map is crumpled up and thrown down on another identical map, at least one point will be exactly where it would be if the two had been simply superimposed. For Lacan, the symptom is a twisted signifier, but it is still related somehow to the original map, just as the nodal point of the dream in analysis is a trans- ferential point aimed at the “significant other” the analyst represents.^^ Frantz Fanon (1925-61) specifies the complications of self-aware¬ ness that result from the necessity of mastering the French language. For the colonialized subject, to write and to speak in French is to in¬ scribe the self into the worldview of the Other and therefore to exist for and through the Other. The result is the sensation of loss, betrayal, even shame. The challenge to the francophone writer, therefore, is to translate, in the archaic sense of translatio studii—xhal is, to carry over into the French language or the culture of the Other—the par¬ ticularity of self and culture, as well as the sense of “home.” In a more limited group, when students from the Antilles meet in Paris, they have the choice of two possibilities: —either to stand with the white world (that is to say, the real world), and, since they will speak French, to be able to confront certain prob¬ lems and incline to a certain degree of universality in their conclusions; — or to reject Europe, “Yo” and cling together in their dialect, making themselves quite comfortable in what we shall call the uniwelt of Mar¬ tinique, by this I mean—and this applies particularly to my brothers of the Antilles—that when one of us tries, in Paris or any other university city, to study a problem seriously, he is accused of self-aggrandizement, and the surest way of cutting him down is to remind him of the Antilles by exploding into dialect. This must be recognized as one of the reasons The Game of Slipknot 43 why so many friendships collapse after a few months of life in Europe . . . A Senegalese learns Creole in order to pass as an Antilles native; I call this alienation. 3 o Language, exile, and consciousness are complementary problemat¬ ics in the colonized outsider writers’ search for precise elaboration of their culture in a European language. This linguistic dilemma often leads to the cognitive, psychological, social, linguistic, symbolic, and political implications of the coercive imposition of another language upon an individual, a culture, and a region. The internalization of that language by the individual, with the language’s implicit worldview and core values, can have deleterious consequences for ethnicity, culture, and nationality, because the process involves the interpenetration of cultures and their respective systems of knowledge. The colonialized discourse expresses cultural difference in the attempt to rearticulate the aims of knowledge from the perspective of the resisting Other. Put differently, the goal of the discourse of cultural difference is to dis¬ turb the calculation of the colonial power holder and the production of knowledge, thereby producing other spaces of signification. The first francophone voices of difference sprang from the liminal, minority position, where, as Foucault would say, the relations of dis¬ course are tantamount to warfare. It is a question of Legitime defensef^ for the first generation of Black francophone student poets did not consider themselves poets but rather fighters.^^ The French-language poetry of this generation is sui generis in its political stance. Its aes¬ thetic has to do with aggressivity, opposition, and insurrection, which inform the stylistic choices and constitute a pragmatics of rejection, rebuttal, and repudiation, and which are antiimperial, anticanonical, and anticolonial in register. Consider Leon Damas, writing in the mid-1930s; C’est qu’aujourd’hui, il ne s’agit plus d’etre consciencieux, de s’appli- quer a ne pas violer les regies, de jouer au nombre de pieds qui se comp- tent, de travailler a des sonnets impeccables. Les heritiers de Leconte de Lisle, de Franqois Coppee, de Sully Prudhomme, de Catulle Mendes, de Leon Dierx, ont vecu, bien vecu de leur legs. Le temps du refoulement et des inhibitions a fait place a un autre age: celui oil I’homme colonise prend conscience de ses droits et de ses de¬ voirs d’ecrivain, de romancier ou de conteur, d’essayiste ou de poete. 44 Countermodernism La pauvrete, I’analphabetisme, I’exploitation de Thomme par rhomme, le racisme social et politique dont souf&e rhomme de couleur noire ou jaune, le travail force, les inegalites, les mensonges, la resignation, les es- croqueries, les prejuges, les complaisances, les lachetes. les demissions, les crimes commis au nom de la liberte, de I’egalite, de la fraternite, voila le theme de cette poesie indigene, d’expression franqaise. De plus en plus, politique et litterature s’entrepenetrent et leur syn- chronisme se fait de plus en plus apparent dans les oeuvres des repre- sentants de la nouvelle ecole.^^ [Today it is no longer a question of being conscientious, of trying hard not to break the rules, of keeping the meter, and working on impeccable sonnets. The heirs of Leconte de Lisle, Franqois Coppee, Sully Prud- homme, Catulle Mendes, and Leon Dierx have lived, and lived well, on their inheritance. The time of repression and inhibitions has given way to a different age: one where the colonial subject realizes his rights and duties as an author, novelist, short story writer, essayist or poet. Poverty, illiteracy, the exploitation of man by man, social and political racism weighing on the black and yellow races, forced labor, inequality, lies, resigna¬ tion, tricks, prejudices, complacency, cowardice, responsibilities shirked, crimes committed in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity: these are the subjects of this native poetry expressed in French. More and more, politics and literature are becoming interwoven and their synchronism is becoming more and more obvious in the works of representatives of the new school.] The problem lies in the absorption of the difference, the literal, and the specific into the generalized (metaphoric) malaise resulting from the European modernist exaltation of individuality, marginality, and alienation as the markers of superiority, genius, and election. It is in this direction that Frantz Fanon, the Martinican ethnopsychiatrist, orients his analysis of decolonization and “the colonized intellecmal dusted over by colonial culmre.” All the Mediterranean values—the triumph of the human individual, of clarity and beauty—become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. All of those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values that seemed The Game of Slipknot 45 to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged. Individualism is the first to disappear. . . . the idea of a society of indi¬ viduals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity and whose only wealth is individual thought. . . . The native intellectual takes part in a sort of auto-da-fe, in which the destruction of all his idols; ego¬ ism, recrimination that springs from pride and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word. . . . The motto “look out for yourself” the atheist’s method of salvation is in this context forbidden.^s A questioning of European values does not mean a return to a precolonialist society. “Je pense a quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se re- trouve” [I think of all those who have lost what they can never, never hope to find again]. This verse places us in the realm of pure nostalgia, for among other things, “la superbe Afrique.” And yet, Baudelaire’s poem “Le Cygne” ambiguously undercuts the modernist desire for a return to some preindustrial, Edenic home of origins. Francophone literature will emphatically deny the possibility’ of a return of any kind, especially to an antecolonial state. There can be no return to precolo¬ nial Africa, as Cesaire makes clear. This being said, it seems that in certain circles they pretend to have discovered in me an “enemy of Europe” and a prophet of the return to the ante-European past. For my part, I search in vain for the place where I could have expressed such views; where I ever underestimated the importance of Europe in the history of human thought; where I ever preached a return of any kind; where I ever claimed that there could be a return}^ Francophone artists are not exiles in the aesthetic modernist sense. According to a basic trope in the composite presuppositions of first- world modernist aesthetics, exile predicts or implies a nostalgic long¬ ing and return, but this exile-return trope is precisely what is unavail¬ able to the colonized subject. Exile in francophone literary culture is grounded in the inability’, even the lack of desire, to remrn to the native land as it was in its abject colonial or postindependence state. Under the conditions that are the consequences of colonialism, or postindependence kleptocracies, there is no nostalgic reverie of a uto- 46 Countermodernism pian pastoralism in the native land. Reminiscences abound, as well as fond recollections of family and communal existence, but they do not constimte a longing to return, for the overwhelming resultant recog¬ nition is of a past that demands a better future. Home is a wellspring of culmral values and an inspiration to action that will engineer a just fumre. If the son and daughter remrn, it is not because of a long¬ ing for the way things were, but rather because they wish to change the social, political, and economic realities that are the legacies of the colonial incursion. Leon Laleau, a Haitian poet of the 1930s, has written very instruc¬ tively about what goes into the experience of writing in French by the colonized.^"^ In the collection Musique negre, Laleau captures, with painful eloquence, the difficulty of inscribing oneself into a nonnative language.^® One very brief poem in particular, “Trahison,” crystal¬ lizes the situation of marginality, liminality, and perplexity: TRAHISON sentez-vous cette souffrance et ce desespoir a nul autre egal d’apprivoiser, avec les mots de France Ce coeur qui m’est venu du Senegal? [betrayal Do you know this suffering and this despair comparable to no other of attempting to calm and to tame with words from France this heart of mine from Senegal?] The Negrimde movement and the voices of francophone literamre emerging from the period of French political and social assimilation offer a different reading of displacement. In this instance, exile and alienation are not situated within modernism, but rather constimte a category and precondition continuous with and counter to first-world modernism. Language and writing are recognized as a predescription and prescription that are experienced and dealt with as difficulty. The Game of Slipknot 47 effort, struggle, work, resistance, and war. There is a desire to re¬ turn to the individual the power to live in and through language and not to submit to it. From the Laleau poem we learn that minority discourse sets the act of emergence in the antagonistic in-between of image and sign. The act of creation in the francophone world is a contentious performative space. Cultural difference addresses the jarring of meanings and values generated in between the variety and diversity associated with cultural plenitude. Cultural difference is to be found where the “loss” of meaning enters as a cutting edge. In L’Enfant de sable, the Moroccan writer Tahar ben Jelloun has one of his characters declare; “One cannot step from one life into another with a simple stride across a footbridge” (p. 130). Cultural difference emerges from the borderline moment of translation, in the foreign¬ ness of languages. From consciousness emerges the awareness that the transfer of indigenous meaning can never be total between differ¬ ent systems of knowledge or knowing the world. Consciousness here is tied to a sharpened existential awareness of place —and of displace¬ ment—of location and dislocation; of having been forcibly moved out of {ex salire, the Latin root of exile) one place and into another, but of not having successfully negotiated the transfer, the crossover, of not having been successfully carried “home” to the new place, as Laleau suggests in the rest of his poem “Trahison”: Ce coeur obsedant, qui ne correspond Pas a mon langage ou a mes costumes, Et sur lequel mordent, comme un crampon Des sentiments d’Emprunt et des coutumes D’Europe [This haunted heart that doesn’t fit My language or the clothes I wear Chafes within the grip Of borrowed feelings, of European ways] These verses point to a sensation of cultural transvestism in, as La¬ leau and Walter Benjamin would say, this “ill-fitting robe of language.” Transvestism, like assimilation, is often a voluntary act undertaken with exuberance. It is the consciousness of one’s eternal lack, of the 48 Countermodernism impossibility of ever becoming what one is imitating, that can lead to the tragic despair of feeling ridiculous. After Laleau, Damas would exploit the ridiculus sum vestmental code. solde/sellout J’ai I’impression d’etre ridicule dans leur souliers dans leur smoking dans leur plastron dans leur faux-col dans leur monocle dans leur melon J’ai I’impression d’etre ridicule dans leurs salons dans leurs manieres dans leurs courbettes dans leur multiple besoin de singeries J’ai I’impression d’etre ridicule parmi eux complice parmi eux souteneur parmi eux egorgeur les mains effroyablement rouges du sang de leur ci-vi-li-sa-tion {Pigments, p. 41) [I feel ridiculous in their shoes their dinner jackets their starched shirts and detachable collars their monocles and their bowler hats I feel ridiculous in their drawing rooms in their manners The Game of Slipknot 49 their bowings and scrapings in their manifold need of monkeyshines I feel ridiculous among them like an accomplice among them like a pimp like a murderer among them my hands hideously red with the blood of their ci-vi-li-za-tion] ^9 Transvestism becomes the satiric representation of hyper-assimi¬ lation or, stated otherwise, the colonized subject’s divestment of his original cultural values. The awareness of a certain transvestism in the ill-fitting robe of language leads, however, to a need for a second divestment of language and the culture it signifies —an imperative to strip down to the nakedness that recovers a state of nonknowledge. The Game of Slipknot Consciousness occurs in the relay of inscription into one language ac¬ companied simultaneously by an erasure of content or effacement of self from the language of one’s origins. There is an awareness of an infidelity that leads some writers to make seemingly innocent and co¬ quettish statements like those of Tahar ben Jelloun that Arabic is his wife and French is his mistress.^° Consciousness, then, is an aware¬ ness that one has shifted levels. This awareness of the secondariness of the expression of the imaginary and the expression of “home” leads to a nexus of concerns where writers can find themselves in a knot of confusion and despair, in a slipknot of assimilation, under the stranglehold of language. My perhaps seemingly excessive pressuring of color line, Mobius strip, twisted signifier, double consciousness, and double vision, as well as my teasing out of the seme nexus, knot, slipknot, and stranglehold of language, is tragically borne out in the noW' celebrated example of another Haitian poet, Edmond Laforest. Often it is a single, singular incident that dramatizes the complexi- 50 Countermodernism ties of a dilemma—especially the dilemma presently under discus¬ sion. The insurmountable agony of living, the incommensurable ex¬ perience of struggle and survival in the construction of a national culmre, and the failures —psychological, spiritual, existential, meta¬ physical, aesthetic, literary and stylistic —of the ambiguous advenmre and of linguistic marginality in the French language coalesce in the fate of Edmond Laforest (1876-1905), a composer of classical alex¬ andrines and limpid, romantic verse. The students who became the first generation of Negrimde poets—Leon Gontran Damas, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire—were poignantly aware of the extent to which a schooled resemblance underscores how emphatically one is not French. According to the Anthologie d'un si'ecle de poesie haitienne, 1817- 1925 (1924) by Louis Morpeau, “the heart of Edmond Laforest bled in crafted verses imbued with a distinguished melancholy and a deep pessimism, and his heart must have bled in real life, if it is true accord¬ ing to accounts that two or three months after the occupation of the Haitian Republic by American marines. Monsieur Laforest, who in verse and in prose had defended his native land, took his own life.”^’ A concern for propriety obviously motivated the anthologist to spare the reader an important detail: Edmond Laforest symbolically tied a Larousse French dictionary around his neck and drowned himself in the great Artibonite River. A response of irrepressible laughter is almost inevitable upon hear¬ ing this account. Laughter is often the only defense in the face of the absurd, the paradoxical, and the nonrational. Edmond Laforest’s life and suicide concretize the seriousness of the relation of colonized writers to the act of writing in their effort to find a voice in a European language. Laforest calls attention to the suffocation and drowning of many other writers who succumbed under the weight of the language of the European Other. Similarly caught in the slipknot of his profound appreciation of France and French culmre and an abiding love for his colonized homeland, the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo committed suicide in 1937. Frantz Fanon instructs us; I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology The Game of Slipknot 51 of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to sup¬ port the weight of civilization. The problem we confront is this. . . . The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language. A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at be¬ comes plain: Mastery of language affords power. Paul Valery knew this, for he called language “the god gone astray in the flesh (Charmes).”'’^ Laforest’s dramatic suicide warns us that language is a potent force, a force of domination by the conqueror-colonizer—domination of a people, of a mind, psyche, and spirit, of life even. Laforest succumbed to this domination entirely. For the present generation of Black lit¬ erary critics,'*^ his death is emblematic. He died agonistically of irre¬ deemable frustration—of silence, of mutism, of the feeling of having lost his voice, caught in the slipknot that is the division and unity of consciousness and repression. At the conceptual crossroads, Laforest could not meet the chal¬ lenge, it would seem, of “incomplete signification,” that is, of a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through w'hich the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated. At the per¬ plexing crossroads of language, history, culture, and consciousness, Laforest perhaps could not negotiate that in-between space “contain¬ ing” thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and trans¬ lated in the processes of cultural production, minority discourse, and cultural differences. Although Aime Cesaire does not succumb, he recognizes the challenges of inscription of self into the French lan¬ guage. Cesaire becomes the potently ignorant being again, working his way through the divestment of language, a pawning of language, toward the eventual expropriation of the previously imposed language and a fascination in the face of its power: II y a des tas de choses dont je ne sais pas le nom et que je voudrais te dire.‘*‘* [There are so many things the names of which I do not know and that I would like to tell you.] Pour penser a toi j’ai depose tous mes mots au mont-de-piete.'*^ 52 Countermodernism [In order to think about you I have turned aD of my words in to the pawnshop.] II faut plier le fran^ais au genie noir. Ou bien on n’utilise pas le fran- 9ais et on emploie carrement sa langue. C’est une possibilite: J’ai voulu I’employer dans des conditions tres particulieres. J’ai voulu mettre le sceau imprime, la marque negre, la marque antillaise comme vous vou- lez sur le fran^ais. J’ai voulu lui donner la couleur du creole.^^ [One must make the French language yield to the bent of the Black genius. Or else one does not use French and one’s ovra language straight out. That is a possibility: I wanted to use it in very particular conditions. I wanted to put the Black stamp, the Negro brand, the Antillean mark, as you^ like it, on the French language. I wanted to give it the color of Creole.] Je n’ai jamais cesse d’etre fascine par la magie des mots. Le mot est demiurge, c’est lui qui organise le chaos. C’est avec les mots que nous passons de I’existence toute simple a I’etre."*’ [I have never ceased to be fascinated by the magic power of words. The word is the creator of the world, it is that which organizes chaos. It is with words that we pass from mere existence into being.] To ponder the dilemma described in the foregoing is to ponder the complexity of the contact between France and its former colonies, a contact that paradoxically has led to an enrichment, a revitalization even, of the French language in the twentieth century. The process of cultural change and psycholinguistic evolution that has led to this fe¬ licitous development of a flourishing body of francophone literamre has been fraught with difficulties and failures, however. The fascination with language in the cultural zone of instability, perplexity, and the liminal, “where the people dwell,” pervades fran¬ cophone literamre, even, perhaps especially, in the densest sites of cul- mral complexity, such as in immigrant-cosmopolitan-srndent neigh¬ borhoods, cafes, and universities of sophisticated capitals. Such is the backdrop of the novel Sans la misericorde du Christ. In this 1985 novel by the francophone Argentinian writer Hector Bianciotti, who is of Italian origin and makes his home both in Paris and Buenos Aires, The Game of Slipknot 53 there is a further description of the ambiguous adventure of linguistic exile and consciousness of the ill-fitting robe of language. J’ai tout de suite aime sa fa^on de parler ... la geographie n’est que la forme apparente . . . route de surface . . . de I’exil. . . Moi, qui n’ai plus de langue mais me tourmentent plusieurs ou qui, parfois beneficie de plusieurs, j’ai des sentiments qui varient selon les mots que j’emploie. II m’arrive d’etre desespere dans une langue et a peine triste dans une autre. Chaque langue nous fait mentir, exclut une partie des fairs, de nous-memes; mais dans le mensonge, il y a une affir¬ mation, et c’est une fayon d’etre a un moment donne; plusieurs langues a la fois nous desavouent, nous morcellent, nous eparpillent en nous memes. . . . J’embarassai Adelaide Marese par quelques questions sur ce sujet— on ne peut pas poser de question plus intime. En fait, ce que je pris sur le moment pour de I’embarras n’etait peut-etre que le reflet d’un souci d’exactitude, le scrupule du croyant qui s’avance parmi les reverences et cauteles de la theologie. La langue peut etre une theologie."’® [Instantly, I fell in love with her way of speaking. . . . Geography, having primarily to do with surfaces, is only the most obvious form of exile. I who no longer have a language, but rather am tormented by several, or who sometimes benefit from several, have feelings that vary according to the words I use. Sometimes it happens that I am utterly devastated by the words in one language and made hardly if at all sad in another. Each language makes us lie, excludes a part of the facts, a part of ourselves. But in the lie there seems to be an affirmation, and the lie is a way of being at a given moment; speaking several languages simultaneously fails to translate us, splits us, scatters and fragments us within ourselves . . . I embarrassed Adelaide Marese by asking some questions on this sub¬ ject. One cannot, you know, pose more intimate questions. Yet in fact what I had taken at the moment for embarrassment was perhaps only the reflection of a concern for exactness, the scruples of an acolyte who makes her way carefully through the reverences and casuistries of the- olog>'. A language can be a theology.] Under conditions of exile and postcolonialism, conflict between the superordinate and subordinate ethnic groups is inevitable. The in¬ ability to give voice to a group’s aspirations, to invent new traditions. 54 Countermodernism to give expression to the silent, flowing, secret life of the heart, of the soul, of the unconscious; the feelings of fragmentation and isolation, and the immobility of one’s treadmill existence in a society of speed, technology, rapid communication, and unprecedented mobility; the disconnectedness from one’s past and traditions, the solimde amid the urban crowd where one sought contact and communion, and the sense of loss and homelessness, wandering and ruin—these are not merely modernist commonplaces but rather constimte the poetry of powerlessness, the poetry of speechlessness. In a shared environment where between the oppressor and the op¬ pressed there is little sharing of the benefits of the economy, as already stated, expropriation of the language is empowering. Language has the potential of becoming an ideological tool for ethnic autonomy. In the painful assertion of political independence, confronting the psycholinguistics of the experience of the imposed language, language has healing, therapeutic, and redemptive powers not to be underesti¬ mated. Poets have always understood the redemptive healing power of the word and have notably declared it in the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot exclaimed: For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images These fragments I have shored against my ruin^i Aime Cesaire entitled his most experimental volume of poetry Les Armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons), which are none other than words. For words have the power to reveal and transform by means of symbols, metaphor, and the forging (in the sense of a blacksmith) of images that invent the fumre and express the world not as it is but as it should be. Through images there is a power of parthenogene¬ sis, a veritable giving birth—in the case of the poet, rebirth—to one’s self. Cesaire declares: Images think for me; I think myself into being through images. A Paris, en meme temps que je decouvrais la culture, j’ai mieux com- pris les raisons de mon insatisfaction; j’ai pris conscience de mon ap- The Game of Slipknot 55 partenance a la condition originale du Xegre. Ma poesie est nee de cette connotation. Le Cahier, c’est le premier texte ou j’ai commence a me reconnaitre; je I’ai ecrit comme anti-poeme. II s’agissait pour moi d’attaquer au niveau de la forme, la poesie traditionnelle frangaise, d’en bousculer les struc- tures.5^ [In Paris, at the same time that I was discovering culture, I better understood the reasons for my dissatisfaction. I became aware of my be¬ longing to the original condition of the Negro [Black]. x\ly poetry was born out of this acknowledgment. The Cahier [d’un retour au pays natal] is the first text where I started to recognize myself; I wrote it as an anti-poem. For me it was a question of attacking traditional French poetry on the level of form, of upsetting its structure.] Je tire un pied, oh je tire I’autre pied, laissez-moi sans m’insulter de promesses me degluer de la charogne et de la boue.^^ [I withdraw one foot, oh I withdraw the other, allow me, without insult¬ ing me with promises, to unglue myself from the putrid carcass and from the mire.] Je saute ancestral aux branches de ma vegetation, je m’egare aux com¬ plications fructueuses.^"* [I leap ancestral to the branches of my vegetation. I stray through fruit¬ ful complications.] Nous avons bondi nous les esclaves, nous le fumier nous les betes au sabot de patience ^5 [We have leaped forward we the slaves, we the dung We the beasts with the hoof of patience.] Cesaire expresses his frustration with the shopworn valuelessness of words and the impotence of language to capture and contain that which is felt and perceived yet is nonarticulable and untranslatable. After wTiting Notebook, Cesaire declared that he had the sensation of having given birth to himself—through language. Naturally one might 56 Countermodernism wonder to what extent this preoccupation with words could lead to an esoteric poetic experience akin to “art for art’s sake.” However, this is rarely the case with the better, committed minority poets who have a clear sense of their role as theorists of a new aesthetic. In the case of Notebook, we see that it is paradoxically through a hatred of tradi¬ tional poetry and traditional literature as art for art’s sake that Cesaire became a poet. I don’t think I had found a form that was my own. I was still under the influence of the French poets. In short, if Return to My Native Land took the form of a prose poem, it was truly by chance. Even though I wanted to break with French literary traditions, I did not actually free myself from them until the moment I decided to turn my back on poetry. In fact, you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Do you see what I mean? Poetry was for me the only way to break the strangle¬ hold the accepted French form held on me. In other words, for me French was a tool that I wanted to use in de¬ veloping a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French had a black charac- ter.^^ (Emphasis added.) Speechlessness as a trope of first-world modernism is inflected by francophone literary culture as one of the untranslatabilities of cul¬ tures and, particularly, cultural signs. The sense is that European languages are not propertied in the way that renders them easily hab¬ itable, thus leaving the third-world subjectivity nonspeakable and in¬ audible in these conventional linguistic sites. The purpose for Cesaire’s generation of poets was to reinvent lan¬ guage. The French poet Apollinaire shouted the cry of liberation and frustration in his Calligrammes when he exclaimed: “Oh mouths man is looking for a new language which grammarians will have no say about.” A poem should be a demonstration of protest, according to Andre Breton and Cesaire. The surrealist formula was that “beauty [art] will be convulsive or it will not be,” but as she contemplated the miserable state of poetic mimicry on her island, Suzanne Cesaire pro¬ claimed, “Martinican poetry will be cannibalistic or it will not be.”^’ It was felt that the poet could no longer concentrate on what was said The Game of Slipknot 57 while neglecting how it was said. In addition to the role of theorist of a new aesthetic, the poet was also pilgrim, quaestor, archaeologist, museum, library, visionary, silence broken, penetrating eye, sonorous ever-expanding and contracting sympathetic echo at the center of all experience, sensation, and sensibility. In a 1959 article Aime Cesaire was unequivocal concerning the ideological and utopian intent of his poetry: “Notre devoir d’hommes de culmre, notre double devoir est la: II est de hater la decolonisation, et il est, au sein meme du present, de preparer une bonne decolonisation, une decolonisation sans sequelles. II faut hater la decolonisation, qu’est-ce a dire? Cela veut dire qu’il faut, et par tous les moyens, hater le murissement de la prise de conscience populaire, sans quoi il n’y aura jamais de decolonisation. . . . Certains ont pu dire que I’ecrivain est un ingenieur des ames. Nous, dans la conjoncture ou nous sommes, nous sommes des propagateurs d’ames, des multiplicateurs d’ames, et a la limite des inventeurs d’ames.^^ [Our responsibility as men of culture, our double responsibility is the following: it is to hasten decolonization and it is at the very present time to prepare a sound decolonization, a process of decolonization that leaves no post-traumatic scars. That we must hasten decolonization is to do what exactly? It means that we must by every means available to us hasten the raising of con¬ sciousness of the masses, without which there will be no decolonization. . . . Some have said that the writer can be an engineer of souls. In our present situation we are propagators of souls, multipliers of souls, and to a certain extent almost inventors of souls.] For Cesaire the transformation of language is inextricably linked to social transformation. The ideologizing of language enables an ethnic group to play desired roles in symbolic mobilization and unification; it also leads to the expropriation, transformation, and development of these languages themselves into fitting instruments of high culture. In the psychological and social domain, language, as an ideologi¬ cal weapon, advances the mission of full self-realization, self-hood, self-determination, and political autonomy. Historically, the first step toward self-esteem is evident in Notebook of a Return to the Native 58 Countermodernism Land, when Cesaire evokes the geography of suffering, enslavement, and colonialism, ending with an allusion to the first successful slave rebellion in Haiti, and when this classical-studies major coins the word negritude. What is mine, these few thousand death-bearers who mill in the cala¬ bash of an island, and mine, too, the archipelago arched with an an¬ guished desire to negate itself as if from maternal anxiety to protect this most delicate tenuity separating the two Americas; and these loins which secrete for Europe the hearty liquor of a Gulf Stream, and one of the two slopes of incandescence between which the Equator tightropewalks towards Africa. And my nonfence island, its brave audacity standing at the stern of this Polynesia; and before it, Guadeloupe split in two down its dorsal line, and equal in poverty to us, Haiti where Negritude rose for the first time and stated that it believed in its humanity; and the funny little tail of Florida where the strangulation of a nigger is being com¬ pleted, and Africa gigantically caterpillaring up to the Spanish foot of Europe, its nakedness where Death scythes widely.^^ It is a step toward the unification of the commonwealth of Black speakers of French when they, by virme of their linguistic particu¬ larity, bear the mark of the colonial experience and must share the ex¬ perience of the internalization of their language so as to transcend it. Paradoxically, this shared experience and language overarches colo¬ nial national boundaries, as well as boundaries of precolonial tribal Africa, so as, in a quite unforeseen fashion, to lend a resonant, unified voice to hundreds, perhaps a thousand, linguistically distinct ethnic groups. In this commonwealth phase, the poets write for survival, catharsis, and expression in French rather than retreating into re¬ gional languages or into the humiliated and humiliating languages that bear the scars of the slave experience —languages such as Cre¬ ole, which can be described as the linguistic crumbs of European languages tossed to the slaves for the most rudimentary, functional communication. There can be no return to precolonial Africa. In every work of Aime Cesaire’s the relation of language, words, and ethnicity is explicitly discussed. In A Tetnpest, an adaptation of Shake¬ speare’s The Tempest for Black Theatre, Ariel, a mulatto sprite, is a hesitant intellectual and indentured servant to Prospero, the magician The Game of Slipknot 59 colonizer of an island inhabited by Caliban, a black radicalized native who has been taught his master’s language. In Ariel and Caliban, the spectator-reader recognizes Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, re¬ spectively, and the play addresses the imperial will to power in the Americas. The tone is tragicomic. Caliban (phonetic echo of “cari- ban” and anagram of cannibal) uses his newly imposed language to curse his master rather than to sing his praises. Cesaire saw in Shakespeare, Prospero, and Caliban the paradigm of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the master and the slave. Caliban is also aware of the foreign worldview (Weltanschauung) that resonates in every syllable of the language of this newly arrived op¬ pressor: Une Tempete {my translation) A TEMPEST Caliban enters Caliban: Uhuru. Prospero: VC'hat are you saying? Caliban: I am saying Uhuru. Prospero: Ah, once again your barbarous language is surfacing. How many times have I told you that I do not approve of it? Besides, you could be courteous, a polite hello would not kill you. Caliban: Ah! I forgot myself. . . . Hello . . . But a Hello covered as much as possible with wasps, toads, running sores, and shit. Let today hasten by ten years the day when birds of prey from the sk>' and the wild beasts of the earth satisfy their appetite on your rotting carcass. Prospero: Ever the gracious spirit, I see, you UTetched monkey. How can one be so ugly? Caliban: So you find me ugly. Well, I don’t find you cute at all, with your hook nose you look like an old \Talture. Hee Hee! Yes an old vulture with a skiimy shaven neck! Prospero: Since you have mastered the art of curses and insults, perhaps you wish to bless me for having so masterfully taught you the art of 6 o Countermodernism speech. A barbarian. A brutish beast that I have trained, educated, that I have lifted up from the base animal instincts that still defile your being through and through. Caliban: First of all, none of that is true! You have taught me absolutely nothing. Except, of course to jabber a few words in order to obey your orders: cut the wood, wash the dishes, fish, plant the vegetables, be¬ cause you are too lazy to do it. Now as for your science and technology, have you ever taught me any of that, huh! Ho Ho, you have taken great pain to keep that to yourself. Your science and technology you have quite egotistically kept for you and yourself alone, locked up in those big books over there. Prospero: Without me, where and what would you be! Caliban: Without you? Quite simply I would be the King. The King of the island, the king of my island that you took from my mother Sycorax. (Act I, sc. 2) Prospero: All this is so amusing! You have tried in vain, in vain, for you will never succeed in convincing me that I am a tyrant. Caliban: You must understand a few things, Prospero: For years I have bowed my head For years I have accepted my condition Accepted, accepted it all! Your insults, your ingratitude Worse still, more degrading than all the rest Your condescension But now, it’s all over. Finished, do you understand? Your power, I don’t give a damn. The same goes for your bloodhounds. Your police force, your riot-control intervention And do you know why I don’t give a damn? Do you want to know why? It is because one day I know that I am going to have you Impaled. And on the very stake that you will have Sharpened for me. Impaled upon yourself Prospero, you are a magician, a prestidigitator, an illusionist The Game of Slipknot 6i Deceiving yourself. Ah lies, you are familiar with lies And you have lied to me so thoroughly Lied to me about the world, lied to me about me So much so that you imposed upon me an image of myself that I almost was convinced of. Me—underdeveloped as you say, incapable of mastering basic skills. That is how you would have me see myself. And this image you have given me of myself, I loathe it And it is false But now, and oh it has taken such a long time, now I know You, you cancer in my heart and I also know myself By the way, you do have the opportunity to get out now. You can break camp, get the hell out You can return to Europe Ah you aren’t listening to me I am certain you won’t leave Oh it makes me laugh, your so-called “mission” Your “vocation” Your calling is to make my life miserable. To stay on my ass To give me shit. (Act 3, sc. 5)®° The foregoing scenes illustrate what Marianne Wichmann Bailey describes in her insightful study of Cesaire’s theatre as “a process of refusal-devaluation and reversal-revaluation” in which there is a “smelting of new values in the crucible of old injuries.”®' Cesaire ex¬ plains his purpose in refashioning Shakespeare’s Tempest: I was trying to “de-m>thify” the tale. To me Prospero is the complete totalitarian. I am always surprised when others consider him the wise man who “forgives.” What is most obvious, even in Shakespeare’s ver¬ sion, is the man’s absolute will to power. Prospero is the man of cold reason, the man of methodical conquest—in other words, a portrait of the “enlightened” European. And I see the whole play in such terms: the “civilized” European world coming face to face for the first time with the world of primitivism and magic. Let’s not hide the fact that in Europe the world of reason has inevitably led to various kinds of totalitarian- 62 Countermodernism ism. . . . Caliban is the man who is still close to his beginnings, whose link with the natural world has not yet been broken. Caliban can still par¬ ticipate in a world of marvels, whereas his master can merely “create” them through his acquired knowledge. At the same time, Caliban is also a rebel—the positive hero, in a Hegelian sense. The slave is always more important than his master—for it is the slave who makes history.®^ Cesairian negritude entails the consciousness of being Black, the simple recognition of this fact, which implies acceptance, and the as¬ sumption of one’s identity, destiny, history, and culture as a Black.^^ For Cesaire, negritude is a philosophy, a psychological posture, and a stance that is, at one and the same time, political and moral. It involves three affirmations: the affirmation of the Black identity, the affirmation of a solidarity with other Blacks, and the affirmation of faith in and faithfulness to a system of values distinctly Black and his¬ torically African in origin. Today, these affirmations might appear to some to be obvious and needless, because we are all in our outlook the intellectual grandchildren of negritude. We must caution ourselves against losing a sense of historical relativity, however, and realize that in the political, social, and cultural milieu of the 1930s, these affirma¬ tions constituted revolutionary postures. Today we live in a postinde¬ pendence era, and perhaps we are living in a post-Negritude era as well—perhaps. While asserting that Negritude should be considered as a historical cultural movement that preceded contemporary cul¬ tural forces such as Antillanite and Creolite, Maryse Conde recalls, “Cesaire said as long as there are Negroes there will be Negritude”^ (see p. 275). The first affirmation of identity is particularly important for Cesaire as a new-world Black belonging to a country in which the structure of domination led to an aggressive politics of assimilation (and continues to do so). As a consequence of the domination, many Martinicans lost a sense of their identity as Blacks. In 1939, wfien The Notebook was published, such an affirmation of blackness in the Martinican milieu was provocative. The poet Leon Damas published equally scandalous volumes, entitled Black Label and Pigments, which drew' attention to the fact that the melanin content of the skin could not be altered, de¬ spite the process of assimilation, that is, whitening, or “lactification,” as Frantz Fanon refers to it. The Game of Slipknot 63 As to the second affirmation, as a Black Cesaire feels solidarity with all Blacks and all oppressed peoples. He asserts, “The world does not spare me. There is not one single lynched man in the world, not one tortured man in whom a part of myself is not murdered and humiliated.” This expression typifies the sympathetic phenome¬ non of simultaneity and unanimism that is seen in much of early- tw'entieth-cenmry literature. It makes for a sense of the oneness of human life containing the multiple, thus encouraging the individual to embrace simultaneous, multiform human experience at different points in space, just as one encompasses all past times through one’s ancestry. Thus, according to Cesaire; [There is a solidarity] through time and space with our black ancestors and with this African continent of which we are the issue, and there is a horizontal solidarity across geographic boundaries with all blacks who come from the continent for the reasons we know well and who have in common this heritage. This heritage and collective experience weighs still heavily upon us, but we must not deny it, we must transcend the pain and make it blossom and multiply.^® Following the example of the Negritude poets, poets could no longer remain aloof wisps of narcissistic, solipsistic meditation. It be¬ came necessary to quit the ivory tower and undertake roles of involve¬ ment that made them modern alchemists searching in their labora¬ tories for the secret algebra, calculus, formulas, processes, dynamics, and pragmatics of social transformation. And where do words fit into this scheme? Ah, yes, words. I would rediscover the secret of great communications and of great combus¬ tions. I should say storm. I should say river. I would say tornado. I should say leaf I should say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenzied blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses, into fresh children into clots into curfews into vestiges of temples, precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not comprehend me would not understand any better the roaring of the tiger. Words? while we handle quarters of the earth, while we wed delirious continents, while we force steaming gates, words, ah! words, but words 64 Countermodernism of fresh blood, words that are tidal waves and erysipelas and malarias and lava and brush fires, blazes of flesh, and blazes of cities.®’^ Finally, Negritude must also be recognized as a psychoanalytic pro¬ cess, the purpose of which is to summon up from the unconscious, untapped forces of the black psyche and genius. Cesaire was aware of this necessity of plunging “into the depths”: —I said to myself: it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian phi¬ losophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black. In other words, it was a process of disalienation. Yes, a process of dis- alienation, that’s how I interpreted surrealism. —That’s how surrealism has manifested itself in your work: as an effort to reclaim your authentic character, and in a way as an effort to reclaim the African heritage. —Absolutely. And as a process of detoxification. A plunge into the depths. It was a plunge into Africa for me. —It was a way of emancipating your consciousness. —Yes, I felt that beneath the social being would be found a profound being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited.®* As a psychoanalytical process of disalienation and detoxification, therefore, Negritude is a means for Black people to come to terms with the double consciousness of their condition. In European terms it is therapy; in ancient African and West Indian ceremonial and rim- alistic terms it is a laying on of the hands, healing of the scars, and ex¬ orcism of the demons that, through the centuries of colonization and slavery, locked up access to the Black psyche and projected the Black spirit into a space of radical divorce from the self. The embrace, a familiar motif in Cesaire’s poetry, characterizes Negritude, a cyclical and circular process of ever expanding and contracting embrace of the self, of one’s people across national boundaries, of all oppressed peoples, of one’s history, and, eventually, of all humankind. Qu’on le sache: en articulant notre effort de liberation des peoples colo¬ nises, en combattant pour la dignite de nos peoples c’est en definitive The Game of Slipknot 65 pour le monde tout entier que nous combattons et pour le liberer de la tyrannie, de la haine et du fanatisme. . . . Alors et alors seulement nous aurons vaincu et notre victoire finale marquera I’avenement d’une ere nouvelle. . . . nous aurons aide a fonder I’humanisme universel [Let it be known: while articulating our effort of liberation of colonized peoples, while fighting for the dignity of our people, it is definitely for the whole world that we are fighting and to liberate it from tyranny, hatred and fanaticism. . . . Then and only then shall we have been victorious, and our final victory will mark the coming of a new era. ... we shall have assisted in founding universal “humanisme.”] In enumerating the aspects of the poet’s role, I specifically did not in¬ clude that of teacher, because the term is not exact. Cesaire would not have the man of culmre, the poet, be a pedagogue but rather a “psy- chogogue,” that is, a molder of souls, a healer and mender of psyches. This purpose is manifest in the much anthologized, eroticized rheto¬ ric of the “virile” prayer in Notebook: and here at the end of these wee hours is my virile prayer that I hear neither the laughter nor the screams, my eyes fixed on this town which I prophesy, beautiful, grant me the savage faith of the sorcerer grant my hands power to mold grant my soul the sword’s temper I won’t flinch. Make my head into a figurehead and as for me, my heart, do not make me into a father nor a brother, nor a son, but into the father, the brother, the son, nor a husband, but the lover of this unique people. Alake me resist any vanity’, but espouse its genius as the fist the extended arm! Alake me a steward of its blood make me trustee of its resentment make me into a man for the ending make me into a man for the beginning make me into a man of meditation but also make me into a man of germination 66 Countermodernism make me into the executor of these lofty works the time has come to gird one’s loins like a brave man— But in doing so, my heart, preserve me from all hatred do not make me into that man of hatred for whom I feel only hatred for entrenched as I am in this unique race you still know my tyrannical love you know that it is not from hatred of other races that I demand a digger for this unique race that what I want is for universal hunger for universal thirst 2 Toward a Sociology of Humor Leon Gontran Damas and Body Talk There can be no going back in time: the destinies of Europe/America and Africa will never again be separate. Mano a mano, like a couple of wrestlers or lovers, they are inextricably bound to one another geo- politically in the ambiguous advenmre of the global economy. Instead of projects revolving around nostalgic return, francophone literature explores the new cultural ties, bonds, links, knots, nooses, hybrid spaces, and beings that result from the contact between the first world and Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Polynesia, and the Indian Ocean. The destinies of Europe and the third world are permanentiy entangled by the experience of colonialism, decolonization, and inde¬ pendence. This tie, which threatens to strangle the alienated couple, is nowhere better illustrated than in the poem “Pour toi et moi” by Leon Gontran Damas: Pour toi et moi qui ne faisions I’un et I’autre qu’un seul pris hier encore au jeu du noeud coulant a moins que ce ne fut au noeud coulant du jeu ou encore au jeu coulant du noeud void que chante pour nous deux la rengaine de I’un sans I’autre tous deux desormais dos a dos 68 Countermodernism Dos a dos je ne dos a dos tu ne dos a dos je ne sais dos a dos tu ne sais je ne tu ne nous nous ne savons I’un Tautre plus rien de I’un plus rien de I’autre si ce n’est ce grand besoin que nous avons I’un I’autre defait de-lie de-noue le coulant du noeud le noeud coulant du jeu le jeu du noeud coulant {Pigments, 146-47) [For you and me who just yesterday were only one caught in the game of slipknot unless it was the slipknot of the game or even the game slipping the knot Here sings for the two of us the chorus of one without the other the two of us henceforth back to back Back to back I can’t quite Back to back you can’t quite Back to back I don’t know quite Back to back you don’t know quite I don’t You don’t We We don’t know the one the other nothing more of the one Toward a Sociology of Humor 69 nothing more of the other if it isn’t this great need that we have the one for the other undone un-tied un-knotted the slipping of the knot the slipknot of the game the game of slipknot]' Damas’s poetry illustrates Frantz Fanon’s assertion that “the vio¬ lence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and thought of the native mean that, in rev'enge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him.” 2 With Damas we move from the homonymity of cygne/signe to the paronomasia of signe/singe (sign/monkey). What is bound in one world is loosed in another. It is the game of slipknot. The poetry of Leon Gontran Damas reveals the sociology- of a humor that is a form of radical social critique. A poetics of indigestion is articulated in this universe of coughing, hiccuping, bleeding, vomiting, vertigo, and sleeplessness. An important figure in Damas’s universe is Singe (Monkey): Tu as beau ressembler a I’Homme, dit Perroquet un beau jour a Singe, tu es incapable de parler, comme lui et moi. Assurement tu paries. Et meme tu paries beaucoup, retorqua Singe. Mais s’il en est ainsi, insupportable bavard, c’est que m n’as pas de mains, comme moi qui en ai quatre, et que des lors, on ne peut pas t’obliger a travailler. Si je voulais parler, je m’en tirerais sans nul doute mieux, beaucoup mieux que toi. Alais je serais—comme tes pareils—en- ferme dans une cage, et il me faudrait payer I’impot. Par surcroit. . .” “Grand merci”^ [Try as you may to resemble man, said Parrot one fine day to Monkey, you are unable to talk like him and me. Most assuredly you can talk. And you even talk a lot, responded Aion- key. But if such is the case, you insufferable chatterbox, it is that you 70 Countermodernism have no hands, unlike myself who has four of them, and so you can’t be made to work. If I wanted to speak, I daresay, I would do a much better job than you. But then I would be—like you and your kind—locked up in a cage and I would have to pay the price. What’s more . . . “Thanks a lot ... go screw yourself!”] There is considerable mischievousness behind Damas’s ironies, burlesque, caricatures, pastiches, and virulent satire. Damas seeks to explode the stereotypes and cliches by his example and through his analyses. In the foregoing “Palabre,” the monkey must be under¬ stood as representing the antithesis of man and also of the parrot, while the parrot represents a hyperassimilated colonized person. Al¬ though accused by the parrot of inhabiting the margins of discourse, the monkey asserts himself as a Master of Discourse with enormously generative semiotic powers. The monkey’s response to the parrot and his kind constitutes an act of aggressivity against language for being shopworn, obscurantist, a hollow repetition of cliches, and a marker of superiority—and of course against the colonized beings who have become parroting parodies of a French person. Monkey is poignantly aware of the extent to which a schooled resemblance underscores how emphatically one is not French. The monkey is a great linguistic jester who completely disorganizes language and wreaks havoc among sig- nifiers on the level of so-called indissolubility of relationships between the signifier and the signified or the sign. The monkey names, signi¬ fies, and criticizes through indirection! In his poetry, Leon Gontran Damas rejects the forced Frenchifica- tion or francisation—thQ French politics of assimilation: HOQUET Et j’ai beau avale sept gorgees d’eau trois a quatre fois par vingt-quatre heures me revient mon enfance dans un hoquet secouant mon instinct tel le flic le voyou Get enfant sera la home de notre nom cet enfant sera notre nom de Dieu Toward a Sociology of Humor 71 Taisez-vous Vous ai-je ou non dit qu’il vous fallait parler franpais le franpais de France le franpais du frangais le franpais fran^ais Ma mere voulant d’un fils ties do txes do re-mi-fa sol-la-si do II m’est revenu que vous n’etes pas aUe a votre leqon de vi-o-lon Un banjo vous dites un banjo comment dites-vous un banjo Non monsieur vous saurez qu’on ne souffre chez nous ni ban ni jo ni gui ni tare les muldtres ne font pas pa laissez done pa aux negres {Pigments, pp. 35-38) SOLDE J’ai I’impression d’etre ridicule dans leur souliers dans leur smoking Jai I’impression d’etre ridicule parmi eux complice parmi eux souteneur parmi eux egorgeur les mains effroyablement rouges du sang de leur ci-vi-li-sa-tion {Pigments, p. 42) 72 Countermodernism [hiccups I gulp down seven drinks of water several times a day and all in vain instinctively like a criminal to the crime my childhood returns in a rousing fit of hiccups This child will disgrace our family name This child will be our in the name of God! be quiet have I or have I not told you to speak French the French of France the French that Frenchmen speak French French My mother wanted her son to be very do very do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do I see you have not been to your vi-o-lin lesson a banjo/did you say a banjo what do you mean a banjo you really mean a banjo no indeed young man You know there will be no ban- or jo or gui or tar in our house they are not for mulatto people leave them to the niggers! Toward a Sociology of Humor 73 SELLOUT I feel ridiculous in their shoes their dinner jackets I feel ridiculous among them like an accomplice like a pimp like a murderer among them my hands hideously red with the blood of their ci-vi-li-za-tion.] (Kennedy, pp. 48-51) Uncompromisingly, Damas, representative of the first generation of Black francophone poets, analyzes the emasculation, masquerade, and complicity of the colonized Black; he mocks the values of the French colonialist politics of assimilation, which he hiccups, coughs up, vom¬ its, and rejects in his poetry. Images of malnutrition, insomnia, and vertigo further express his malaise. If Aime Cesaire conjures the Black Narcissus toward cultural “de¬ toxification” of the superficially French self and “disalienation” by framing the self in the particularity of Antillean culmre, it is Leon Gontran Damas w’ho will live and die in contemplation of the chiasmatic image of self reflected in the mirror of Afro-French cul¬ mre. In the person and poetics of Damas, there is something, in the Baudelairean sense, of the Dandy, who is aware of the functioning of the extravagant mask as a weapon of protest and protection against a hostile society. Certain titles of poetry collections reveal Damas’s dandyism in another sense: Pigments and Black-Label were considered by some, at the time of their publication, to be inelegant, indeed, in poor taste, because they brought undue attention to difference, and particularly to the melanin content of the skin. In the assimilationist milieu of the thirties, this was scandalous for Blacks as w'ell as Whites. Damas’s intentionally impertinent, provocative subjects suggest the intoxicating, aristocratic pleasure the Dandy derives from choices, extravagances, excesses, and tastes that displease and unsettle bour¬ geois notions of convention and propriety. It is this pleasure taken in displeasing that in part inspires the aggressive, dark humor of the Dandy. Baudelaire theorizes that the concept of the Dandy implies an 74 Countermodernism extraordinary refinement of character and a highly nuanced under¬ standing of the moral dynamics of the world and the moment in which one livesd These qualities are apparent in the poetry of Leon Damas, professor and representative to the French National Assembly. The Dandy, in the nineteenth-century tradition of Baudelaire and Barbey d’Aurevilly, is torn between narcissistic preoccupation with the rare, superior, and individual quality of his postures and actions and, at the same time, the desire to provoke, to be daring and to shock rather than please a normative public. The poetic universe of Damas is bitter, tragicomic, noisy, and musical. From his poems (which typographically meander across, up, and down the page, resembling musical scores at times) rise pianistic melodies, the hammering cadences of African and Harlem drums, and the stammerings, stutterings, and moans of a Louis Arm¬ strong muted trumpet. Damas confronts the poetics of the mask in his contemplations. The Negro American poet Paul Laurence Dun¬ bar (1872-1906), who was appreciated for his dialect poetry and not his crafted verses of American poetry, expressed his disappointment in his poem “The Poet”: He sang of love when earth was young And Love itself was in his lays. But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue.^ Personal despair and historical and racial consciousness, as well as moral, philosophical, and religious questioning, lent Dunbar’s poetry a deep pessimism and irony, as the following lines show: We wear the mask that grins and lies It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes This debt we pay to human guile With torn and bleeding hearts we smile And mouth with mjTiad subtleties. . . . But let the world dream otherwise We wear the mask^ Damas dedicated a poem to Louis Armstrong, who in many ways was a Dandy, in the sense that he assumed certain stereot>'pical char- Toward a Sociology of Humor 75 acteristics of the “Darky,” such as the big eyes, the gleaming complex¬ ion, the enormous smile, and the “sportin’ life wardrobe.” These he was able to transmute, because of his jazz trumpet and singing virm- osity, into an inimitable and ironic Negro elegance and eloquence of which many “enlightened” Negroes and whites did not approve. The poem “Shine” reflects Damas’s empathetic understanding of Arm¬ strong’s mask and of the complex position taken by this musician of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Avec d’autres des alentours avec d’autres quelques rares j’ai au toit de ma case jusqu’ici garde I’ancestrale foi conique Et I’arrogance automadque des masques des masques de chaux vive jamais n’est parvenue a rien enlever jamais d’un passe plus hideux debout aux quatre angles de ma vie Et mon visage brille aux horreurs du passe et mon rire effroyable est fait pour repousser le spectre des levriers traquant le marronnage et ma voix qui pour eux chante et douce a ravir Fame triste de leur por- no- gra- phie {Pigments, p. 65) [With others from the neighborhood a few rare friends 76 Countermodernism till now I have kept the conical ancestral faith high among the rafters of my hut And the automatic arrogance of masks masks of living chalk never has been able to remove anything ever of a past more hideous here at the four corners of my life And my face gleams with the horrors of the past and my dreadful laughter would repel the specter of the hounds pursuing runaways and my voice which sings for them is sweet enough to soothe the soul saddened by their por- no- gra- phy] (Kennedy, p. 58) Stylistically and syntactically, Damas’s poems rely on repetitions and reversals, with subtle permutations and modulations of inverted repetitions of phrases or entire verses, thereby producing a poetic ver¬ tigo that is uniquely Damasian. It is a discourse that unfolds from a semantic and syntactic nodal point, or kernel, spiraling in linguistic knots, like riffs and musical chiasmus in jazz, toward cohesion and signification. Too often, Damas’s poetry is characterized as “simple”; but if the rhetorical figures to which Damas instinctively returns are among the simplest kind, it is in their orchestration that his virtu¬ osity is demonstrated. Antithesis, oxymoron, chiasmus, synonymy, homonymy, paronomasia, and irony progressively overlay each other and, indeed, emerge out of each other as the poem pushes toward Toward a Sociology of Humor 77 signification in a symbolic enactment of the entanglement of cross- cultural, political, racial, and philosophical struggles. From the stand¬ point of the Freudian analysis of humor, Damas’s “playfulness” might be seen as based on “manifold applications” deriv'ed from the exploi¬ tation of the “plasticity” of language—double-meanings, ambiguities, allusions, “the contrast of ideas,” “sense in nonsense,” and “confu¬ sion and clearness.” The result is a productive, insightful, and reve¬ latory ambiguity of states and emotions in which language affirms itself no longer as a simple tool of command and coercion and a perfect univocal means of communication, but as a space of explo¬ ration, self-examination, evocation, aggression, punning, intellectual and aesthetic creativity, or, simply put, poetry. And, consequently, one understands with Damas the Wittgensteinian notion that the “limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”” Ostensibly a love poem, “Pour toi et moi” ultimately reflects Damas’s position vis-a-vis the West. The poem is a politicization of the intimate and the familial, as well as an eroticization of the politi¬ cal. As previously noted, the destinies of Africa and the West are, like those of lovers, inextricably linked, despite their state of divorce. Herein lies the significance of Cesaire’s ending in his Tempest. In con¬ trast to the ending in Shakespeare’s Tempest, in which Prospero re¬ turns to Europe, Cesaire’s Prospero has remained on the island with Caliban and years later mutters: “Odd how the climate has changed. Cold on this island . . . Have to think about making a fire . . . Well, Caliban, old fellow, it’s just us two now, here on the island, only you and me. You and me. You-me . . . me-you!”® Damas’s neuralgic, noisy poetry also features the taste of blood that rises in the throat, coughs, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, spasms, insomnia, drunkenness, sobs, stuttering, suffocation, burping, and, of course, hiccups. The poet’s entire nervous and digestive being rebels against the French politics of assimilation, as is evident in the poems “Solde” (Sellout), “Nuit Blanche” (Sleepless Night), “Hoquet,” “Limbe,” “Blanchi” (Whitewashed), “Black-Label,” and “Treve” (Truce). Treve de blues de martelements de piano 78 Countermodernism de trompette bouchee de folie claquant des pieds a la satisfaction du rythme Treve de lachage de lechage de leche et d’une attitude d’hyperassimiles {Pigments, 21) [Enough of blues piano banging muted trumpet mad feet tapping to satisfy the rhythm Enough letting-go-of licking-up-to taking-the-leavings and enough of that attitude of hyperassimilation] In the poem “Hiccups” Damas recalls the intensely painful effects he suffered as a child from parental and cultural authority, which, from the vantage point of adulthood, he can treat humorously rather than repress. The poem illustrates a principle in the Freudian psycho¬ analysis of humor, for, as Freud wrote: “Humor can now be conceived as the loftiest of these defense functions. It disdains to withdraw from conscious attention the ideas which are connected with the painful af¬ fect, as repression does, and it, thus, overcomes the defense automa¬ tism. It brings this about by finding the means to withdraw the energy from the ready held pain release, and through discharge changes the same into pleasure.”’ Langston Hughes (1902-67) places a slightly different spin on the psychoanalysis of humor: Toward a Sociology of Humor 79 Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it. Of course, you laugh by proxy. You’re really laughing at the other guy’s lacks, not your own. That’s what makes it funny—the fact that you don’t know you are laughing at yourself. Humor is when the joke is on you but hits the other fellow first—before it boomerangs. Humor is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious therapy.'® Hughes’s analysis explains the functioning of ironic laughter in the following lines by Damas: Ils ont si bien su faire si bien su faire les choses les choses qu’un jour nous avons tout nous avons tout foutu de nous-memes tout foutu de nous-memes en I’air {Pigments, p. 73) [They did their thing so well did their thing that one day we let all all that once was ours go we threw it all away] (Kennedy, p. 59) Damas does not write from a settled state, and his texts elaborate a poetry of indigestion and indisposition. Yet while there is the irre¬ pressible hiccup, there is also the inextinguishable Damasian laughter. Laughter raises a plethora of questions concerning its origins and what motivates and drives it. With Damas, it is a question of the laughter that emerges from the spiritual and historical experiences of a people: the uprooting, slavery, colonialism, the abolition of slavery, segregation, miscegenation, exile into another language, assimilation, double consciousness, even triple consciousness —for Leon Damas, who is ever aware of the triangulated history of the Caribbean, and his triracial origins. Trois Fleuves trois fleuves coulent trois fleuves coulent dans mes veines 8 o Countermodernism de tous ces riens qui font une ame euphemiquement creole." [Three Rivers three rivers flow three rivers flow in my veins of all the bits of everything that make a soul euphemistically Creole] The triangulated history of the Caribbean involves the slave trade triangles drawn from Europe to Africa and the Caribbean as well as from the Caribbean to the United States and Europe. The triangula¬ tion of anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone cultures in inti¬ mate contact creates a distinct multicultural Caribbean identity. The specific reference in the poem, however, is to the Amerindian, Afri¬ can, and European ancestry of many Caribbean and American Blacks. Of the three theorists of Negrimde, it is Damas who most compel- lingly orients one toward a sociology of humor. Wit, laughter, com¬ edy, parody, and humor function as revolutionary gestures, acts of provocation, unconscious therapy, and aesthetic freedom in Damas’s poetry. Damas’s poetry is one of negation. Damas declares himself to be against the farce of French social and political hypocrisy and the “host”ipophagic (as in anthropophagic) church, “the holy history of which is not very catholic.” From Damas’s work, with its nega¬ tivity and tragic dimensions, there erupts the engulfing philosophical laughter of dark humor. The treatment of serious issues seems to give coherence to the comical or satiric, and thus humor takes on a philosophic, political, and ethnic cast. The bitter, black, dark humor is an outcry, which conveys that the business of living is absurd and that there is perhaps no more fitting response to the tragedy of man’s fate in the twentieth century than caustic, mocking, derisive, and at times desperate, convulsive laughter. Damas’s nervous, self-conscious laugh is both protection and protest, an expression of fury and out¬ rage at the misery, exploitation, and reciprocal dehumanization that characterize colonialism, fascism, and Nazism in their original as well as contemporary forms. Toward a Sociology of Humor 81 As much as it speaks to readers’ emotions and animal instincts, Damas’s desperate laughter speaks to their intellect and intelligence, thereby functioning as a strong weapon of persuasion, dissuasion, and conversion, as in the horrific laughter of “S.O.S.” s.o.s. A ce moment-la seul comprendrez-vous done tous quand leur superiorite s’etalera d’un bout a I’autre de leurs boulevards et qu’alors vous les verrez vraiment tout se permettre ne plus se contenter de rire avec I’index inquiet de voir passer un negre mais froidement matraquer mais froidement descendre mais froidement etendre mais froidement matraquer descendre etendre et couper leur sexe aux negres pour en faire des bougies pour leurs eglises bientot cette idee leur \'iendra de vouloir vous en bouffer du negre a la maniere d’Hitler bouffant du juif sept jours fascistes sur sept {Pigments, p. 51) 82 Countermodernism [s.o.s. At that moment only will you all finally understand when their superiority spreads itself out from one end to the other of their boulevards and then you will see them truly allow themselves every excess no longer contenting themselves to laugh with the finger pointed disturbed about seeing a nigger go by but coldly bludgeoning but coldly killing but coldly eliminating but coldly bludgeoning killing eliminating cutting off niggers’ dicks in order to make candles in their churches Soon the idea will come to them of ridding you of niggers just as Hitler does away with Jews seven fascist days a w'eek] Humor resides in the slipknots of language and its translation. Humor shatters the enveloping, assimilating, leveling mechanisms of domination. Humor calls attention to that which cannot be translated and is a code that must be learned by outsiders. Humor takes place at the site where the civilizers have been thwarted and outdone by the laughter that is speech. The nontranslatability is the elimination of the power of decoding. In Damas’s humor there is a double consciousness not only of Afro- Frenchness but also of the pain informing the laughter. Toward a Sociology of Humor 83 OBSESSION Un gout de sang me vient un gout de sang me monte m’irrite le nez la gorge les yeux {Pigments, p. 19) II est des nuits sans nom II est des nuits sans lune oii jusqu’a I’asphyxie moite me prend I’acre odeur de sang jaillissant de toute trompette bouchee ou le degout s’ancre en moi aussi profondement qu’un beau poignard malais {Pigments, p. 25) [A taste of blood comes a taste of blood rises irritates my nose eyes throat There are nights with no name there are nights with no moon when a clammy suffocation nearly overwhelms me the acrid smell of blood spewing from every muted trumpet When the sickness sticks within me like an oriental dagger.] (Kennedy, P- 46) In Damasian humor one observes what Sigmund Freud referred to as a “Janus-like double-facedness” of wit,‘^ which often is dictated 84 Countermodernism by painful emotional feelings but must simultaneously be released by laughter. In this concatenation of affect and release, laughter is the cavernous howl of despair. Damas’s humor is gripping because it stimulates meditation and self-criticism. The laughter is not always immediate. Rare, in fact, are those poems that make the reader guffaw. Most often the reaction does not manifest itself in raucous or even perceptive laughter; there will be instead an almost imperceptible, all-knowing, smug smile of understanding and complicity, and this after an intellectual exercise of social criticism and self-criticism precipitated by the poet’s observa¬ tions and puns. One understands that the purpose of Damas’s humor is not to tickle readers lightly, but rather to affect their intellect and psyches, that is, to radically alter the consciousness of people who are often alienated from the problems presented, as for example in the poem “Whitewashed”: BLANCHI Se peut-il qu’ils osent me traiter de blanchi alors que tout en moi aspire a n’etre que negre autant que mon Afrique qu’ils ont cambriolee Blanchi Abominable injure qu’ils me paieront fort cher quand mon Afrique qu’ils ont cambriolee voudra la paix rien que la paix Blanchi Ma haine grossit en marge de leur sceleratesse Ma haine grossit en marge de la culture Toward a Sociology of Humor 85 en marge des theories en marge des bavardages dont on a cru devoir me bourrer au berceau alors que tout en moi aspire a n’etre que negre autant que mon Afrique qu’ils ont cambriolee {Pigments, p. 59) [whitewash It may be they dare to treat me white though everything within me wants only to be black as Negro as the Africa they ransacked White Abominable insult that they’ll pay me dearly for when my Africa the Africa they ransacked is determined to have peace peace nothing else but peace VC’hite My hatred swells at the scope of their villainy My hatred swells around the limits of the culture the limits of the theories the tales they thought they sought to stuff me with from the cradle onward while all the while everything within me wants only to be black as Negro as the Africa they robbed me of] (Kennedy, p. 56) 86 Countermodernism Humor also functions as a weapon and shield for the community, particularly in regard to its sociological functions of laughter as de¬ fense, protest, and protection. Humor serves as a social bond, re¬ inforcing a collective consciousness by underscoring the heritage, tra¬ ditions, experiences, ideas, themes, and values shared by a community — specifically, the Afro-French community. Whether Black or White, readers who do not share the community’s values will feel immedi¬ ately excluded—indeed, targeted—by the humor. ALORS je vous mettrai les pieds dans le plat ou bien tout simplement la main au collet de tout ce qui m’emmerde en gros caracteres colonisation civilisation assimilation et la suite {Pigments, p. 53) [Then I’ll put your feet in it or simply grab you by the throat with all that capital letter shit colonization civilization assimilation and the rest] Damas seems very wary of the power of certain racist stereotypes, as in the poem “Pareille a ma legende.” occidentalement avance mon ombre pareille a ma legende d’homme-singe. {Pigments, p. 61) [occidentally my shadow moves forward like the legend of my ape-man past] Toward a Sociology of Humor 87 Damas seems to be acutely aware of the fine line between mock¬ ery that is resistance, revolt, and protection, and the brand of humor that crosses the line and becomes, inadvertently, complicity and re¬ inforcement of stereotypes. Humor must be redemptive, affirming the humanity' and the integrity of the so-called inferior and encouraging self-esteem and belief in personal and collective strength and integ¬ rity. The formula is very simple: laugh to keep from crying; laugh in order to survive. Through our participation in the act of reading, Damas’s laughter becomes our laughter, shared in the face of the worries, paradoxes, and repulsive, convulsive grotesqueness of human comportment, which is so shamelessly displayed in the colonial drama. Laughter is life. In a single Damasian verse, tears, alarm, confusion, rebellion, ten¬ derness, revelation, and nervous laughter coalesce. What one feels pro¬ foundly in Damas is the great potential of laughter and its effectiveness as a strategy for survival, as a shield against oppression, and ultimately, as a form of radical social critique, invective, and counterdiscourse: voila qu’il recommence qu’il recommence a dire iVlerde UN POEME POUR SUR S’eN PASSE VOLONTIERS mais il s’agit moins de recommencer a dire le gros mot le mot defendu que de continuer a etre contre la conspiration du silence autour de moi-meme a moi-meme imposee par moi-meme admise II s’agit moins de recommencer que de continuer a etre 88 Countermodernism centre la morale occidentale et son cortege de preceptes de preoccupations de presomptions de prenotions de pretentions de prejuges II s’agit moins de recommencer que de continuer a vous refiler ma nausee continuer a vous surveiller continuer a ruer continuer a vous navrer vous decevoir vous desarmer. (Black-Label, pp. 29, 31) [there he goes he’s at it again back to saying Shit. A POEM CERTAINLY CAN DO VERY WELL WITHOUT THAT but it is less about starting to say once again the dirty word the forbidden word than it is of continuing to be against the conspiracy of silence all around me that I have imposed upon myself by myself admitted It is less a question of starting all over again than it is about continuing to be against western morality and its procession of precepts of preoccupations Toward a Sociology of Humor 89 of presumptions of preconceived notions of prejudices It is less a question of starting all over again than of continuing to pass on to you my nausea continuing to keep an eye on you continuing to kick and scream continuing to annoy you to trick you to disarm you] Humor also functions as a psychological safety valve and a means of emotional decompression. It allows for the venting of frustration and provides an opportunity' for salutary aggression against, and escape from, the pressure of authority', institutions, and individuals, as well as philosophical and scientific positions. Laughter, acting as a form of release against a system of coercion, domination, and restriction, re¬ channels frustrated energies into a “passive,” or legal, resistance that can expose the grotesque in human behavior and ideologies. As to social conflict, humor functions as sublimation of physical violence and attack, defusing a potentially explosive situation. In Freudian terms, Damas’s humor leads to a discharge of psychic irritation, a con¬ sciousness of incongruities, and relief from the restraints inherent in a psychically stopped-up being as expressed in the poem “Si souvent.” Si souvent mon sentiment de race m’effraie autant qu’un chien aboyant la nuit une mort prochaine quelconque je me sens pret a ecumer toujours de rage centre ce qui m’entoure centre ce qui m’empeche a jamais d’etre un homme Et rien rien ne saurait autant calmer ma haine 90 Countermodernism qu’une belle mare de sang faite de ces coutelas tranchants qui mettent a nu les mornes a rhum {Pigments, p. 49) [If often my feeling of race strikes in me the same fear as the nighttime howling of a dog at some approaching death I always feel about to foam with rage against what surrounds me against what prevents me ever from being a man And nothing nothing would so calm my hate as a great pool of blood made by those long sharp knives that strip the hills of cane for rum] For Aime Cesaire humor is a powerful, emotionally unsettling, po¬ litically liberating, and socially destabilizing force (humor, force of liberation . . . negation of the world).From its most ancient ori¬ gins, humor has overturned hierarchies. It is only when the world is turned upside down that we can see ourselves as “other.” A grammar of humor then asserts itself, one in which Damas hoists a great ironic smile toward the “enlightened” totalitarian European, w'ho perceives himself as the subject of all predications in which the colored races, which have been reified so as to better serve the demands and exigen¬ cies of the colonial machine, would be direct objects of exploitation, and indirect objects to whom the European brings civilization and for Toward a Sociology of Humor 91 whom bridges, railroads, and ports of exportation and importation have been built. In Damas’s textual maneuvers, Damas the “negre” becomes the subject of the discourse, a first-person active voice. The former accusative accuses the European, who is now the object of his scrutiny, his radical critique, and his humor. At this juncture the “pleasure principle” comes into play, for, as Freud suggests, “the most conspicuous factor of the jest is the grati¬ fication it affords by making possible that which reason forbids. . . . From the beginning [wit’s] object is to remove inner inhibitions and thereby, render productive those pleasure sources which have become inaccessible.''^ In this sense, humor levels difference, exposes political travesty, upsets artificial hierarchies, and overturns social orders. Specular chiasmus may be used to see the self’s image repeated but reversed, to see it as other. In the humor glass “Je est un autre” (“I is an other,” writes Rimbaud).'^ It is perhaps this specular dimension of Damasian humor that is the most exalting—humor as the demythi- fying, demystifying, revelatory, and sonorous mirror held up to self and society. As a poet, Damas has the mission of unmasking social inequality and of stating the truths that both Black and White society wishes to cloak. Finally, Damas’s humor is not limited to the cynical, the grating, or the uneasy. The second movement of Black-Label ends with a great, smiling celebration of the energy, legitimacy, pleasures, and prides of Black life. car la beaute est negre et negre la sagesse car I’endurance est negre et negre le courage car la patience est negre et negre I’ironie car le charme est negre et negre la magie car I’amour est negre et negre le dehanchement car la danse est negre et negre le rythme car I’art est negre 92 Countermodernism et negre le mouvement car le rire est negre car la joie est negre car la paix est negre car la vie est negre. {Black-Label, p. 52) [for beauty is negro and negro too is wisdom for endurance is negro and negro too is courage for patience is negro and negro too is irony for charm is negro and negro too is magic for love is negro and negro too is the swaying of hips for dance is negro and negro too is rhythm for art is negro and negro too is movement for laughter is negro for joy is negro for peace is negro for life is negro.] 3 Counter exertions Theorizing the Francophone Condition Neither as terms nor as concepts does symbolist, supernaturalist, aesthetic modernism or, especially, parodic, aleatory, absurdist, gim¬ micky postmodernism appropriately designate the experience, affect, and rhetoric of francophone literature. None of these adequately sug¬ gests the combination of negation, negotiation, and reevaluation or the expropriatory acts and the multiple consciousness of the twisted sig- nifier in francophone artistic expression. Especially during its insur¬ rectionary beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s, African and Caribbean francophone text production posited a consciousness that ironized its position within European civilization, examined the liminal spaces of cultural hybridity occupied by the colonized subject, and systemati¬ cally expressed its sameness (i.e., humanity)? as well as its difference (i.e., culture). The themes of modernism were superficially embraced and constituted swinging-door concepts between first-w^orld mod¬ ernism and francophone literature. Swinging-door concepts at the borderline of cultural difference allow passage from one world into another. Yet there is a hollowness to the terms expressing these con¬ cepts, and as one moves from first-world modernism to the specificity' of francophone literature these concepts become unhinged. Simply put, the themes are the same but different. Poised at the crossroads of consciousness, the francophone artist, aware of the emptiness of language and suspicious of the strange familiarity and the familiar strangeness of terms, grapples with the incommensurabilities. Aletaphoricity' has been voided for the francophone artist. Eranco- 94 Countermodernism phone literary culture voids the modernist engine of translation of its operative mechanism of turning every tenor and vehicle into equiva¬ lents, correspondences, and facile interchanges. In linguistic terms francophone literary culture stands before linguistic swinging or re¬ volving doors in which significance is translated into the power to play against any single meaning. This constant unhinging of relationships, voiding of meaning, and rejection of language as adequate—this re¬ assessment of significance and pawning of language—is the linguistic conceptual play that partly constitutes the game of slipknot. Franco¬ phone literature does not oppose modernism, but in the slipknots of language, intertextualities, and life there is an erasure of metaphor- icity as it is employed in European modernism. Frantz Fanon, ap¬ parently wanting to distinguish Negritude poetry from the European lyric, observes: For, it must be admitted, Aime Cesaire was generous in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. This town of Fort-de-France is truly flat, stranded. Lying there naked to the sun, that “flat, sprawling city, stumbling over its own common sense, winded by its load of endlessly repeated crosses, pettish at its destiny, voiceless, thwarted in every direction, incapable of feeding on the juices of its soil, blocked, cut off, confined, divorced from fauna and flora.” Cesaire’s description of it is anything but poetic.' The performance of francophone literamre constitutes a deromanti- cized modernism in which metaphor is illustrated as literal and lived experience; in which the melting pot of generalized correspondences is deconstructed into its constiment differences; in which marginality, alienation, and disease are not markers of the artistic temperament and the holy wounds of hypersensitivity and intelligence but rather notations of the quotidian realities of a subordinated social, economic, and ethnic class; in which the slave, the colonized worker, the guest worker, the third-world tormred political prisoner are absolute, not metaphorical, embodiments of pain and the racially mixed woman is an absolute embodiment of difference, marginahty, and alienation.^ For the colonized, subordinated, uprooted elements of the trans¬ formed francophone societies, francophone literature does not repre¬ sent antimodernism. It is instead continuous with modernism, while being in counterposition to it, cautious, suspicious, qualifying, and resistant to further intellectual colonization by this first-world phe- Counterexertions 95 nomenon. The poet Arthur Rimbaud facilitates the orientation toward this qualification when he writes, “II faut etre absolument moderne” (One must be absolutely modern). This well-known declaration from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Adieu.” ^ has served, when decontextual- ized, as the slogan and rallying cry for an ultramodern, chic. Because the statement begins with the ambiguous, impersonal “z 7 faut” (it is necessary/one must/you must), one can read it in context either as a lamentation, as in “Alas, today one must be absolutely modern,” or as an ironic protest, as in “At all costs you have to be absolutely modern.” Rimbaud’s protest speaks to the tyranny of modernism and would seem to suggest that to be absolutely modern necessitates a shading, an abandonment, an erasure even, of all that is and all that one is. Rather than reflecting an antimodernist position, Rimbaud’s statement seems to be cautionary and suspicious, questioning and contesting, and therefore it foreshadows the position of francophone literary culmre vis-a-vis European aesthetic modernism. The counterexertions of francophone literamre form what, in my opinion, could properly be called countermodernism. As mentioned earlier, francophone literary culture is neither modernist nor antimod¬ ernist; instead, it refuses both labels and slips the knot of binary oppo¬ sitions, thereby asserting itself as countermodernist. Francophone lit¬ erary culture is neither a shortsighted solipsistic identity politics nor a type of lyricism. It is not antiurbanism, anticommodification, or antiprogress in the strict sense. Rather, it seeks to confront, to con¬ test, and to counter the dehumanizing excesses and legacies of colo¬ nial domination. As previously suggested, the affix counter is crucial in describing francophone literary culture’s inflection of modernist aesthetic practices and vision. As a prefix, according to dictionary definitions, counter posits a relationship of proximity' between one action and another and declares an oppositional stance within that re¬ lationship of proximity. Counter suggests the substitution of an action as a reply to that other action, condition, narrative, or discourse that is already in existence and considered inimical. The reply is a critique whose purpose it is to check or frustrate, correct or redefine, rival or outdo the inimical discourse by working in particular within the realm of the unacknowledged, the unrecognized, and the unrealized. Counterstornelling is the next facet of the francophone literary cultural experience that we will explore, focusing particularly on 96 Countermodernism questions evoked earlier of status inconsistency, role conflict, and consciousness. Although theorizing is a way of accounting for a phe¬ nomenon, it is not only the slipknot and the idea of countermodernism that assist one in hypothesizing the many dimensions of francophone literary culture; one may also look to myth. Myths are clues to one’s experience of life in groups and in one’s surroundings. They serve as flelds of reference and, as such, as the interface between what is known and that which constimtes the mystery of human experience. Myth forms the interface between hidden meaning and the visible. For example, in studying the baobab, a tree indigenous to northern and western Africa, we learn why this imposing giant of African flora, with its cathectic dimension as cult object, its subsequent diegetical survival in myth, and the rich hermeneutical potential of the myth, is a model for analyzing the nomadic condition. Attaining at times a circumference of twenty meters, as old as two thousand years (the age of some civilizations), capable of withstand¬ ing brush and bush fires, often a solitary giant in a desolate land¬ scape, scarred, scorched, burned, and dusty, this bombaceous tree is shrouded in mystery and surrounded by myth. It is the “generous” giant of the African plain. With a trunk that is often hollow, the tree is a veritable oasis and sprawling zoological garden. It contains bird nests, insect colonies, animal lairs, and, it is believed, offers asylum to errant souls and wandering spirits. In short, it is a community, a small city, a society teeming with life. Elephants roaming in search of food and water gouge out enormous chunks of the baobab’s bark and wood, gorging themselves on these, as well as on the branches, leaves, and gourdlike fruit. On rare occa¬ sions an unusual drama is enacted that symbolizes the intertwined fates of the dominant and the subordinate, demonstrating in the pro¬ cess that society’s most dangerous creation is that element stripped of all dignity, the oppressed, which harbors but one dream—to bring down the society that oppresses. Occasionally this gigantic tree, al¬ ready hollow, burned, and deserted, and having, it would appear, nothing further to lose, collapses under the assault of a hungry ele¬ phant, crushing the elephant to death in its fall. Commonly known as “the upside-dowm tree,” the baobab (Adanso- nia digitata) is associated with a startling mjThology. The veneration of this spectacular tree by the native peoples allegedly aroused the Counterexertions 97 jealousy and eventually the wrath of the neglected gods. These gods violently uprooted the baobab and thrust it deep into the earth with its canopy, branches, leaves, and fruit so deeply interred that only a portion of the trunk and the root system were visible. Miraculously, going against every design of the gods, the baobab rerooted upside down. The former branches functioned as roots, while the former roots functioned as branches, thus explaining the distinctively with¬ ered and atrophied appearance of the tree. The spreading of foliage and flowering are difficult for the baobab; its fruit is precious and its growth process slow. A schematization of the elements associated with the destiny of this tree reveals: \iolent de- racination, a fall, the instability of status and the reversals of role, full and harmonious fulfillment denied, desires thwarted, difficult repro¬ duction, a society' decimated, its upper portion relegated to the world of shadows, its aspiration toward the spiritual directed downward, re- enracination, survival under the most adverse conditions and despite the reigning gods’ arsenals of suppression, and, finally, the ensuing atrophy. It can be seen that this schema coincides with the trajectory and history of the slave trade and the sur\'ival of Blacks in the New World. Aime Cesaire says succinctly: “Baobab, c’est notre arbre.” Naissance arbre non arbre hier renverse les laboureurs celestes sont fiers d’avoir change o laboureurs labourants en terre il est replante le ciel pousse il centre pousse arbre non arbre bel arbre immense"* bel arbre nu en deja I’invincible depart vers on imagine un sabbath de splendeur sur les oriflammes sublimes de ta revoke 98 Countermodernism innocent qui va la oublie de te rappeler que le baobab est notre arbre qu’il mal agite des bras si nains qu’on le dirait un geant imbecile ^ les bras trop courts s’allongerent de flammes® [tree that is not a tree yesterday overturned The celestial workers are proud of having changed it O laboring laborers In earth it is replanted the sky pushes It counter pushes tree that is not a tree Beautiful tree immense beautiful tree naked already embarked upon the invincible departure toward one imagines a Sabbath of splendor on the sublime golden banners of your revolt innocent one who goes there forget to remember that the baobab is our tree how awkwardly it waves its arms so dwarfed one would almost say it is an imbecilic giant the arms too short stretched out into flames] In an interview with Cesaire, when I discussed the extended role of the flora in his poetry, he offered: The baobab has always fascinated me because it is a tree that I find pathetic. It is quite pathetic because it is monstrous. It most definitely has extremely short arms. It is not at all a harmonious tree. Indeed, it is what you would call your tortured ontology. In particular, the Baobab has an extremely large trunk; it is almost like a prehistoric animal in shape, with Counterexertions 99 very short arms. I find it a very painful tree; it is not fully blossomed, not fully realized. Yes, it is a tree in pain. Whence, consequently, the conclu¬ sion that it is our tree. Further, it is the tomb of the African stor>teller- poet-chroniclers. Yes, the soul of the griot rests in the Baobab tree.'^ Archetypes of the collective unconscious, m>T±is are expressions of the human psyche that serve as models in analyzing human com¬ portment. The rich hermeneutical potential of this baobab mythology led me to focus on the consequences of certain social and political actualities of the francophone colonial and postcolonial condition, for the dominated, the subordinated, and for their consciousness. Em¬ blematically a tortured ontology, the upside-dowm tree vegetalizes the existential preoccupations that I daresay characterize much of franco¬ phone literature of the last fifty’ years: the sense of loss, displacement, lost harmonies, lost communities, homelessness, traditions negated and redefined, survival, experimentation, and the reevaluation of con¬ cepts of self and society’. (The m\’th and reality of the baobab tree are richly exploited in Le Baobab fou [The Abandoned Baobab], which is the subject of close analysis in chapter 7.) Implicit among the network of existential concerns and social actu¬ alities of francophone literary culmre are status, role, and conscious¬ ness. Countermodernist francophone literary culture ponders the realities of migration, wandering, the bordering of cultures, popula¬ tion drains, the exodus or the transplantation of segments of a popu¬ lation for economic reasons, and the ecological disasters that are the consequences of colonialism as well as the actualities of the postcolo¬ nial condition. One of my principal concerns is the extent to which the necessarily uprooted nomadic condition of certain peoples of West Africa, North Africa, and the French West Indies have exacerbated the problems of status inconsistency, which leads to role conflict, and in turn to altered consciousness, issues that, along with questions of sexu¬ ality, I shall be examining in Part II. II Counter story telling 4 Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling In 1921, as Batoiiala by Rene Maran was being awarded the Goncourt Literary Prize and its preface was being banned in the French colo¬ nies, the first pan-African congresses were demanding self-govern¬ ment for the African colonies and calling upon the Societe des Nations to undertake the project of promoting the independence of African colonies. From 1921 onward, the emergence of francophone literary culture coincided with the dying days of French colonialism, the bitter trauma of decolonization, and the cooperative phase of neocapitalist postcolonialism. Frantz Fanon asserts, “Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his ‘nation,’ and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure.”' Francophone literary culture can be analyzed as counterstorytelling, that is, writ¬ ing, speaking, and performing against the colonial discourse, from the perspective of the colonized. French Colonialism, the Rise of Anticolonialist Sentiment, and the Push for Nationhood The term colonialism came into being as a derivation of the Latin verb colere (to cultivate), through the masculine noun colonus (cul¬ tivator, peasant, settler), to the feminine noun colonia, designating a 104 Counterstorytelling detachment of Roman citizens sent to populate a deserted territory or conquered land with inhabitants.^ Eventually colonia, or colony, came to designate a settlement that the Romans “founded” and that was composed of an agricultural sector and an urban center replicating the planning of the Roman city itself. The concept of colony implied a legal stams for the settlement that combined local municipal au¬ tonomy with political subordination to Rome, the “mother” city. The concept of the extended family was fundamental to Roman principles of organization and protection. Thus the hierarchical family metaphor was already in place, with the setthng metropolis as a parent figure — matriarchal or patriarchal, empress or emperor, queen or king— and the colonies as the governed, subordinated, dominated woman- child. The Roman model prefigures the nineteenth-cenmry dualistic, anthropological logic of French colonialism in which, as we shall see, the parent-child metaphor is transformed into a conjugal one. In the twentieth century, colonialism refers to the annexation and exploitation of one people by another. Looking further back, how¬ ever, it refers to that crusading, missionary, “civilizing,” and, above all, entrepreneurial spirit of exploration and commerce that inspired the expansionist politics of most of the European maritime powers from the time of Columbus and Vasco da Gama through the nine¬ teenth century. The settling of the colonies was conceived of, first of all, as a com¬ mercial or economic enterprise designed to procure for the metro¬ politan center rare goods, precious metals and ores, raw material, spices, and produce from the tropics, the Orient, Polynesia, and the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Mercantilism was refined to an art so as to enrich the metropolitan center through trade and the sale of goods at increasingly exorbitant prices to foreigners. In this sys¬ tem, the colonies served, on the one hand, as exclusive suppliers of exotic products (coffee, ivory, tobacco, vegetable and nut oils, spices, sugar, cotton, etc.). On the other hand, they served as controlled mar¬ kets for the products manufactured on the mainland. This system of exclusive exploitation of all of the colonies’ namral resources as well as the exclusive monopoly of the colonial marketplace not only for¬ mally and legally outlawed all direct trade among the colonies or with other foreign powers, but also limited local rates and levels of pro¬ duction. This mercantile regime, which assured the sovereignty and Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 105 enrichment of the colonial power, was known as the exclusive Colo¬ nial Pact.^ Some would maintain that little has changed and that in the “cooperative” postindependence period, the actors merely wear dif¬ ferent costumes. This, at least, is the message of the minidrama in the opening scenes of the film Xala by Ousmane Sembene. The railroads and ports that were once used primarily for export of raw materials by colonial powers now serve transnational conglomerates for importing and distributing their Western goods to the countries whose natural economies were destroyed through colonial exploitation. African nationalism would not be clearly articulated until after World War II, but a certain proto-Black ethnonationalism was evi¬ dent in Senegal as early as 1919. The slogan “Alettre les blancs a la porte!” (Kick the whites out) appeared in this colony during the years 1919-21, when the Societe des Nations was being asked to help deliver it from the shackles of French government and exploitation. In the 1920s African intellectuals were particularly attracted by the ideas of the Jamaican American Marcus Garvey, which foreshadowed pan-Africanism. VC'ith such rallying cries as “Africa for Africans” and “Wake up, Ethiopia,” he initiated the “back to Africa movement.” His National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, calling for the eviction of the White race from the Black continent, claimed to sound the death knell for colonialism in Africa. At the same time an international communist movement was aligning itself with Africans by supporting their growing anti-imperialist sentiments and offering a program that called for the emancipation of Black people, the alliance of Blacks ever\’where, and solidariU' among all pariahs and proletar¬ ian classes of the world. In Paris, the Ligue Anti-imperialiste called for the independence of Senegal and the Sudan in 1932, although the Ligue de Defense de la Race Negre and the Union des Travailleurs Negres working out of Paris had no real presence in Africa at the time. Cri des Negres, a manifesto written by French Communists, appeared in 1933-34, demanding independence for Senegal and the Sudan.'* The French Communist “program” for Blacks would be questioned in 1956 by Aime Cesaire, who resigned from the Communist Party in the now famous “Letter to xMaurice Thorez”: Je crois en avoir assez dit pour faire comprendre que ce n’est ni le marxisme, ni le communisme que je renie, que c’est I’usage que certains io6 Counterstorytelling ont fait du marxisme et du communisme que je reprouve. Que ce que je veux, c’est que marxisme et communisme soient mis au service des peuples noirs, et non les peoples noirs au service du marxisme. [I think I have said enough to make it clearly understood that it is neither Marxism nor Communism that I am rejecting, but rather it is the use to which certain people have put Marxism and Commtmism that I reject. What I want is that Marxism and Communism be placed in the service of the Black peoples of the world, and not the Black people of the world in the service of Marxism and Communism.] An extraordinary statistic reveals that just prior to the period of de¬ colonization, the French colonial machine in Africa was made up of a surprisingly small core/corps of French administrators. These func¬ tionaries governed and controlled more by virme of their prestige than by force and incorporated traditional African chiefdoms into their system of command. Thus, 593 French colonial administrators con¬ trolled 2,200 African canton chiefs, who in turn presided over 48,000 village chiefs.^ Between 1939 and 1945 Black Africans were deeply involved in World War IF an estimated 175,000 Africans were mobilized for the armed effort. In 1939, at the outset of the Allied campaign, 17,000 French troops were joined by 80,000 African troops, who, it is said, often served on the front lines as la chair a canon (canon fodder). In addition to the troop support, the colonies were called upon to in¬ crease production of goods for export to raise revenues for France; in particular, the tonnage of cotton, peanuts, and rubber was increased.® Following World War II the political activity inspired by African nationalism accelerated and violence began to erupt. Black Afri¬ cans felt that the human and material sacrifices of French-speaking Africa during the war required at least gratimde and recognition from France; instead, in 1944 the return of demobilized Senegalese sharp¬ shooters was marked by a grave incident of mutiny at Tiaroye in which thirty-five rebellious sharpshooters were killed. The Senega¬ lese press reflected the country’s growing impatience and militancy. L’Afrique libre and Jeunesse et democratie both asserted: “Le colonia- lisme est termine” (Colonialism is over) and “Le Toubab a peur” (Whitey is afraid). Another Senegalese newspaper. La Communaute, announced: “We will not accept European domination much longer. Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 107 It is our hope that Europe will be reduced to dust before a resurrected Africa.”’ The emancipation of Black Africa took place between 1946 and i960. Compared to Algeria, decolonization in Black Africa was relatively peaceful.* A refusal to hate and a willingness to forgive can be found in some francophone poetry in the years before decolonization. For the most part, however, the bitterness runs deep, and hatred is kept in check through prayer and, failing that, through the mordant ironies of the native perspective. For example, Leopold Sedar Senghor evokes the memory of the disregarded Sengalese soldiers who fought so valiantly for France during World War II but who were offered up as so many “Black Hosts,” or sacrifices, by the Republic. His poem, “Priere de Paix,” is remarkable for its contained bitterness and expression of Catholic pardon. While asking forgiveness for France, it nonetheless records all of the abuses of the colonizer and the ironies issuing from France’s double standards, and it reveals the often ambivalent feel¬ ings of the colonized subject who loves French culture and hates what France has done to the homeland and the people. Seigneur la glace de mes yeux s’embue Ft voila que le serpent de la haine leve la tete dans mon coeur, ce serpent que j’avais cru mort. . . . Tue-le, Seigneur, car il me faut pour suivre mon chemin, et je veux prier singulierement pour la France. Seigneur, parmi les nations blanches, place la France a la droite du Pere. Oh! je sais bien qu’elle aussi est I’Europe, qu’elle m’a ravi mes enfants comme un brigand du Nord des boeufs, pour engraisser ses terres a Cannes et coton car la sueur negre est fumier. Qu’elle aussi a porte la mort et le canon dans mes villages bleus, qu’elle a dresse les miens les uns contre les autres comme des chiens se disputant un os. Qu’elle a traite les resistants de bandits, et crache sur les tetes-aux- vastes-desseins. Oui Seigneur, pardonne a la France qui dit bien la voie droite et chemine par les senders obliques. Qui m’invite a sa table et me dit d’apporter mon pain, qui me donne de la main droite et de la main gauche enleve la moitie. io8 Counterstorytelling Oui Seigneur, pardonne a la France qui hait les occupants et m’im- pose I’occupation si gravement. Qui ouvre des voies triomphales aux heros et traite ses Senegalais en mercenaires, faisant d’eux les dogues noirs de I’Empire. Qui est la Republique et livre le pays aux Grands-Concessionnaires. Et de ma Mesopotamie, de mon Congo, ils ont fait un grand cime- tiere sous le soleil blanc.^ [Lord the mirror of my eye clouds over and there is the serpent of hate raising his head in my heart, the serpent whom I had believed dead. . . . Kill it, O Lord, for I must continue on my way and I want to pray par¬ ticularly for Erance. O Lord, among all the white nations, place France on the right hand of the Father. Oh! I know she is also part of Europe, that she has stolen my children as a robber from the north takes cattle, to enrich her lands with sugar cane and cotton, for the Negro’s sweat is manure; that she also brought death and the cannon into my blue vil¬ lages; that she set my people one against the other like dogs fighting over a bone; that she treated resistance as banditry, and spat on the heads that dreamt of greamess. Yes, Lord, forgive Erance who preaches the straight path but takes the crooked one herself; who invites me to her table yet tells me to bring my own bread, who gives to me with the right hand but takes half away again with the left. Yes, Lord, forgive Erance who hates occupiers yet imposes occupation so heavily upon me; who opens the tri¬ umphal gates to heroes and treats her Senegalese as mercenaries, making them the black watchdogs of the Empire; who is the Republic yet places the country in the hands of big companies. And of my Mesopotamia, of my Congo, they have made a great cemetery beneath the white sun.] 'o Colonialism and the Francophone Literary Imagination The study of francophone literary culture involves the examination of the sociopolitical and psychosexual challenges imposed by the experi¬ ences of colonialism, decolonization, and postindependence. My task is to investigate the consequences of the colonial enterprise for the literary culmre or imagination.'' With texts from French and franco¬ phone literary culture, I shall illustrate the set of relationships that Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 109 form a sequential, transformative, and political grammar of metaphors and obsessions orienting the francophone imagination. This task re¬ quires citing some lengthy passages from compelling, shocking, even distasteful documents that have exerted a profound influence on the francophone imagination and, particularly, on the dynamics of count- erstor^telling. “These facts require to be recalled. . . . these resent¬ ments remain with us extremely vivid,” asserts Abiola Irele, the Nige¬ rian comparatist of African and Caribbean literature.’^ I have sought to order these texts so that they lead to a reading of a little-discussed musical interlude (act 2, scene 2) in The Tragedy of King Christophe, the masterpiece of Cesaire’s “theater of decolonization.” French colonialism was integral to Europe’s ideological will to domi¬ nate. Beginning in 1790, France sought to augment its power by land and sea and, through its expansionist, mercantilist policies, to become the focal point of the world. It established its first colony, Algeria, in 1830. By 1878, land under French colonial rule was expanding, according to some figures, at the rate of 240,000 square miles per year. Concerning the speed of this colonialist expansion in Oubangui- Chari, which later became the Central African Republic and Chad, Rene Alaran writes: The region was very rich in rubber and very populous. Plantations of all sorts covered its expanses. It abounded in chickens and goats. Seven years were enough to ruin it completely. . . . Civilization went through there. And Dacpas, Al’bis, Alaroukas, La’m- bassis, Sabangas and N’gapous—all the Bamba tribes—were scattered.’^ The first point in this political grammar of metaphors and relation¬ ships to consider are the cliches that made up the colonial rhetoric. The domination of the African, Asian, American, and Amazonian “hearts of darkness” by the West, coupled with the ability to codify and to disseminate knowledge, led to a perception by the colonizers of a duty' to the natives: to establish colonies for their benefit and for the prestige of France. This sense of “duty” gave rise to the rheto¬ ric of the mission civilisatrice, the civilizing mission of the French. In a section entitled “The French” in her biography of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Jean Vaillant illustrates these very points when citing Jules Alichelet and Senghor: no Counterstorytelling The Frenchman wants above all to imprint his personality on the van¬ quished, not because it is his, but because it is the quintessence of the good and the beautiful—this is his native belief. He believes that he can do nothing that would benefit the world more than to give it his ideas, customs, and ways of doing things. He will convert other people to these ways, sword in hand, and after the battle, in part smugly and in part sympathetically, he will reveal to them all that they gain by becoming French. Leopold Sedar Senghor seems to agree grudgingly with Jules Miche¬ let, for he states: “The Frenchman wants bread for all, liberty for all; but this liberty, this culture, and this bread will be French. The uni- versalism of this people is French.” Along with the impulse to global dominance, colonialism entailed the wtU to define, depict, portray, represent, characterize, and textu- alize the colonized people through the capitalist, Judeo-Christian, and male normative gaze. In his exhaustive study Le Negre romantique, Leon-Fran?ois Hoffmann reveals the extent to which the French col¬ lective consciousness was preoccupied with classifying, organizing, and establishing social and racial hierarchies.'^ His study is essential for understanding many of the literary traditions that francophone artists struggle to counter in their own creative works. An analysis of the texts and their considerations of alterity discloses a generative, transformational, and political grammar of preoccupa¬ tions, stereotypes, and metaphors that, to some extent, continue to burden us today. Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, who served as an inspiration to Adolph Hitler, is perhaps the most well-known au¬ thor of pseudoscientific texts that sought to justify the exploitation of colored races by the colonial machine. This brings us to the sec¬ ond point in this grammar: the hierarchical codification of colonialist visions of alterity. The scientific literature of the times reinforced the anthropological “logic” of colonialism and, with its binary opposi¬ tions between the prelogical and the logical, placed on the one side the yellow, brown, red, and black savage, the child, the woman, and the poet, and, on the other side, the European male. La variete melanienne [i.e., le Noir] est la plus humble et git au bas de I’echelle. Le caractere d’animalite empreint dans la forme de son bas- Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling ill sin lui impose sa destinee, des I’instant de la conception. Elle ne sortira jamais du cercle intellectuel le plus restreint. Ce n’est cependant pas une brute pure et simple, que ce negre a front etroit et fuyant, qui porte, dans la partie moyenne de son crane, les indices de certaines energies gros- sierement puissantes. Si ces facultes pensantes sont mediocres ou meme nulles, il possede dans le desir, et par suite dans la volonte, une intensite souvent terrible. Plusieurs de ses sens sont developpes avec une vigueur inconnue aux deux autres races: le gout et I’odorat principalement. . . . Mais la, precisement, dans I’avidite meme de ses sensations, se trouve le cachet frappant de son inferiorite. Tous les aliments lui sont bons, aucun ne le degoute, aucun ne le repousse. Ce qu’il souhaite, c’est man¬ ger, manger avec exces, avec fureur; il n’y a pas de repugnante cha- rogne indigne de s’engloutir dans son estomac. Il en est de meme pour les odeurs, et sa sensualite s’accommode non seulement des plus gros- sieres, mais des plus odieuses. A ces principaux traits de caractere il joint une instabilite d’humeur, une variabilite des sentiments que rien ne peut fixer, et qui annule, pour lui, la vertu comme le vice. On dirait que I’emportement meme avec lequel il poursuit I’objec qui a mis sa sensiti- vite en vibration et enflamme sa convoitise est un gage du prompt apaise- ment de Tune et du rapide oubli de I’autre. Enfin il tient egalement peu a sa vie et a celle d’un autre; il tue volontiers pour tuer, et cette machine hu- maine, si facile a emouvoir, est, devant la souffrance, ou d’une lachete qui se refugie volontiers dans la mort ou d’une impassibilite monstrueuse.'^ [The negroid variety is the lowest and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal-like characteristic that appears in the shape of the pelvis is stamped on the negro from birth and foreshadows his destiny. His intel¬ lect will always move within a very narrow circle. He is not however a mere brute, for behind his low receding brow, in the middle of his skull, we can see signs of a powerful energy, however crude its objects. If his mental faculties are dull or even nonexistent, he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, that may be called terrible. Many of his senses, especially taste and smell, are developed to an extent unknown to the other uv'o races. The very strength of his sensations is the most striking proof of his inferiority. All food is good in his eyes; nothing disgusts or repels him. What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously and to excess; no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him. It is the same with odors; his inordinate 11 2 Counterstorytelling desires are satisfied with all, however coarse or even horrible. To these qualities may be added an instability and capriciousness of feeling that cannot be tied down to any single object, and which, so far as he is con¬ cerned, do away with all distinctions of good and evil. We might even say that the violence with which he pursues the object that has aroused his senses and inflamed his desires is a guarantee of the desires being soon satisfied on the one hand and the object quickly forgotten on the other. Finally, he is equally careless of his own life and that of someone else’s: he kills willingly, for the sake of killing; and this human machine, in whom it is so easy to arouse emotion, shows, in the face of suffering, either a mon¬ strous indifference or a cowardice that seeks voluntary refuge in death.] The third point in a francophone political grammar of the colonial experience would be what the Afro-Americanist Hortense Spillers might designate the legacy of the slave trade: The massive demographic shifts, the violent formation of a modern Afri¬ can consciousness, that take place on the subsaharan Continent during the initiative strikes which open the Atlantic Slave Trade in the fifteenth century of our Christ, interrupted hundreds of years of black African culture. . . . the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, off-told events of their power, even now to startle. In a very real sense every writing as revision makes the discovery aU over again.’® Although slavery in its archaic forms is past, it remains a nightmare that haunts the consciousness of all Blacks, however divided they may be by different languages, policies, and histories of colonial experi¬ ence. Slavery is the collective experience binding Blacks through time and space, and some writers are unable and unwilling to escape the memory and rememory of that experience. The following description of conditions under the French slave trade support Spillers’s char¬ acterization of the colonial commerce of human flesh as “a ‘fall,’ a veritable descent into the loss of the communicative force.” PRECIS SUR LA TRAITE DES NOIRS Un espace menage sur I’arriere, entre le logement des noirs et la cham- bre des officiers, contient les armes du bord, que Ton expose avec inten- Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 113 tion aux regards des esclaves. C’est dans cet arsenal, separe des pares par une grille, que se promene la sentinelle qui surveille les noirs. Le pare des negresses doit etre eaehe a la vue des hommes. L’aspeet de ees infor- tunees suffirait pour porter les afrieains a des revokes qu’il est toujours plus faeile de prevenir que de reprimer. Une inspiration, qui pourrait paraitre bizarre si elle n’etait pas feroee, a fait employer depuis peu un moyen de eontenir les eselaves sans le see- ours des sentinelles. De forts ehiens de Terre-Neuve, exerees a la garde des troupeaux d’hommes, sont maintenant eharges de la poliee interi- eure des negriers. Deux de ces animaux suffisent pour garder deux a trois cents afrieains. . . . Ces pares, ou Ton entasse un si grand nombre d’hommes, sans songer qu’ils ont besoin de respirer, deviennent quel- quefois des cloaques d’ou s’exhalent la contagion et la mort. II n’est pas rare de voir un negrier perdre le tiers ou le quart de sa cargaison dans le cours d’une traversee meme rapide. Mais quelques [szc] ravages qu’exercent les epidemies sur les afrieains, le desespoir ou la melancolie qui les atteint leur devient encore plus funeste: aussi les capitaines ont-ils le soin de faire prendre des distractions aux plus moroses, en les faisant danser sur le pont au bruit d’un tambour et d’un fifre. Pendant cet ex- ercice, qui leur est offert comme un specifique contre la douleur, des espingoles, braquees sur les danseurs, sont disposees a les foudroyer au moindre signe de rebellion; et cette triste joie qu’on leur impose, en leur offrant le plaisir a cote de la mort, est encore plus feroee peut-etre que les mauvais traitements dont on les accable.^° [precis on the slave trade A space arranged at the aft of the ship, between the lodging for the Black males and the officers’ quarters, contains the ship’s weapons, which are exposed intentionally in the sight of the slaves. It is in this arsenal, sepa¬ rated from the slave quarters by a grid, that the sentinel who keeps watch over the Blacks makes his rounds. The female slave quarters must be hidden from the view of the male slaves. The sight of these unfortunates was enough to incite the African males to revolts that are always easier to avoid than they are to repress. An inspiration that could appear bizarre, were it not so vicious, led to a recently employed means of controlling the slaves without the need for a watchman. Enormous Newfoundland dogs trained to guard human 114 Counter story telling herds are now charged with policing the interior of the slave ships. Two of these animals suffice to guard two or three hundred Africans. . . . These quarters, where such great numbers of men are stacked, without considering that they need space in which to breathe, become at times cesspools from which contagion and death exude. It is not rare to see a slave ship lose one-third or a quarter of its cargo in the course of a crossing, even a rapid one. Yet, however great the ravages inflicted by the epidemics upon the Africans, the despair and melancholy that afflict them is even more devastating. The captains take great care to force the more morose ones to participate in distractions by making them dance on the bridge to the sound of a flfe and drum. During this exercise, which is offered them as a tonic to counter their pain, muskets aimed at the dancers are ready to blow them to bits at the slightest sign of re¬ bellion; and this sad joy imposed upon them, by offering them pleasure under the threat of death, is perhaps even more \flcious than the other bad treatment that is heaped upon them.] A francophone grammar of the colonial experience would place at its center the Haitian slave insurrection of 1802, which eventually led to a declaration of independence in 1804. These events mark the first successful slave rebellion, decolonization, and independence of a Black nation: Art. 3. Nous concedons . . . par la presente ordonnance, aux habitants actuels de la partie franqaise de Tile de Saint-Domingue, I’independance pleine et entiere de leur gouvernement, et sera la presente ordonnance scellee de notre grand sceau.^' Art. 3. We hereby concede . . . with the present order, to the current inhabitants of the French side of the Island of Santo Domingo, the full and total independence of their government, and the present order will be sealed with our imperial stamp. Aime Cesaire makes the point in Notebook of a Return to My Native Land that the Haitian revolution and independence were essential to the formation of a redemptive, revolutionary concept of the Black self and that they exemplify the concept of nigritude. “Haiti,” he writes, “ [is] where nigritude stood up and declared its humanity.” In colonial depictions, the superlative values of those “within God’s grace” were opposed to those heathen societies, which were described Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 115 as “lazy,” “degenerate,” “primitive,” and “unnatural” and should be ruled. As we have seen, Antenor Firmin replied systematically to this discourse. The hierarchies led to the codification of diflference among people of color. According to the tortured logic of this rhetoric. New World Blacks were progressively approaching the European model of the human. Les negres Creols [iic] naissent avec des qualites physiques et morales, qui leur donnent un droit reel a la superiorite sur ceux qu’on a transpor- tes d’Afrique. . . . A I’intelligence, le negre Creol reunit la grace dans les formes, la sou- plesse dans les mouvemens, I’agrement dans la figure, et un langage plus doux et prive de tous les accens que les negres Africains y melent. Accou- tumes, des leur naissance, aux choses qui annoncent le genie de I’homme, leur esprit est moins obtus que celui de I’Africain qui, quelquefois par exemple, ne sait pas discerner les subdivisions de la monnoie. ... II n’est aucun objet pour lequel on ne prefere les negres Creols, et leur valeur est toujours, toutes choses egales d’ailleurs, d’un quart, au moins, au-dessus de celle des Africains. Une predilection assez generale, fait preferer les negres Creols pour les details domestiques, et pour les differens metiers.^^ [Creole Blacks are born with physical and moral qualities that confer upon them a true right to superiority over those who were subsequently transported from Africa. . . . To namral intelligence, the Creole Black adds grace in form, supple¬ ness in movement, beauty of visage, and a more mellifluous language rid of all those accents that African Blacks mix in. Accustomed, from the moment of their birth, to those phenomena that hail the genius of man, their mind is less obtuse than that of the African, who sometimes does not know, for example, how to discern the subdivisions of currency. . . . There is no area in which one would not prefer a Creole Black, and their value is always, all things considered besides, one-quarter at least above that of Africans. A rather widespread predilection makes Creole Blacks preferable for domestic duties and for different trades.] The family model implicit in early Roman colonization discussed earlier was perpetuated by the European maritime powers of modern times. The connections between servitude and domesticity, colored races and women, fetishism and emotion, and the manifest domina- ii6 Counterstorytelling tion of the passive colored races and women by the rational white virile race were elaborated in the pseudoscientific literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that sought to explain the orga¬ nization of the human family. The observation of the double jeopardy of race and gender for the black woman in the following nineteenth- century text seems prophetic: Le noir me parait etre la race femme dans la famille humaine, comme le blanc est la race male. De meme que la femme, le noir est prive des facultes politiques et scientifiques: il n’a jamais cree un grand etat. il n’est point astronome, mathematicien, naturaliste: il n’a rien fait en mecanique industrielle. Mais, par contre, il possede au plus haut degre les qualites du coeur, les affections et les sentiments domestiques; il est homme d’in- terieur. Comme la femme, il aime aussi avec passion la parure, la danse, le chant. . . . Tandis que le blanc est pantheiste et s’absorbe dans la con¬ templation de I’infiniment grand, le noir est fetichiste et adore la puissance infinie dans ses manifestations infiniment petites. . . . Jusqu’ici domesticite et servitude ont ete des choses a peu pres iden- tiques. Aussi le noir, etre essentiellement domestique, comme la femme, a ete jusqu’ici condamne comme elle a un esclavage plus ou moins rude. L’emancipation de la femme devra done etre accompagnee de celle du noir, ou pour parier plus nettement, e’est dans la femme noire que I’eman- cipation de la femme doit completement se realiser. On pent dire, encore sous une autre forme, que le couple typique se compose d’un homme blanc et d’une femme noire?^ [The Black appears to me to be the female race in the human family, just as the White is the male race. Just like women, the black is deprived of political and scientific faculties: he has never founded a great state. He is not an astronomer, mathematician, or naturalist; he has done nothing in industrial mechanics. However, in contrast, he possesses to the high¬ est degree qualities of the heart, affection and domestic feelings; he is a man of interiors. Like the woman, he likes trinkets for self-adornment, dance, song. . . . Whereas the White man is pantheistic and absorbs him¬ self in the contemplation of the infinitely great, the Black is fetishistic and adores the infinite power in its tiniest manifestations. . . . Up to this point domesticity and servimde have been more or less identical concepts. Also, the Black, an essentially domestic being, like the woman, has been condemned heretofore to a slavery that is more or Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 117 less rude. The emancipation of the woman will consequently be accom¬ panied by that of the Black, or perhaps to state it more pointedly, it will be in the emancipation of the Black woman that the liberation of woman will be fully realized. One can also say, in another way, that the typical couple is composed of a White man and a Black woman.} When the emphasis is pointedly racial, colonialist writers have transformed the original Roman parent-child metaphor into a spousal metaphor. In so many ways, this text by d’Eichtal and Urbain states the unsayable, indeed the unspeakable, as it addresses the political and ideological assignment of gender to Europe and to the rest of the globe. In wielding power, the European culture, the European man or European woman, will function as male. In pow’er relations, the Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow cultures, the women or the men will always already be female.^^ It is clear also that the d’Eichtal and Urbain text is not a ringing endorsement of racial miscegenation; rather, it presents an economic and a hegemonic model of marriage between European civilization and the natural resources, ports, commercial routes, and labor potential of non-European cultures that are there to be unveiled, opened up, and raped. The marriage model between the metropoli¬ tan center and the colonies is that of polygamy. While distancing themselves from the native assimilationist poetics that slavishly imitated French literary traditions, the Negritude poets began to challenge and “signify” upon certain pseudoscientific litera¬ ture and the romantic and modernist stereotypes that literature engen¬ dered: the faithful, contented, and dependent domestic servant; the demonic, rebellious, savage slave; the sexually overdetermined Black male and female; the beautiful, tragic, and demonic mulatto. Of all the female figures and presences—feminine essences and forces—in the work of Aime Cesaire, perhaps the most haunting is the one whose intertextual destiny migrates between French roman¬ tic literature, francophone literature, feminist theory, and film. She is Ourika, the Black nun of despair, from the 1824 French novella Ourika, by Claire Durfort, duchesse de Duras, noble friend and spiri¬ tual companion of Chateaubriand. Ourika, saved from drowning by the French governor of Senegal after being dropped into the sea by her mother, is pressed into slavery. The anonymous two-year-old Black girl is reared in Paris by the governor’s sister, Madame de B., a 118 Counterstorytelling noblewoman who loves the Black child as if she were her own daugh¬ ter. Ashamed of her Black skin, embarrassed by the bloody, successful revolt of her Haitian revolutionary brothers, Ourika becomes suicidal because her blackness, she is convinced, prevents her adopted French brother from loving her passionately. Ourika the text as weU as Ourika the female figure inspired the de¬ piction of the solitary cloaked female figure in the opening frames of John Fowles’s film The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles also trans¬ lated Ourika into English in a limited deluxe edition. The embedding of the novella Ourika in Cesaire’s The Tragedy of King Christopher (1963) directs us to read this nineteenth-century text. Cesaire’s incor¬ poration of this figure into his play anticipates the discovery of this text by the French feminists who republished it in 1972 with a lengthy preface. In his play, Cesaire uses the tragic self-discovery of a charac¬ ter fatefully named Ourika (Eureka, or “I discover”) to study slavery, the Haitian revolution, racial shame, the tension of the white male and the Black female “couple,” and the figuration of the Black woman as a split subject. Ourika illustrates the mobility of existence and ex¬ perience across boundaries of geography, culture, and genre, and the resultant network of significance woven into francophone literary cul¬ ture. Ourika’% fate is an exciting example of the deterritorialization and expropriation of a text and literary figure. In The Tragedy of King Christophe, during an Elizabethan musical interlude (act 2, scene 2), Cesaire recalls the name and the tragedy of Ourika in order to explain the significance of King Christophe’s tyrannical love and exceptional demands on his recently decolonized Haitian people. After the successful slave rebellion against the French, King Christophe has challenged his people to build an impregnable citadel atop an almost unscalable peak on a cape in northern Haiti. Premiere Dame:. . . assez de politique! Isabelle, mettez-vous au clavecin. Elle a une voix ravissante, cette enfant. IsabeUe, chantez-nous done cette jolie romance, la romance d’Ourika. Vastey: Et qui est cette charmante enfant, Ourika? Premiere Dame: L’heroine d’un roman qui fait pleurer tout Paris . . . C’est I’histoire d’une petite noire elevee dans une grande famille blanche, et qui souffre de sa couleur et en meurt. Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 119 Vastey: Ah! Interessant! Tres interessant! Isabelle, chantant: Enfant de la noire Guinee D’un ciel brulant lointaine fleur, Ourika, fille infortunee, Deplorait ainsi son malheur France, toi qui m’avais charmee Toi que saluaient mes transports Tu me cachais que sur tes bords Je ne serais jamais aimee. Blanche couleur, couleur des anges, Mon ame etait digne de toi, O Dieu puissant, que de louanges Si tu I’avais faite pour moil Mais pour I’oubli tu m’as formee! D’Ourika termine le sort: C’est un si grand bien que la mort Pour qui ne peut pas etre aimee. Premise Dame: Bravo! Bravo! C’est a mourir. Qu’en pensez-vous. Monsieur Vastey? Vastey: ]e pense a Christophe, Madame. Savez-vous pourquoi il travaille jour et nuit? Savez-vous, ces lubies feroces, comme vous dites, ce travail de forcene . . . C’est pour que desormais il n’y ait plus de par le monde une jeune fille noire qui ait honte de sa peau et trouve dans sa couleur un obstacle a la realisation des vceux de son cceur.^® [Premiere Dame: Enough of politics! Isabelle, do play the harpsichord. She has a ravishing voice, this child. Isabelle, sing for us that beautiful romance, the story of Ourika. Vastey: And who is this charming child, Ourika? Premiere Dame: The heroine of a novel that has all of Paris crying. It is the story of a little black girl reared in an important white family, who suffers because of her color and dies consequently. Vastey: Ah! Interesting! Very interesting! Isabelle, singing: Child of Black Guinea / Distant flower of a scorching sky / Ourika, unfortunate girl / thus deplored her misfortune. / France, 120 Counterstorytelling you who had charmed me / You who greeted my transport / You hid me on your shores / Where I would never be loved. / White color, color of angels / My soul is worthy of you / O powerful God, what praises to you / If you had granted me that. / But for oblivion you made me / The fate of Ourika is ending / Death is such a great deliverance / For one who cannot be loved. Premiere Dame: Bravo! Bravo! It is to die for! What do you think of it. Monsieur Vastey? Vastey: It makes me think of Christophe, Madame. Do you know why he works day and night? Do you know why he undertakes these wild whims, as you call them, this work of a madman. It is so that hence¬ forth, there will no longer be anywhere in the world any little black girl who is ashamed of the color of her skin and who finds in her color the obstacle to the realization of the wishes of her heart.] The extravagant dream of the Black King of Haiti has not yet been realized, for the problems treated in the dilemma of Ourika persist today: Journalist: Who is better? White people or Black? Black South African schoolgirl: White people. Journalist: Why? Schoolgirl: Because they can do whatever they want. Journalist: What would you prefer to be: White or Black? Schoolgirl: I would prefer to be White, but there is nothing I can do about it because I am Black. Journalist: How do you feel about that? Schoolgirl: Sad.^’ It is not only the self-hatred revealed by this child’s dilemma that should be noted, but also the sense of powerlessness that pervades and burdens the entire being of a little girl because of the conse¬ quences of the color of her skin. This profound alienation is repeat¬ edly meditated upon in francophone literature, be it through Mayotte Capecia in Negresse blanche (White Negress) or Je suis Martiniquaise (I am Martinican); Ken, the confused Senegalese girl in Le Baobab fou (The Abandoned Baobab); Kim, the rejected French Vietnamese Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counter story telling I2i girl in Metisse blanche (The White Mestizo); or the Haitian author Gerard Etienne in La pacotille (The Wretched One) and Le Negre cru- cifie (The Crucified Black). Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said have demonstrated in their analyses that colonialism entails control of territory, popula¬ tions, material goods, labor forces, commercial routes, markets, atti- mdes, minds, and desires. As a concept, francophone culture implies the primacy of language and geography. It is a geolinguistic con¬ cept. The geographic underpinnings imply social and political space. From this primacy of geography emerges a structure of attitudes in which valid places are affirmed with such prestige as to hold within their power—the peripheral spaces, that is, the territories, protector¬ ates, colonies.^* The local bourgeoisie, the collaborating elites, and the class of evolues in the colonies made possible the continuing domi¬ nation and interdependence between the metropolis, Paris, and the peripheries. Militarily, commercially, imaginatively, fashionably, aes¬ thetically, socially, morally even, absolute ideological, cultural, and geographic boundaries of distinction between the Western and the Native would be maintained. It was the creation of a \dolent iMani- chaean universe that, according to Frantz Fanon, only the counter- Holence of emancipatory decolonization could shatter. TTie colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the fron¬ tiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-between, the spokesman of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral re¬ flexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal serHce, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behav¬ ior—all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submis¬ sion and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and “bevvilderers” separate the exploited from those in power. . . . the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone in¬ habited by the settler. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service 122 Counterstorytelling of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both foUow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. . . . The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physi¬ cally, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial ex¬ ploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil.^® The violence of the colonial enterprise inherent in the complexity of its double standards was clearly analyzed in 1921 by Rene Maran. What perplexed and anguished this West Indian colonial adminis¬ trator were what Cesaire, Fanon, and Said analyzed subsequently— the double standards of metropolitan Western liberty and egalitar¬ ian values and standards produced domestically, versus authoritarian imperial control, repression, terror, massacre, and brutality practiced abroad. After all if they break down from hunger by the thousands like flies, it is because their country is being developed. Civilization, civilization, pride of the Europeans, and their burying ground for innocents. . . . You build your kingdom on corpses. Whatever you may want, what¬ ever you may do, you act with deceit. At your sight, gushing tears and screaming pain. You are the might which exceeds the right. You aren’t a torch, but an inferno: everything you touch, you consume. . . . . . . The negro question is relevant ... in the course of a challenge in the Chamber of Deputies. The Minister of War, Mr. Andre Lefevre, was not afraid to declare that certain French civil servants had thought that they could conduct themselves in reconquered Alsace-Lorraine as if they were in the French Congo. Such words pronounced, in such a place, are significant. They prove two things—that it is known what is going on in foreign lands and that until now, no one has tried to remedy the abuses, the corruptions and the atrocities which abound there. . . . . . . Let your voice be raised! You must help those who tell things as they are and not as one would want them to be. . . . How right was Montesquieu, who wrote in a passage whose contained indignation vibrates under the golden irony; “They are black from head to toe and they have such flattened noses that it is almost impossible to pity them.” Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 123 . . . Rare, even among the civil servants, are the colonialists who cultivate their minds. They don’t have the strength to resist the atmosphere. They take up alcohol. . . . These and other excesses lead those who indulge in them to the most despicable slackness. That baseness can only cause worry to those who are charged with representing France. . . . They as¬ sume the responsibility for the evils which certain parts of the country of the Blacks suffer, right now. That is because, to advance in rank, it was necessary that they make no waves. Haunted with that idea they gave up all pride, they hesitated, they procrastinated, lied and embellished their lies. They did not want to see. They wanted to hear nothing. They did not have the courage to speak. And moral debility adding itself to their intellectual anemia, with no remorse they wronged their country. I am appealing to you in order to set to rights everything the adminis¬ tration designates under the euphemism “follies.” The fight will be close. You are going to confront slave dealers. It will be harder to fight them than to fight windmills.^o Rene Maran’s preface to Batouala foreshadows by some thirty’ years Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950). The primary differ¬ ence between the documents is one of identification. Cesaire, unlike Maran, does not align himself with his misguided colonial “brothers of France.” Maran’s document is an appeal to the moral and social con¬ science of France, whereas Cesaire’s discourse is an unambiguous indictment in which the native places the settler on trial. More ex¬ plicitly than Maran, Cesaire underscores the “boomerang effect” of mutual dehumanization that is the inevitable consequence of colonial violence: For my part, if I have recalled a few details of these hideous butch¬ eries, it is by no means because I take a morbid delight in them, but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civi¬ lized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it: that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man 124 Counterstorytelling as an animal; accustoms himself to treating him like an animal and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boo¬ merang effect of colonization, that I wanted to point out. 3 ' Counter story telling Ce peuple doit se procurer, vouloir, reussir quelque chose d’impossible. Contre le Sort, contre I’Histoire, contre la Nature 32 [This people must come into its own, must desire, must achieve something impossible. Against fate, against History, against Nature] In general, francophone literary culture is counterstorytelling. As implied by many of the texts on colonialism and racial inequality just examined, most exploitative domination does not seem to be oppres¬ sion to those perpetrating it. Colonialism, economic exploitation, op¬ pression, and patriarchies are rationalized into systems that cause few considerations of conscience. Counterstories attack smugness, self- serving rationalizations, complacency, blindness, and cultural amne¬ sia. Stories, both oral and written, are the oldest, most primordial meeting ground of human experience. Their effectiveness often pro¬ vides the means for forming a new collectivity based on the shared story. Thus, in So long a letter Mariama Ba has the character Rama- toulaye declare, in effect, the dynamics of counterstor^telling: Books knit generations together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress. They enabled you to better yourself. . . . Wliat society refused you they granted}^ (emphasis added) I began this section by stating that francophone literary culture can be analyzed as counterstorytelling, that is, writing, speaking, and per¬ forming from the perspective of the colonized against the colonial dis¬ course. Counterstories dream, imagine, and construct new realities, new communities, and new' traditions against history, against fate, and Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counterstorytelling 125 against nature as it has been defined. Counterstories reveal that what is inevitable, natural, just, and best for some, in fact can be full of pain, exclusion, and both petU’ and major tyranny for others.^^ It is through this process that societies can overcome the unthinking conviction that their worldview is the only one and should be the universal. From this discussion of French colonialism and francophone lit¬ erary culture, I now turn to discussions of decolonization, indepen¬ dence, and postcolonialism as treated in three representative franco¬ phone counterstories. 5 Postscripts Mariama Ba, Menopause, Epistolarity, and Postcolonialism L’Histoire marchait, inexorable. Le debat a la recherche de la voie juste secouait I’Afrique occidentale. Des hommes courageux connurent la prison; sur leurs traces d’autres poursuivirent I’oeuvre ebauchee. Privilege de notre generation, charniere entre deux periodes historiques, I’une de domination, I’autre d’independance. Nous etions restes jeunes et efficaces car nous etions porteurs de projets. L’Independance acquise, nous assistions a I’eclosion d’une Republique, a la naissance d’un hymne et a I’implantation d’un drapeau.^ [History marched on, inexorably. The debate over the right path to take shook West Africa. Brave men went to prison: others following in their footsteps, continued the work begun. It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We remained young and efficient, for we were the messengers of a new design. With independence achieved, we wimessed the birth of a republic, the birth of an anthem and the implantation of a flag.] ^ The early phases of francophone literary culture are characterized by assertion of identity, the reinvention of language, the quest for self¬ hood, the unification of Blacks in the commonwealth of the French Postscripts 127 colonial experience, and the struggle for decolonization and nation¬ hood. The emphasis on language is crucial, for the expropriation of the French language by the early francophone writers was a first step in the decolonization of the mind. The transformation of language is inseparable from social transformation and the reinvention of con¬ cepts of the European and the emancipated self. Decolonization, in¬ dependence, and postcolonialism are redefinitions of nation, self, and what it means to be a man or a woman in the formerly colonized spaces of the globe. During the French colonial phase, African and Antillean men and women demonstrated a fierce solidarity, and their combined voices formed a univocal expression of the aspirations of a people to end colonial domination. As Frantz Fanon points out, “Decolonization unifies the people by the radical decision to remove from it its hetero¬ geneity', and by unifying it on a national, sometimes a racial, basis.” ^ A consequence of decolonization and nationhood has been that Afri¬ can women have become accustomed to speaking out, alongside their men, have come in revelatory contact with the world, notably with other women on a worldwide scale, and have become aware of the im¬ proved status of women in other societies. African women now have the perspective, privilege, political space, and right to attend to their own agenda, apart from that of the African male. The social trans¬ formation in Africa involves not only the couple Europe and Africa, but the African man and the African woman vis-a-vis traditional Afri¬ can society' and mores. The agenda has shifted from the raising of the consciousness of the masses to the expression of intracultural dif¬ ference and consciousness, or perhaps, as Julia Kristeva would say, to “the demassification of cultural difference.” The perplexing new space is that of the African woman in postindependence society'. In broad terms, francophone literary culture is concerned with tran¬ sitional social realities and the ever-shifting construction of the franco¬ phone identity as it responds to the pressures of the political, the economic, the social, and the legal. In this sense the letter should not be a surprising form of literary expression for a francophone woman writer. As an artifact the letter is in transit, crisscrossing borders and barriers, negotiating the national and international in-between places where, in francophone literature, difference, displacement differance, change, and conflict are signified. 128 Counterstorytelling As in the plot of the film Xala (1975) by the Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembene, at the center of Une si longue lettre is the problem of multiple marriages, failed marriages, divorce, decolo¬ nization, and independence. The confessional epistle of the Senega¬ lese woman writer, Mariama Ba, becomes not only a recovery of the letter as an art form, but also an intense psychodynamic exploration and exploitation of the letter as the locus of self-discovery and heal¬ ing. Beyond this, what is unique in Ba is her peculiar yoking of the experience of the middle years of a Black woman’s life to the trau¬ mas of decolonization, independence, and the transition to the state of postcolonialism. The result is that Une si longue lettre constitutes a prolegomenon to a distinctly African poetics of gender, menopause, and the postcolonial condition. In the deeply personal missive of her revelations, Ramatoulaye’s mentations bridge the gap between the personal and the social symbolic. Ramatoulaye’s menopausal transi¬ tion is experienced as the female embodiment of the African national experience of independence. I shall discuss Une si longue lettre in ways that might seem unortho¬ dox to some. My aim is to attempt to catch some of the complexity that lies beneath the surface sentimentality of the text. Menopause and Decolonization Menopause and decolonization have a shared rhetoric. Old medical descriptions of menopause bear a striking similarity to the rhetoric of the colonizer warning the colonized of the fate of regression that would befall those seeking independence. Certain traditions have also treated both menopause and decolonization as disabilities. Medicine and the colonial powers opposed to decolonization have a shared vocabulary of doom and curse that is potentially disabling to those who internalize it. A cultural analysis of reproduction and an ethno- pyschoanalytic analysis of colonialism make the point. First, speaking of menopause, Emily Martin notes the following in The Woman in the Body: This period during which the cycles cease and the female sex hor¬ mones diminish rapidly to almost none at all is called the menopause. The Postscripts 129 cause of the menopause is the “burning out” of the ovaries.... Estrogens are produced in subcritical quantities for a short time after the meno¬ pause, but over a few years, as the final remaining primordial follicles become atretic, the production of estrogens by the ovaries falls almost to zero. Loss of ability to produce estrogen is seen [as] central to a woman’s life; “At the time of the menopause a woman must readjust her life from one that has been physiologically stimulated by estrogen and progester¬ one production to one devoid of those hormones.” ^ Moving beyond the physiological bases of menopause, Martin is very direct concerning the descriptive language of menopause. What is the language in which menopause is described? In meno¬ pause, according to a college text, the ovaries become “unresponsive” to stimulation from the gonadotropins, to which they used to respond. As a result the ovaries “regress.” . . . Diminished, atrophied relics of their former vigorous, functioning selves, the “senile ovaries” are an example of the vivid imagery brought to this process.^ . . . After the menopause a woman is usually unable to bear chil¬ dren. . . . Everywhere else there is regression, decline, atrophy, shrinkage, and disturbance.' Eliminating the hierarchical organization and the idea of a single pur¬ pose to the menstrual cycle also greatly enlarges the ways we could think of menopause.® At this point, it is important to consider Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the politics of the descriptive language of decolonization: During the period of decolonization, the native’s reason is appealed to. He is olfered definite values, he is told frequently that decolonization need not mean regression [emphasis added], and that he must put his trust in the qualities that are well tried, solid and highly esteemed.® The well being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the blood of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer. When a colonialist country, embarrassed by the claims for independence made by a colony, proclaims to the nationalist leaders: “If you wish for independence, take it, and go back to the Middle Ages,” the new'ly independent people tend to 130 Counterstorytelling acquiesce and to accept the challenge; in fact you may see colonialism withdrawing its capital and its technicians and setting up all around the young State the apparatus of economic pressure. The apotheosis of inde¬ pendence is transformed into the curse of independence, and the colonial power through its immense resources of coercion condemns the young nation to regression. In plain words, the colonial power says, Since you want Independence, take it and starve.” Both menopause and colonial independence are transitional water¬ shed experiences. Menopause, as a state, is viewed as regression, de¬ cline, atrophy, shrinkage, disturbance, and the negation of reproduc¬ tion; and, viewed as such, it entails a dramatic change in the identity of the female subject. The move to colonial independence also involves a shift in the identity of the colonized subject in which the social, politi¬ cal, and economic transitions are viewed by segments of the society as “regression, decline, atrophy, shrinkage, disturbance (folly, madness), and the negation of reproduction.” " The tension is between the loss of the capacity to bear and the birth of the nation. Ramatoulaye, the fifty- year-old letter writer at the end of her childbearing years, dispatches a hymn to the new nation after independence, a hymn to marriage, to the couple and the family, drawing our attention to the tie between personal narrative and the narrative of nation. Mariama Ba reveals what Edward Said would call the “sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency” of a woman living on the borderline of histori¬ cal transition.'^ Ba’s statement cited at the beginning of this chapter insists upon this point: “It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We . . . were the messengers of a new design.” Here Ba’s text presents the correspondences and ironies of the co¬ incidence between a woman’s change of life and national emancipa¬ tion. To describe the postcolonial condition as menopausal is to admit a consciousness of the ambiguities in the experiences of struggle for decolonization and independence: it is to view emergent nationhood as a prolongation of trauma and pain, as temporary loss and disable¬ ment and deferral of full blossoming. This is the sense of the words of Ben M’Hidi, leader of the National Liberation Front (FLN), speaking to the young revolutionary Ali Lapointe in The Battle of Algiers: “It is difficult to start a revolution.... More difficult to sustain it.. . and still Postscripts 131 more difficult to win it. But it’s later when we’ve won that the real diffi¬ culties begin. There is still a great deal to do. I hope you are not tired.” The association of the change of life with birth leads to Ba’s refusal of the menopausal state as a psychically, socially, and physically dis¬ abling state. The identity and the discourse of the menopausal woman and the postcolonial subject are experienced as altered and enabled: both are ultimately experienced here as emancipation from subjuga¬ tion. Despite the surface simplicity' of expression, Une si longue lettre is dense with emotional, political, and ironic complexity' springing from defining experiences and from the aftermaths of national trauma, the birth of a nation, abandonment, death of a loved one, and the loss of youth and illusions. Ba experiences the limits of race and gen¬ der and translates the differences, along with her woman’s pain, into a kind of solidarity with women of her class and condition as well as with African men. Ba’s Epistolarity Mariama Ba’s novel, as its title Une si longue lettre suggests, is in fact one long letter with embedded shorter letters, examples of which we shall see within its texture. The letter as a form is silence broken, solitude broken. The epistolary form allows for the dictation of the discourse of the Other; it is a privileged format for inscribing silent awareness and speechlessness into reality, into being, like the experi¬ mental poetry of the surrealists and the Negritude poets and The Color Purple by the African American novelist Alice Walker.’^ The epistle is potentially a particularly feminist form. It permits the notation of the social history of a people, that is, the details of domes¬ tic life, the female perspective on politics, the inclusion of trivia (by male standards), tangential realities, digressions, and, psychoanalyti- cally, the transcription of stream of consciousness and, ultimately, the liberation of the subconscious and the unconscious self—the Other. In particularly feminist terms, it promotes bonding between the cor¬ respondents who share their secrets, intimate fears, aspirations, and political agenda. The letter allows Ramatoulaye a space in which to articulate a wife’s feminist pride that includes a song of praise to do¬ mesticity' and cleanliness: 132 Counterstorytelling Nous sommes vendredi.... L’odeur du savon m’enveloppe. Cette nettete de ma personne m’enchante. Les femmes qu’on appelle “femmes au foyer” ont du merite. Le travail domestique qu’elles assument, et qui n’est pas retribue en monnaies sonnantes, est essentiel dans le foyer. Leur recompense reste la pile de linge odorant et bien repasse, le carre- lage luisant ou le pied glisse, la cuisine gaie oii la sauce embaume. Leur action muette est ressentie dans les moindres details qui ont leur utilite: la, c’est une fleur epanouie dans un vase, ailleurs un tableau aux coloris appropries, accroche au bon endroit. . . . L’ordonnancement du foyer requiert de I’art. (P. 93) [Today is Friday. . . . The smell of soap surrounds me. The cleanliness of my body pleases me. Those women we call housewives deserve praise. The domestic work they carry out, and which is not paid in hard cash, is essential to the home. Their compensation remains the pile of well- ironed, sweet-smelling washing, the shining tiled floor on which the foot glides, the gay kitchen filled with the smell of stews. Their silent action is felt in the least useful detail: over there, a fiower in bloom placed in a vase, elsewhere a painting with appropriate colours, hung up in the right place. The management of the home is an art.] (P. 63) Francophone literature is replete with insurrection, anger, suffer¬ ing, and frustration, but it is also sensuous, sexual, about love, loving, embrace, and, in particular, it contains prayer for deliverance from hatred. Mariama Ba ends her letter with a litany of one-line observa¬ tions, versets, in which she expresses the desire to transcend her pain, to articulate courageously the love she cannot suppress or transform into hatred, and finally to underscore the importance of the couple and the family. The tone is not strident. It is the considered reflection of a middle-aged widow too old for first love, wise enough to face the future, and strong enough to keep her eyes and heart open to happi¬ ness. Les irreversibles courants de liberation de la femme qui fouettent le monde, ne me laissent pas indifferente. . . . Mon coeur est en fete chaque fois qu’une femme emerge de I’ombre. Je sais mouvant le terrain des ac¬ quis, difficile la survie des conquetes: les contraintes sociales bousculent toujours et I’egoisme male resiste. . . . Instruments des uns, appats pour d’autres, respectees ou meprisees, souvent muselees, routes les femmes ont presque le meme destin que des religions ou des legislatures abusives Postscripts 133 ont cimente. . . . Je suis persuadee de I’inevitable et necessaire comple- mentarite de rhomme et de la femme. . . . L’amour si imparfait soit-il dans son contenu et son expression, demeure le joint naturel entre ces deux etres. . . . C’est de I’harmonie du couple que nait la reussite fami- liale. . . . Ce sont toutes les families, riches ou pauvres, unies ou dechi- rees, conscientes ou irreflechies qui constiment la Nation. La reussite d’une nation passe done irremediablement par la famille. . . . (P. 129) [I am not indifferent to the irreversible currents of women’s liberation that are lashing the world. . . . My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows. I know that the field of our gains is unstable, the retention of conquests difficult: social constraints are ever present, and male egoism resists. . . . Instruments for some, baits for others, re¬ spected or despised, often muzzled, all women have almost the same fate, which religions or unjust legislation have sealed. ... I remain persuaded of the inevitable and necessary complementarity of man and woman. . . . Love, imperfect as it may be in its content and expression, remains the natural link between these two beings. . . . The success of the family is born of a couple’s harmony. . . . The nation is made up of all the fami¬ lies, rich or poor, united or separated, aware or unaware. The success of a nation therefore depends inevitably on the family. . . .] (P. 89) Une si longue lettre is addressed from Ramatoulaye to her girlhood friend, Aissatou, across the ocean. Also a letter in a bottle tossed into the sea of humanity, Une si longue lettre is dedicated “To all women, and to men of good will” [p. i; emphasis added]. It is addressed to all who would see the condition of women improved. As in most letters, Une si longue lettre is punctuated within and espe¬ cially at the end by incomplete significance: “Tant pis pour moi si j’ai encore a t’ecrire une si longue lettre” (p. 131; “Too bad for me if once again I have to write you so long a letter,” p. 89). It does not end, but rather stops, in a suspended and elliptical space, perhaps at a thresh¬ old of understanding and self-affirmation. The gallant and amorous Dr. Daouda Deng functions to underscore the fact that in African societies, divorce, widowhood, middle age, and menopause are not synonymous with death for a woman and need not foreclose the pos¬ sibilities of sexuality or marriage. Ramatoulaye has gotten “man off her eyeball” as Sug would say in The Color Purple, at least for now, and consequently there is no resolution of the economic, social, and 134 Counterstorytelling affective dimensions of the marital mourning or menopausal conflicts through a happy remarriage ending. Une si longue lettre resists closure by simply stopping inconclusively, because of a sense of exhaustion, because it is the end of the day, or because Ramatoulaye is running out of words. The addressee-reader is offered a brief valedictory tinged with a note of delay, deferment, and disarticulation. While remarriage is forestalled, the letter ends at a point in the process of personal ex¬ ploration and experimentation heretofore denied Ramatoulaye. In transitional social realities, the need to write often leads to the search for new forms of expression. Most often, existing art forms are recovered, reformulated, and revalued. The “threshold,” “after- math,” or “watershed” literatures of francophone production express their blurred realities and borderline living in mixed genres or hybrid forms. Mariama Ba recovers and exploits the letter maximally. Une si longue lettre is a chronicle of Ramatoulaye’s mind, her body, her age, her time, and her nation as a woman thinks them. As judge and defen¬ dant, with herself and her society on trial, Ramatoulaye’s epistolary apostrophe is, in the jurisprudential sense, a letter missive, a letter dismissory, or a letter of appeal. As a transmission of pain and knowl¬ edge to her African woman friend in America, the letter is an S.O.S. both to African women of her class and polygamous condition around the world and to future generations of readers.'^ When addressing the nation, the letter assumes the cadences of Koranic discourse and the biblical form of versets (as in the apostolic Epistles). As Ramatou¬ laye works her way through the “various sounds and juxtapositions of words,” her letter becomes a “mystic writing pad” where she lives in the full sensuous mystery of language, characters, script, and callig¬ raphy, finding refuge and revelation in their interstices and a phonics of dilTerence and affirmation. Absence, silence, abandonment, solitude, and, one might hazard, a measure of preciousness and sentimentality are the nodal points of European female epistolary expression, as typified in French by Les Lettres portugaises (perhaps written by a man) and, to some extent, in the writings of Isabelle de Charriere. Une si longue lettre seems to pressure these points differently and thereby wrench women’s epis- tolarity from many of its commonplaces and traditions, moving it from the intimate to the community and from the community to the Postscripts 135 nation and beyond. Ramatoulaye, the correspondent, is not a passion¬ ate woman in love, alone and tormented, who through the projective epistolary gesture seeks to turn her lover’s absence into an imag¬ ined presence and her soliloquy into an imagined, fulfilling dialogue.'^ Ramatoulaye’s letter is a retrospective, written, indeed, under the tra¬ ditional epistolary sign of absence, but with the distinction that she has been abandoned utterly—through infidelity, remarriage, and her lover-husband’s death. There is no hope or possibility ever again of dialogue and presence. Ramatoulaye’s letter writing as therapy and retrospective seeks “to penetrate the deepest abysses of being.”'® Polygamy The film Xala begins with a rapid-fire mini-morality play depicting the stages of African nationalist assertion, decolonization, indepen¬ dence, and neocapitalist cooperation in which, significantly, the same actors very obviously simply change costumes. The bright tomorrow of independence strikingly resembles yesterday’s colonialism. The mini-drama is followed by the announcement of the third marriage of El-hadji, a businessman and member of the president’s inner circle. On this occasion a brief but important declaration is made concern¬ ing the importance of polygamy from the male point of view. The hyperassimilated president, who is dressed in a tuxedo, asserts, “La modernite ne doit pas nous faire perdre notre africanite” [Modernity must not cause us to lose our Africanness]. Later, Rama, the daugh¬ ter of El-hadji’s first wife, not only vigorously protests the suffering that the third marriage is causing her mother, but also denounces as liars all men who practice polygamy. El-hadji slaps his daughter and declares, “La polygamie fait partie de notre patrimoine” [Polygamy is an integral part of our national cultural heritage]. The male posi¬ tion seems to be reinforced by the behavior of certain women in the film who perpetuate the system for an array of personal reasons. On the wedding night, only minutes prior to one of many attempted con¬ summations of the marriage by an impotent El-hadji, the mother of the bride-to-be methodically and explicitly instructs her daughter that “woman is not equal to man” and that as a wife it is her duty to be 136 Counterstorytelling “quiet, submissive, and available.” Mariama Ba addresses the issue of polygamy, clearly stating her awareness of the complexity of the social fabric that fetters the sustained independence of women in her society. African Muslim polygamous societies are, by definition, relation¬ ships of permanent Koran-sanctioned social inequahty in which the power of the husband reinforces the domination, subordination, and submission of women. This power is rationalized by the elders and their Koranic explications of what “ought, should, better” be and of what is “right, good, and bad.” As indicated before, Ba’s text is a letter of appeal, in the legal sense, to traditional patriarchal societies to rethink the economic, legal, and affective consequences of polygamy and culturally sanctioned gender inequality. Mariama Ba manages with passion, compassion, and discernment to crystallize the sense of the situation of an educated, professional, intellectual Black mother- wife called to an uncommon destiny by a white woman, her high school teacher, in a polygamous Muslim West African urban cen¬ ter. In Une si longue lettre, Ramatoulaye, a fifty-year-old teacher and mother of twelve, is abandoned, after twenty-five years of marriage, by her first and only love, her husband, Modou Fall, who marries Binetou, the best friend of their oldest daughter, Daba. The letter begins with the correspondent in a state of total divorce and word¬ lessness. Ramatoulaye spins in madness, inertia, and devastation, ac¬ cepting with difficulty what is not there: no husband and no words that can express her spiritual disarray after having been abandoned. The family, especiaUy Ramatoulaye and their daughter, Daba, reel in pain and disbelief. Ramatoulaye laments: Et dire que j’ai aime passionnement cet homme, dire que je lui ai con- sacre trente ans de ma vie, dire que j’ai porte douze fois son enfant. L’adjonction d’une rivale a ma vie ne lui a pas suffi. En aimant une autre, il a brule son passe moralement et materiellement. II a ose pareil renie- ment . . . et pourtant. Et pourtant, que n’a-t-il fait pour que je devienne sa femme! (P. 23) [And to think that I loved this man passionately, to think that I gave him thirty years of my life, to think twelve times over I carried his child. The addition of a rival to my life was not enough for him. In loving someone else, he burned his past, both morally and materially. He dared to com- Postscripts 137 mit such an act of disavowal. And yet, what didn’t he do to make me his wife!] (P. 12) Une si longue lettre systematically analyzes a middle-aged mother- wife’s perspective and mode of thinking in contrast to those of a man. Ramatoulaye presents the woman’s body as a text upon which the abjectness of her social condition is writ large. In contemplating her mirror image, Ramatoulaye regards herself as an abject object: L’doquence du miroir s’adressait a mes yeux. Ma minceur avait disparu ainsi que I’aisance et la rapidite de mes mouvements. Mon ventre saillait sous le pagne qui dissimulait des mollets developpes par I’impressionnant kilometrage des marches qu’ils avaient effectuees, depuis le temps que j’existe. L’allaitement avait ote a mes seins leur rondeur et leur fermete. La jeunesse desertait mon corps, aucune illusion possible. . . . Alors que la femme puise, dans le cours des ans, la force de s’attacher, malgre le vieillissement de son compagnon, I’homme, lui, retrecit de plus en plus son champ de tendresse. Son oeil egoiste regarde par-dessus I’epaule de sa conjointe. II compare ce qu’il eut a ce qu’il n’a plus, ce qu’il a a ce qu’il pourrait avoir. (P. 62) [I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes took in the mirror’s eloquence. I had lost my slim figure, as well as my quickness of movement. My stomach protruded from beneath the wrapper that hid the calves devel¬ oped by the impressive number of kilometers walked since the beginning of my existence. Suckling had robbed my breasts of their round firm¬ ness. I could not delude myself: youth was deserting my body. Whereas a woman draws from the passing years the force of her devotion, despite the aging of her companion, a man, on the other hand, restricts the field of tenderness. His egoistic eye looks over his parmer’s shoulder. He com¬ pares what he had with what he no longer has, what he has with what he could have.] (R 41) The social context of this fiction is not contrived and as a con¬ struct is instructive about the universal condition of women, whether Black, white, yellow, red, brown, European, American, or third world. Traditional twentieth-cenmry Muslim and Black communal societies are hierarchical visions of human connection and, as such, drama¬ tize in the boldest terms the issues, frustrations, concerns, and visions 138 Counterstorytelling of feminism today.'* Structured on gender inequality, these groups reveal that, between men and women there are different ideologies (myths, images, concepts, and ideas) of justice, care, sexuality, and economics. These societies allow little recognition of the dual per¬ spectives in these areas. The woman, especially, has little exercise of choice. On the one hand, the “network” or “web” of interconnected¬ ness in these religious, polygamous traditional contexts seems to pro¬ tect the man from entrapment, betrayal, humiliation, rejection, and deceit by the woman.'® On the other hand, in exchange for protection from isolation, the society offers women roles of dependence, nur- turance, self-sacrifice, submission, and susceptibility to abandonment at the very stage of her development when she is most vulnerable; middle age. The voice in Une si longue lettre is that of a middle-aged woman in mourning, struggling to overcome rejection and the image of herself as an “abject object.” The Body Pre-text The epistolary confession we have been discussing presents the psy¬ chopathology of a middle-aged woman who, as an adolescent, had imagined a life of intimacy and activities through which family re¬ lationships would be woven and connections sustained in an inter¬ dependence of love and care rendered increasingly coherent and safe with the passage of time. Instead, after twenty-five years of marriage, she finds herself in a state of moral nihilism because the loss of affilia¬ tion with her husband and the disruption of her family cohesion are perceived and experienced as a veritable loss of self. Before its tran¬ scendent closing, Une si longue lettre is a statement of mourning in triplicate. The novel begins with the death of Ramatoulaye’s husband. This ostensible mourning of her husband’s death allows her to mourn the greatest transition of her life that had preceded his death by sev¬ eral years: his abandonment of her for an adolescent girl. Occasioned by the same man, this double mourning gives rise to melancholia, self-deprecation, and despair, which exacerbate the third normal tran¬ sition of midlife with its attendant crises of menopause. Ramatoulaye struggles to see herself as worthwhile. The contemplation of the mir¬ ror image of her body reveals to Ramatoulaye, and perhaps to women Postscripts 139 universally, the integration of the social being and the personal being. In this case, with its “inscriptions” that record the travail of twelve childbirths and years of walking, aging, and internalized pain, the body itself is the first text, the pre-text to the actual letter. Indeed, the body is the original secret text in which are encrypted the revelations of the subsequent letter. The letter must be read, then, as a second¬ ary trace, as a postscript to the original body text. Here one intuits the potential of a woman’s body to become a cult to which she alone is the initiate; it is a secret, a chamber, to which she alone holds the key and through which she thinks. Toutes les femmes ont presque le meme destin que des religions ou des legisla¬ tions abusives ont cimente. (P. 129; emphasis added) [All women have almost the same fate, which religions or unjust legisla¬ tion have sealed.] (P. 88) Polygamy and abandonment can entail emotional as well as eco¬ nomic humiliation. The consequences of Modou’s newfound pas¬ sions are economically devastating for the family. Ramatoulaye and the twelve children are left almost destitute except for her teacher’s salary. They no longer have the car that Alodou drives, while the new mother-in-law drives a new car. Binetou, the new wife, has two new Alfa-Romeos, which she drives according to fancy. And then there is the affective humiliation of the statutory conjugal Hsits from Modou on a tidy, routine rotational basis. Despite her abiding love, Ramatou¬ laye can no longer suffer his deceitful embrace. She confides: Je n’etais done pas trompee. Je n’interessais plus Alodou et le savais. J’etais abandonnee: une feuille qui voltige mais qu’aucune main n’ose ramasser, aurait dit ma grand’mere. (P. 77) [I was not deceived, therefore. I no longer interested Alodou, and I knew it. I was abandoned: a fluttering leaf that no hand dares to pick up, as my grandmother would have said.] (P. 57) Ramatoulaye describes herself as a fluttering leaf that no one dared pick up. And yet Ramatoulaye picks herself up and reaches out across the distance, across the sea, to her best girlhood friend, Aissatou, who presently lives and works in VC’ashington, D.C. One of the felici¬ tous consequences of Ramatoulaye’s abandonment is the bonding that 140 Counterstorytelling occurs between the two modern women of the same ethnic, national class who share a mutually inclusive reality that neither had thereto¬ fore discussed. Aissatou’s husband, Mowdo, had inflicted upon her what, despite tradition, was for her an irreparable, unpardonable hurt. Before Modou, Mowdo had also taken a younger wife at the insis¬ tence of his mother, who had always despised Aissatou. On the day of his marriage, Aissatou gathered her four children and disappeared without a trace, leaving only a letter: Mawdo, Les Princes dominent leurs sentiments, pour honorer leurs de¬ voirs. Les “autres” courbent leur nuque et acceptent en silence un sort qui les brime. Voila, schematiquement, le reglement interieur de notre societe avec ses clivages insenses. Je ne m’y soumettrai point. Au bon- heur qui fut notre, je ne peux lui substituer celui que m proposes au- jourd’hui. Tu veux dissocier I’Amour tout court et I’amour physique. Je ne retorque que la communion charnelle ne peut etre sans I’acceptation du coeur, si minime soit-elle. . . . Si tu peux procreer sans aimer . . . je te trouve vil. . . . d’un cote, moi, “ta vie, ton amour, ton choix,” de I’autre, “la petite Nabou a supporter par devoir.” . . . Je me depouille de ton amour, de ton nom. Vetue du seul habit valable de la dignite, je poursuis ma route. Adieu. (P. 50) [Mawdo, Princes master their feelings to fulfill their duties. “Others” bend their heads and, in silence, accept a destiny that oppresses them. That, briefly put, is the internal ordering of our society, with its absurd divisions. I will not yield to it. I cannot accept what you are offering me today in place of the happiness we once had. You want me to draw a line between heartfelt love and physical love. I say that there can be no union of bodies without the heart’s acceptance, however little that may be. . . . If you can procreate without loving ... I find you despicable. ... on one side, me, “your life, your love, your choice,” on the other, “young Nabou, to be tolerated for reasons of duty.” . . . Clothed in my dignity, the only worthy garment, I go my way. Good-bye.] (Pp. 31-32) Aissatou’s departure is an act of refusal in which she transcends victimization, asserts her dignity, withdraws from participation in a system that humiliates her, and makes the move to self-reliance. Ais¬ satou’s example sustains Ramatoulaye. Postscripts 141 There is a man willing to pick up Ramatoulaye “fluttering like a leaf” —the handsome, wealthy, intellectual assemblyman, the medical doctor Daouda Deng, who had asked her to marry him when they were teenagers. His love for her has never wavered. He declares that still at age fifty, perhaps at the height of her menopausal transition, her grace has kindled his passion. Ramatoulaye is warmed by his expres¬ sion of love, but she sends him a letter of regret, explaining that while she holds him in high esteem, esteem is not enough for marriage, whose snares she knows from experience. Perhaps more important, Ramatoulaye’s solidarity with other married women and her refusal to be complicit in the perpetuation of the abuses of polygamy lead her to point out that, recently abandoned herself because of a woman, she could not lightly impose herself between Dr. Deng and his family. Tu crois simple le probleme polygamique. Ceux qui s’y meuvent con- naissent des contraintes, des mensonges, des injustices qui alourdissent leur conscience pour la joie ephemere d’un changement. Je suis siir que I’amour est ton mobile, un amour qui exista bien avant ton mariage et que le destin n’a pas comble. . . . C’est avec une tristesse infinie et des larmes aux yeux que je t’offre mon amide. (P. 100) [You think the problem of polygamy is a simple one. Those who are in¬ volved in it know the constraints, the lies, the injusdces that weigh down their consciences in return for the ephemeral joys of change. I am sure you are motivated by love, a love that existed well before your marriage and that fate has not been able to satisfy. ... It is with infinite sadness and tear-filled eyes that I offer you my friendship.] (P. 68) Farmata, the messenger, returns to act out the pain apparently dis¬ played by Daouda upon reading the letter. Farmata severely criticizes Ramatoulaye for rejecting Daouda. She does not understand Rama¬ toulaye’s empathy and solidarity with Daouda’s wife, or that women who question the justice of polygamy must not perpetuate its injus¬ tices, even for, or perhaps especially for, personal comfort. Further, Farmata fails to comprehend Ramatoulaye’s deferral, which does not foreclose any relationship with Dr. Deng. Ramatoulaye wishes to as¬ sert that sometimes a woman might, as she says, “want to be something else besides a mother” or a wife: “Je souhaitais ‘autre chose’ a vivre. 142 Counterstorytelling Et cette ‘autre chose’ ne pouvait etre sans I’accord de mon coeur” (p. 102); “I wanted ‘something else.’ And this ‘something else’ was impossible without the full agreement of my heart” (p. 70). Anance’s Web: Weaving the Connections Through the bonding between two women, both traumatized by aban¬ donment and by the “rights” of men in a polygamous society, the reader observes the variable definition of family. It is the support of her friend in moral, spiritual, and financial terms that sustains Rama- toulaye and her family during their time of stress. Family, including the friend Aissatou, is the “smallest organized, durable network of Kin and non-Kin who interact daily, providing the domestic needs of children and assuring their survival.” Often, as in Une si longue let- tre and in The Color Purple, family culminates in a network of women abandoned by men. Mariama Ba writes with deft simplicity. In a passage where Rama- toulaye is ostensibly talking about books, one discovers a Riffaterrian “paradoxical depth of the surface”:^^ Les livres te sauverent. Devenus ton refuge, ils te soutinrent. . . . Puis¬ sance des livTCS, invention merveilleuse de I’astucieuse intelligence hu- maine. Signes divers, associes en sons; sons differents qui moulent le mot, agencement de mots d’ou jaillit I’idee, la Pensee, I’Histoire, la Sci¬ ence, la Vie . . . Les livres soudent des generations au meme labeur com- mun qui fait progresser. Ils te permirent de te hisser. Ce que la societe te refusait, ils te I’accorderent. (P. 51) [Books saved you. Having become your refuge, they sustained you. . . . The power of books, this marvelous invention of astute human intelli¬ gence. Various signs associated with sound; different sounds that form the word. Juxtaposition of words from which spring the idea. Thought, History, Science, Life . . . Books knit generations together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress. . . . They enabled you to better yourself. . . . What society refused you they granted.] (P. 32) The passage stands out because it seems to be a graft,^^ an interven¬ tion, that describes the text’s own procedures. It repeats the structures Postscripts 143 it is analyzing, and it seems an act of deconstruction in that it consists of moving from one concept to another by reversing and displacing a conceptual order. Ba’s meta-writing reveals the dynamics of Rama- toulaye’s, as well as her own, WTiting processes, and it suggests what Ba hopes will be the reception and interpretation of Ramatoulaye’s letter, Ba’s book, by Aissatou, the first of generations of readers. While the passage is very much about the power of reading for all Africans, in context it also suggests metonymically or through displacement the power of writing and the dire need of African women, as repre¬ sented by Aissatou, to read books wTitten by African women, as repre¬ sented by Ramatoulaye. Further, the passage pressures differance in that it underscores and bridges the gap of significance between the let¬ ter as correspondence—postal missive —and the letter as correspon¬ dence between sound and sense, as printed character, representation of sound. There is a desire to remrn to the African woman the power to live in language and not submit to it, to find herself in the let¬ ters, sounds, and juxtapositions. Writing is difficulty, effort, struggle, work, and resistance to predescription and prescription; but, above all, it is refuge, freedom, and power “granted” when a woman writes the letters that correspond to the sounds emanating from within. Une si longue lettre must also be read as the transcription of a phonics of difference. Ramatoulaye’s letter is an epistolary cogito, a groping toward sig¬ nificance, self-determination, self-definition, and subjectivity in which she thinks in order to wTite—in order to be. This groping for signifi¬ cance is evident in the passage of unusual density’ cited previously wherein Ramatoulaye searches for a phonics that is distinctly her own. The missive is transmission of knowledge, a sharing of pain, a trac¬ ing of feminine affect and a search for a language of her own. It is a letter of grief, transfiguration, and conversion in which Ramatou¬ laye wishes to shed her capacity’ for self-sacrifice. Like the journal, the dream, and the daydream, the letter allows intimacy with self and emergence of the unconscious self—the Other that has almost lost its voice under the weight of inequality’, subordination, submission, and self-abnegation. As a process of self-examination, the epistolary form allows Ramatoulaye to place herself on trial —dialoguing with herself, quarreling with herself as judge and defendant. As wTiter, Ramatou¬ laye is author of self and Other. Ramatoulaye’s letter represents the 144 Counter story telling unconscious or the discourse of the Other. The Other is therefore the place, the letter itself, in which is constituted the “I” who speaks with her/herself, and who hears her true voice for the first time. There is, of course, a change in register: epistolarity normally associated with the privacy of the “I” is here socialized, politicized, nationalized, and even internationalized by Aissatou’s location. The link between writing, textuality, and difference is enacted. Writing in Ba’s text is perform¬ ing the construction of an alternative personal consciousness within the nation—the demassification of difference. The postcolonial and the poststructural are conjoined in the correspondents, Ramatoulaye and Aissatou, who are mutually constructed disseminations of pain. Ramatoulaye finds salvation and refuge through writing: she does not speak out^ rather she writes herself out of her passivity of depen¬ dence, self-abnegation, and paralysis of initiative, action, choice, and thought. Finally, the mother of twelve gives birth to herself through the process of parthenogenesis that is in fact her act of letter writing for survival. Her life had been oriented toward others: virtue resided in self-sacrifice and a reluctance to judge or hurt others.^"* Ramatoulaye’s letter continues with some refiections on the nature of the mother-daughter relationship and particularly with observa¬ tions on the distinction between love and friendship. L’Amitie a des grandeurs inconnues de I’amour. EUe se fortifie dans les difficultes, alors que les contraintes massacrent I’amour. File resiste au temps qui lasse et desunit les couples. File a des elevations inconnues de I’amour. (P. 79) [Friendship has splendours that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wear¬ ies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love.] (P. 54) One particular friendship, brief but of profound importance, was with her high school teacher—another woman, a white woman. The middle years of a woman’s life readily appear to be a time to re¬ turn to the unfinished business of adolescence. For Ramatoulaye, it is the remembrance of the utopian experience of the girls’ school, with its white headmistress who called her girls to an uncommon destiny, the recollection of which helps Ramatoulaye orient her des¬ perate condition toward the future and visions of transformation. Postscripts 145 self-enhancement, self-development, and a new morality of love that includes obligations to self. Aissatou, je n’oublierai jamais la femme blanche qui, la premiere, a voulu pour nous un destin “hors du commun.” . . . Des amities s’y nouaient, qui ont resiste au temps et a I’eloignement. Nous etions de veritables soeurs destinees a la meme mission emancipatrice. . . . Nous sortir de I’enlisement des traditions, superstitions et moeurs; nous faire apprecier de multiples civilisations sans reniement de la notre; elever notre \ision du monde, cultiver notre personnalite, renforcer nos qualites, mater nos defauts; faire fructifier en nous les valeurs de la morale universelle; voila la tache que s’etait assignee Tadmirable directrice. . . . Elle sut decouvTir et apprecier nos qualites. . . . Comme je pense a elle! . . . c’est que la voie choisie par notre formation et notre epanouisssement ne fut point hasard. Elle Concorde avec les options profondes de I’Afrique nouvelle, pour promouvoir la femme noire. (Pp. 27-28) [Aissatou, I will never forget the white woman who was the first to desire for us an “uncommon” destiny. Friendships were made that have en¬ dured the test of time and distance. We were true sisters, destined for the same mission of emancipation. ... To lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of cityli- zations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us: these were the aims of our admirable headmistress. She knew how to discover and ap¬ preciate our qualities. . . . How I think of her! ... it is because the path chosen for our training and our blossoming has not been fortuitous. . . . It has accorded with the profound choices made by New Africa for the promotion of the black woman.] (Pp. 15-16) Returning to the meta-writing passage cited earlier allows for clo¬ sure as well as overture: Books / knit / generations / together. . . . The syntagmatic development of this sentence progressively signifies and complicates the idea of text. The field of signification expands from the personal texmal (books) to the social, economic, and aesthetic textile (knit), to the corporal and biopsychological network of human connection (generations), and finally to the spirimality of cultural identity, solidarity, and community (together). Perhaps the opera- 146 Counter story telling tive word is knit, which invites the contemplation of African literary, genealogical, intellectual, social, political, and textual arachnologies or Anance’s web, which finds its correspondence in the telegraph and telephone wires that establish the networks of communication in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s novels, especially Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle. In Dogon mythology, the relationship between text and knit¬ ting, or speech and weaving, is made explicit: SPEECH WHICH IS INSIDE CLOTH By now, we expect that the origin of the relationship made in Dogon my¬ thology between speech and weaving has been made sufficiently clear, a relationship of both a physiological order, since the mouth organs are parts of a loom that “weaves” the sound material emitted by the larynx and gives it color and form, and of a social order because all the individual “words” intertwine like threads weaving human relationships together and making, as it were, a wide band of cloth that continues un¬ interrupted from generation to generation. If speech is weaving, weaving inversely is “speech” in the broad sense because it is created by human activity. It is also “speech” in the re¬ stricted sense because the threads intertwine like elements of language, animated by the regular creaking of the pulley and the sound of the tens¬ ors and shuttle. This combination of sounds is “the voice of Nommo who speaks softly.” The mysterious message registered in the cloth de¬ signs is enigmatic, and in the system of correspondence, this speech t>T)e is associated with the “speech of weaving.” The thread receives this mes¬ sage and becomes a band of cloth. Before it can be altered, its substance requires speech.^s As secondary trace or as postscript to the original menopausal body text, Une si longue lettre weaves the connections between the middle-aged woman’s body and the postcolonial condition, between the personal and the social symbolic. The significances respectively of menopause and of the nation’s coming into being are altered by their juxtaposition and friction in the text. Just as independence from colo¬ nial rule is experienced as birth as well as the prolongation of trauma and pain, menopause is presented as loss as well as redefinition and rebirth. Writing as a connotative system is progress as well as loss and incomplete significance. Writing is contribution to the progress Postscripts 147 of society, which is itself “in transit,” in transition, moving from state to state as in the situations of the menopausal w'oman, the birth of the nation, and the trajectory of the letter crisscrossing political, intel¬ lectual, psychological, and social boundaries. The letter-book knits a network of understanding between Ramatoulaye and Aissatou, and it dreams that there are possibilities for life other than those of the life lived. The letter is so effective because, in its effect, it is insinuative and noncoercive while seeking to subvert the dominant ideology and mind-set that have been lived and experienced as oppression. The closing of the letter points to the healing dimension of Ba’s episto- larity as therapeutic storytelling, as “a writing cure,” and an act of psychic self-preservation and a counter to subordination. “Decolonized” and “postcolonial,” not unlike “menopausal,” are imperfect markers of change. Neither decolonization nor postcolo¬ nialism is a completed act or state. Both decolonization and post¬ colonialism or postindependence are ongoing temporalities and pro¬ cesses of political, social, and psychological revaluation of nation, race, couple, family, and gender. Letter writing is an act of incomplete significance or severed communication, and, as such, it is appropriate to the transcription of the disjointed temporality’ and ongoing cultural questioning, revaluation, and healing that is the postindependence condition: Ba’s valedictory suggests that the African woman will take up the pen again if she does not find silence without oppression. Ramatoulaye lives in a culture with inherited laws that no longer work for her. Her story is a statement of refusal in which she tran¬ scends victimization, asserts her dignity, and withdraws from partici¬ pation in a system that humiliates her. Her love for Africa, her hopes for the nation, and her belief in the importance of the couple and the family are unshakable. The tension is between changing and evolving. Fundamentally, what Ramatoulaye seems to long for is to see the laws that govern polygamy evolve so as not to be out of sync with, or even in opposition to, gender equality’ by taking into account the changing economic, political, and cultural forces of postindependence Africa and their impact on the reconstruction of the identity’ of the Afri¬ can w’oman. 6 Moroccan Independence Status Inconsistency, Role Conflict, and Consciousness in Tahar ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child Morocco, the Last and the First Dieu est clement. . . Cette naissance annonce fertilite pour la terre, paix et prosperite pour le pays. Vive Ahmed! Vive le Maroc! . . . La derniere phrase fit aussi du bruit. La police fran^aise n’aimait pas “Vive le Maroc!” Les militants nationalistes ne savaient pas que cet artisan riche etait aussi un bon patriote.' [God is merciful . . . This birth will bring fertility to the land, peace and prosperity to the country. Long Live Ahmed! Long live Morocco! . . . The last sentence caused a stir. The French police did not at all care for the “Long live Morocco!” The nationalist militants did not know that this rich potter was also a good patriot.] ^ Moroccan Independence 149 In The Sand Child the peculiar evolution of circumstances surround¬ ing the birth of a child coincides with the final days of Morocco’s transition from colony to independent state. Morocco’s unique des¬ tiny in the history of French colonial domination has a symmetry that verges on the poetic. According to accounts,^ on November 17, 1955, amid great jubilation, Muhammed V returned to his homeland from imposed exile. His first words called upon God to bless Morocco and its people. Immediately, legal preparations for severance from France began. On March 2, 1956, Morocco became the first Maghrebi coun¬ try to w'in formal independence from France, and Muhammad V, the Prince of the Faithful, stepped back onto the Moroccan throne.^ In 1415, Morocco had been the first country to be attacked when Europe came into its age of colonial domination. In 1912, Morocco was the last Maghrebi country to be colonized. When the slide to colonial domination began, Morocco’s culture remained secure and, in time, became the means through which Moroccans ousted the colonialists from the land. The French took Algiers in 1830 and, from their Alge¬ rian base, launched attacks against Morocco. The French remained in Algeria until 1962. In 1844, French troops defeated Moroccan troops at the battle of Isly, the first major defeat for Morocco in al¬ most three hundred years. Yet Moroccans maintained their cultural independence. The strength of Morocco’s political identity, as well as the sharifian monarchy’s ability to actively set the French, Spanish, German, and American powerholders against each other, were con¬ tributing factors in Morocco’s continued cultural independence, and in its ability to remain outside the French camp for eighty-one years after Algeria became a colony and thirty-one years after Tunisia fell.^ The Moroccan novel L’Enfant de sable (The Sand Child), by Tahar ben Jelloun, is a richly puzzling text. What can be said about this novel, which is not one text but many because of a semiotic process of suspension and circularity of meaning, or mise en abyme of con¬ flicting narrative subversions by a succession of unreliable trickster storytellers? After the disappearance of the original storyteller, Amar, Salem, Fatouma, and the blind troubadour—each in his own way— offer versions, falsifications, and alterations of the follow-up to the story of the life of Ahmed/Zahra. The competing discourses of the storytellers underscore the nomadic namre of truth. 150 Counterstorytelling The conjugal relations, the family drama, and the backdrop of post¬ independence economic and ecological ruin make The Sand Child a culturally complex tale. In the broadest terms, it is concerned with dispossession and thwarted desire. Sociologically, The Sand Child is a tale of intragroup and intergroup conflict. Gender, class, language, religion, and nationality interact, coUide even, with almost equal force in this Arabic, Muslim, feudal, traditional context. In psychoanalytic terms. The Sand Child is a tale of phallic aggression and impotence, male and female role conflict, and gender undecidability. Through¬ out the text these issues are demonstrated imagistically, thematically, and structurally as two sides of the same ideological and sexual coin. The rare coin is a motif in the text: le battene, with its image of frater¬ nal twins who are indistinguishable except for a beard on the young man, signifies the inner life, that which is buried in the belly, whereas the zahir coin signifies the visible, the apparent. Culturally, The Sand Child struggles with issues fundamental to Moroccan society: patri- lineality, patriarchy, and the blood-centered rituals of sacrifice, mar¬ riage, birth, and circumcision. The issues that underlie the blood-centered Moroccan rituals are essential to the structure of Jelloun’s The Sand Child and are of abiding and universal concern. The Prophet’s birthday concerns the truth of the universe. Where does truth reside? How can humans connect with truth, the eternal, and the transcendent? First, marriage addresses the lives of individuals on earth. What are human beings? What does it mean to be a man, to be a woman? Is the universe’s truth mindful of them? What is the male-female connection to be? How should it be organized so that humans beneficently reproduce themselves on earth?® The Great Mountaintop Sacrifice is a richly overdetermined male ritual. In this observance, the ram is used as a substitute for the son Ibrahim, whom the father was willing to sacrifice to God. With his weighty phallus and testicles and his remarkable reproduc¬ tive capacities, the ram is the epitome of natural maleness. The ram’s blood verifies the male’s dominance of transcendent birth. The ram represents hope beyond the limits of this world and the infant repre¬ sents hope within it. The sacrifice myth and practice build a reality in which males give birth to that which is eternal and enduring, in con¬ trast to females who give birth to that which is temporal and limiting.'^ All male heads of traditional households perform the sacrifice. Moroccan Independence 151 Blood-centered rituals represent humanity itself, the red lifeblood and the red in which all humans are born. The Great Sacrifice ex¬ plores the connections betw'een the earthly dilemmas. With knife and slit flesh, the sacrifice metaphorically and metaphysically enacts sexual intercourse and uses its connective power to fuse man to God, to gain immortality, and to achieve birth into transcendence, thereby forever breaking death’s bonds and connecting with everlasting truth. Mo¬ roccan rituals not only play upon the most basic experiences of life — birth, intercourse, and death—but systematically combine them with the physical attributes of the male form (a single erect figure in white like the father in Jelloun’s tale) to create a powerful basic-level experi¬ ence that physically confirms the male’s dominance over these pro¬ cesses.* With these observations in mind, w’e must approach Jelloun’s postindependence Morocco with its evolving identities and the power of the blood-centered traditions. A Tale of Contrasexuality On a decouvert la veritable identite de mon oncle le jour de sa mort. Depuis nous vivons un cauchemar. J’ai pense qu’en rendant publique cette histoire on en ferait une legende, et, comme chacun sait, les m^thes et les legendes sont plus supportables que la stricte realite. (Pp. 207-8) [My uncle’s true identity was discovered on the day of his death. Ever since, we have lived through a nightmare; I thought that making this story public might turn it into a legend; as everybody knows, myths and legends are more bearable than harsh reality.] (P. 163) ^ A Moroccan father and mother have seven daughters. The mother feels inadequate and unfulfilled as a woman, wife, and mother, while the father feels that he is less than a man because they have not pro¬ duced a son. The mother is pregnant an eighth time. Having consulted the stars as well as a sage, an old midwife, the father announces that the eighth child will be a male. In league with the father and having been handsomely paid, the midwife corroborates the father’s predic¬ tions and at the birth declares the eighth daughter to be a blessed male. The child is named Ahmed. According to Koranic tradition, the rite of circumcision must follow'. The father thrusts his index finger w’here 152 Counter story telling there is not a penis and sacrifices the tip of his finger. Blood spatters on the face of the barber and on the thighs of the heavily swaddled infant, who cries as on cue. The witnesses and onlookers are satis¬ fied. The circumcision scene is rich and fascinating in its tentacular range of signification for the development of the text as well as for Ahmed, who will later assume the female name Zahra. The excision of the finger as a mock circumcision evokes clitoridectomy as practiced in other patriarchal African societies. Texmally, it foreshadows, among other events, the sacrifice of an ox that runs about headless until it drops, Ahmed’s obsessive fear of her head being separated from the body, and Ahmed/Zahra’s castration of the circus bully who repeat¬ edly had sodomized her. Like the ox, he is frantic until he finally bleeds to death. Ahmed will contemplate his/her first menstruation as “the splash from a belated circumcision” (p. 30). Psychologically and affectively, the scene pre-scribes into her destiny denial of the plea¬ sure principle, thwarted desire, and the extent to which Ahmed will live cut off from Zahra, that is, radically divorced from herself. Thus begins the remarkable de-gendered, ungendered, and cross-gendered existence of Ahmed/Zahra. The Sand Child can be read as a tale of “passing,” of postmodern transvestism in which masculinity is a per¬ formance. It is not a tale of fashionable androgyny, but rather an analysis of the coerced and survivalist contrasexuality of the domi¬ nated subject in a patriarchal society. Ahmed/Zahra’s life begins as a reversal of roles that turns her status upside-down. She is reared and socialized as a male and the exclusive patrilineal heir to her father’s fortune, with all the power and authority over the sisters that is the birthright of Arabic males. Zahra enjoys her station, status, and prestige as male and does not at all wish to trade places or stams with the sisters or mother. As time passes, Ahmed be¬ comes more and more determined to give her status an unchallenged legitimacy. To guard the secrecy of Ahmed’s gender, fate and/or the father seem to silence the women who are privy to the masquerade. The sage old midwife, Lalla Rhadia, dies suddenly. For the mother, the stress of the life-lie is too burdensome, and as a consequence she retreats into a gentle madness and silence, losing her hearing and sight. The mother’s muted madness, with the self walled up in silent sub- Moroccan Independence 153 mission, stands in counterpoint to the comoilsive figure of the female condition, Fatima. Ahmed/Zahra decides to take a wife and chooses the last among women: an unattractive cousin no other man would choose as a wife, the wretched Fatima with her limp and epileptic fits. Ahmed’s ges¬ ture raises Fatima to the rank of first among women; as the first of four daughters to marry and to marry well, she is singularly honored. Ahmed, a religious man, assumes that their marriage will be “white,” that is, chaste. Being grateful for her elevation and deliverance from the excessively cloistered existence imposed by her family, for whom she was an embarrassment, the epileptic Fatima expected no sexual involvement. “Merci de m’avoir sorti de I’autre maison. Nous serons frere et soeur! Tu as mon ame et mon coeur, mais mon corps appar- tient a la terre et au diable qui I’a devaste!” (p. 76) [Thank you for getting me out of the other house. We will be brother and sister. You have my soul and my heart, but my body belongs to the earth and the devil that laid it waste] (p. 53). Fatima’s presence eventually en¬ rages Ahmed and occasions the first formulations of protest against the religiously and culturally prescribed and sanctioned submission of women to the will of men. Limping, built into life at an odd angle, Fatima is, moreover, a distorted mirror image of Ahmed/Zahra, and one that Ahmed grows to despise: La presence de Fatima me troublait beaucoup. Au depart j’aimais la difficulte et la complexite de la situation. Ensuite je me mis a perdre patience. Je n’etais plus maitre de mon univers et de ma solitude. Get etre blesse a mes cotes, . . . cene femme courageuse et desesperee, qui n’etait plus une femme, . . . cette femme qui n’aspirait meme pas a etre un homme,.. . cette femme qui ne parlait presque jamais, murmurait de temps en temps une phrase ou deux, s’enfermait dans un long silence, lisait des li\Tes de mystiques et dormait sans faire le moindre bruit, cette femme m’empechait de dormir. (P. 77) [Fatima’s presence disturbed me. At first I liked the complexity and dif¬ ficulty of the situation. Then I began to lose patience with that wounded creature at my side. . . . that grave, desperate woman who was no longer a woman, who didn’t even aspire to be a man, but to be nothing at all, that woman who almost never spoke, murmuring a sentence or two from 154 C ounters tory telling time to time, but enclosing herself in a long silence, reading books of mysticism and sleeping.] (P. 54) There is hardly a character in The Sand Child who experiences a fulfilling sexual life, and the details of Fatima’s situation dramatize thwarted sexuality in the concretest of terms: “Pudeur et chastete regnaient dans notre grande piece. J’essayais un jour de voir pendant qu’eUe dormait si elle ne s’etait pas excisee ou cousu les levres du vagin. Je soulevai les draps et decouvris qu’elle portait une espece de gaine forte autour du bassin, comme une culotte de chastete, blindee, decourageant le desir ou alors le provoquant pour mieux le casser” (p. 77) [Modesty and chastity reigned in our large room. One day as she lay asleep, I tried to see if she had been circumcised or if the lips of her vagina had been sewed up. I gently lifted the sheet and found that she was wearing a strong girdle around her pelvis, like a steel chastity belt, to discourage desire—or to provoke, and destroy it, aU the more] (p. 54). In Fatima the pain of the psyche and the body, unsatisfied desires, and woman’s inferior status converge, fuse, and convulse in epilepsy. A twisted reflection of Ahmed’s condition with “the inverted emotions that come from a betrayed body,” Fatima surrenders to her death wish in an epileptic fit. As time passes, Ahmed’s capacity to mute or silence his woman’s will becomes increasingly difficult. Ahmed’s bound breasts and late- adolescent physiology place her at odds for the flrst time with her prior socialization as a male. Ahmed/Zahra experiences, as she states it, “la resistance du corps au nom” (p. 46) [the resistance of the body to the name] (p. 30). The question for Ahmed/Zahra becomes “Who am I and who is the other?” She declares, “Je sentais le besoin de me guerir de moi-meme, de me decharger de cette solitude lourde” (p. 46) [I felt the need to cure myself of myself, to unburden myself of the heavy solitude] (p. 31). Particularly in the chapters “The Houseless Woman” and “The Man with a Woman’s Breasts,” there are mirrors, mirror stage enactments, private exhibitionism, self-examination, masturba¬ tion, orgasm in a steamy bath. The autoerotic acts put him literally in touch with her, the absent Other. There are anonymous letters from a secret, trustworthy male admirer. In a secret journal, Ahmed records fears, curiosities, and, above all, desires. The letters and the journal constitute a rich psychoanalytic space of release. They are “the writ- Moroccan Independence 155 ing cure” that allows the initial surfacing of the unconscious, the re¬ lease of subjectivity, the expression of the repressed, oppressed, and denied self, the emergence of the Other, as in Julia Kristeva’s distinc¬ tion between Other/other, or the stranger within. The autoeroticism and this writing exercise are in time apparently insufficient release and exteriorization, for Ahmed runs away to life. Mise en abyme The narrative strategies of this text are as interesting as the life or fic¬ tions of Ahmed/Zahra. In its counterdiscourse on the identity, status, and consciousness of the North African man and woman. The Sand Child is not antimodernist in its novelistic techniques, for it builds on many of the characteristics of high modernist prose as exemplified by, for example, James Joyce and William Faulkner; the rejection of narra¬ tive objectivity’, variations of time sequence, stream of consciousness or interior monologue, experimentation and breaks with traditional storj’telling techniques, alternative endings and beginnings. The saga is being recounted in installments on consecutive days of the week be¬ ginning with Thursday, the day of male births, and by a troubadour who disappears at this point in the story. However, among those as¬ sembled to hear the tale are alleged witnesses to Ahmed/Zahra’s fate. Each stor\’teller discredits his predecessor and claims to have irrefut¬ able evidence. The subsequent installments chronicle Ahmed/Zahra’s adventures and protean incarnations, past and present, as, among others, circus performer Zahra Amirat Lhob, that is. Princess of Love and female impersonator and male impersonator, who as leader of a band of thieves, occasionally fancies a male rival of rough beauty whom she has beaten into submission and to whom she bares her splendid, irresistible nakedness. All the storytellers are devoured or discredited by their own fictions. The narrative strategies almost overdetermine the undecidability of meaning. A hermeneutical impasse seems to result from the mul¬ tiple, competing interpretative possibilities that are not resolved or do not seem to converge. The text invites certain readings that it subse¬ quently resists, if not jettisons. In The Sand Child, like grains of sand too tightly grasped in the palm of the hand, meaning slips away. One 156 Counterstorytelling might be tempted to suggest that The Sand Child is simply an ex¬ ample of the Oriental or Arabian art of storytelling. And yet Tahar ben Jelloun, Moroccan, poet, essayist, and novelist, is also, unknown to many, an ethnopsychiatrist like the Martinican Frantz Fanon, au¬ thor of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon, who practiced in Algeria, concentrated in his writing on the study of the alienation, self-aversion, neuroses, and psychoses that can accom¬ pany the arbitrary, coercive imposition of a foreign language and the resultant consequences of assimilation and the internalization of the values of the dominating or superordinate Other upon an individual, indeed, upon an entire culture. It is difficult for me to accept that the discourse of The Sand Child is innocent, unworldly, or sociaUy, politi¬ cally, and existentially uncharged. In other words, it is not simply a question of telling an oriental tale. The choice of form implies an ideo¬ logical stance. Modern thought and experience have taught us to be sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying the 0 /other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the sociopolitical role of intellectuals, and in the great value set on skeptical critical consciousness. The ques¬ tions, then, for me, are what precisely does Ahmed/Zahra represent as transvestite? More precisely, what does the vestmental code repre¬ sent? What is portrayed in the suffering for want of love, the sexual inversion, the masturbation, the authoritarian father, the mad mother, the epileptic cousin, and, finally, the absurd wandering from culture to culture? As Ahmed/Zahra stands “une passerelle reliant deux reves” (P- 173) [on a bridge linking two dreams] (p. 135), the overwhelming sensation for the reader is that of being neither/nor, of residing neither here nor there, of absence that is presence, of being and nonbeing, of yearning to become. Ultimately The Sand Child is a tale of liminality. Tahar ben Jelloun identifies intimately with the human condition of his country in particular, and of the Maghreb in general. I believe that he wishes his work to be a demythification and a demystifica¬ tion of Orientalism. It can be read as a study of competing nation¬ alisms; it is an unveiling of the complexities of existence that result from the cultural overlay of French colonial and postcolonial eco¬ nomic domination upon an Islamic patriarchate. Edward Said has noted Orientalism’s failure as a human inquiry, compared to its intel¬ lectual inquiry, for, according to Said, in having to take up a position Moroccan Independence 157 of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with the human experience. In his counterdiscourse, Ben Jelloun writes to achieve what traditional Euro-American Orientalism failed to do: to perceive the humanity of the Maghrebi world. He does so by studying ideology and sexuality in The Sand Child, illustrating the pervasive impact of intragroup and intergroup conflict that, as political and economic struggle, can de¬ humanize the subordinate class to the extent of controlling and desta¬ bilizing even sexuality. Combining the novelistic techniques of high modernist prose and the traditions of the Oriental tale, Tahar ben Jelloun’s countermodernist project is a sociodiagnostic that exposes and denounces the layerings and tyrannies of French, Islamic, royal, and clan patriarchy in Moroccan society and the attendant condi¬ tion of Moroccan women in postindependence Morocco, as weU as the psycho-socio-economic condition of the Moroccan male as guest worker in France. Latent Textuality Je viens de loin, d’un autre siecle, verse dans un conte par un autre conte, et votre histoire, parce qu’elle n’est pas une traduction de la realite, m’interesse. Je la prends telle qu’elle est, artificielle et doulou- reuse. (P. 172) [I come from afar, from another country, thrown into one tale by an¬ other tale. Your story, because it is not a translation of reality, interests me. I take it as it is, artificial and painful.] (P. 134) Texts challenge assumptions and thereby alter consciousness in ways that are not always obvious. The “latency” of signification can lead to the discovery of a text’s “worldliness” or aptness to the politi¬ cal, social, and existential actualities of the contexts in which the text was produced.I subscribe to the surrealist Andre Breton’s percep¬ tion of the literary experience as an essentially wrenching, disorient¬ ing, disruptive, and alienating one, “a demonstration of protest”: “Le poeme doit etre une debacle de I’intellect. II ne peut en etre autre- ment”" (The poem must be a collapse of the intellect. It cannot be otherwise). Surrealism was not simply a poetic revolution, but also 158 Counterstorytelling a movement aimed at the total transformation of society. Art openly proclaimed its political and social engagement. These positions ori¬ ent my reading of Tahar ben JeUoun. Not art for art’s sake, the textual experience of The Sand Child, which at first glance seems to be such a distortion of reality, is characterized by an uncanny mimesis. And it is semiosis that leads the reader to its discovery. The characteris¬ tics of everyday existence (actuality) that assist the reader in making sense of a textual experience such as The Sand Child, lead the reader through a process of recognition of forms, equivalents, and corre¬ spondences (isomorphism) that take on a strange a posteriori world¬ liness. A paradoxical fictional truth emerges that, in its hyperreferen- tiality, is more real than the slavishly mimetic. In texts that are not a direct translation of reality, textuality need not be, it would seem, the antithesis and displacement of the historical, social, political, and exis¬ tential. Rather, texts such as The Sand Child are often a distortion, a decentering, and a revalorization of the interpretations and meanings of constructs normally defined for society’s consumption by the con¬ trolling discourse. Indeed, texts are about other texts. The most obvi¬ ous intertextual connection that the text invites explicitly is with the writing of Borges. The “wordliness” of the text, however, seems just as profoundly related to “texmal latency.” Textual latency can be defined as that paradoxical depth of the surface of the text that reveals that it is hiding something and indicates how that something can be found. The Riffaterrian paradoxical depth of the text’s surface and Said’s affiliative or tentacular network of the text encourage the reader-critic to contemplate and to tease out those suspected gaps, needs, incom¬ pletenesses, ungrammaticalities, unintelligibilities, and ambiguities of the text. The combined linguistic, literary, and sociological compe¬ tence, if not consciousness, of the reader leads to a progressive reso¬ lution of these riddles of the text, as well as to (and this must be underscored) an incremental fascination with and pleasure in the text. RiflFaterre’s intertext as well as Said’s social text are both texts that exist outside of and prior to the text—focusing and informing the strucmres, pragmatics, and systems of signification and bafflement in the text. From my first reading of The Sand Child, I experienced the sensation of “a strange familiarity” or “a familiar strangeness.” The chapter that is most difficult to discuss and that most completely defies summarizing or paraphrasing is chapter 18, “The Andalusian Moroccan Independence 159 Night.” Yet it is precisely this chapter that orients the reader in the most explicit terms toward a Spanish language intertext. The chapter ends with a cuarteta (quatrain) in Spanish; it begins with a sleepwalk¬ ing promenade through the streets of Buenos Aires, and the subject of dreams and phantoms, or “La vida es sueno,” is the organizing principle of the chapter. For this reader the intertexts for The Sand Child are two texts by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “Borges y yo” and “Las ruinas circulares.” My point is that the short story “Las ruinas circulares”—with its plot strucmre involving a wizard who dreams a son into existence with the help of Fire, its extended netw'ork of images involving Fire, consumption, and consummation, religiosity, appearances, and dreams, its themes of patriarchy, filial rebellion, and independence —seems to serve as one of the kernel inspirations that Ben Jelloun has teased out into the narrative elaboration that is The Sand Child. Three troubling questions orient my discussion of The Sand Child. Does not this novel, which was a commercial success, perpetuate the cliches and commonplaces of dated eighteenth- and nineteenth- cenmry Orientalism? One of the tasks of contemporary literary dis¬ course is to penetrate the m\Tiiical hegemonic discourse concerning the Maghrebi presence. Yet in The Sand Child the reader rediscov¬ ers the Orient that is associated with vagabondage, undifferentiated sexual drive, and sexual fantasy and license expressed in stock Ori¬ ental cliches: harems, all-powerful males, baths, steam, slaves, veils, rapes, dancers, acrobats, circuses, caravans, exotic spices and per¬ fumes, illusion, and chameleonlike change. Sensuality', promises of vague fulfillment, terror, sublimeness, despotism, and idyllic plea¬ sure all intermingle and dissolve into one another. Behind this tradi¬ tional Orientalism of the fantastic and playful Oriental tale there is an implicit, or “veiled” analysis of a particular aspect of the postcolo¬ nial Maghrebi experience —an appeal to reconsider the economic and social relations within the traditional patriarchal family structure: La grande, I’immense epreuve que je vis n’a de sens qu’en dehors de ces petits schemas psychologiques qui pretendent savoir et expliquer pour- quoi une femme est une femme et un homme est un homme. Sachez, ami, que la famille, telle qu’elle existe dans nos pays, avec le pere tout- puissant et les femmes releguees a la domesticite avec une parcelle d’au- i6o Counterstorytelling torite que leur laisse le male, la famille, je la repudie, je I’enveloppe de brume et ne la reconnais plus. (P. 89) [The great, the huge ordeal through which I am passing has meaning only outside those petty, psychological schemata that claim to know and explain why a woman is a woman and a man is a man. No, my friend, the family, as it exists in our countries, with the all-powerful father and the women relegated to domesticity, with a portion of authority left to them by the male, that family I reject, wrap up in mist and no longer recognize.] (P. 64) After the death of the father, Hajji Ahmed Suleyman, the potter, Ahmed/Zahra levels one the most ironic and pointed criticisms of gender-ascribed superiority and inferiority in Moroccan society. He summons her seven sisters to establish his/her authority: “A partir de ce jour, je ne suis plus votre frere; je ne suis pas votre pere non plus, mais votre tuteur. J’ai le devoir et le droit de veiller sur vous. Vous me devez obeissance et respect. Enfin, inutile de vous rappeler que je suis un homme d’ordre et que, si la femme chez nous est inferieure a I’homme, ce n’est pas parce que Dieu I’a voulu ou que le Prophete I’a decide, mais parce qu’elle accepte ce sort. Alors subissez et vivez dans le silence!” (P. 66) [“From this day on, I am no longer your brother; I am not your father either, but your guardian. I have the duty and the right to watch over you. You owe me obedience and respect. Anyway, I do not have to re¬ mind you that I am a man of order and that if in this house women are inferior to men it is not because God wishes it or because the prophet decided it thus, but because the women accept this fate. So submit, and live in silence!” (P. 46) Ahmed then says, “J’ai un comportement d’homme, ou plus exactement on m’a appris a agir et a penser comme un etre naturellement superieur a la femme. Tout me le permettait: la religion, le texte coranique, la societe, la tradition, la famille, le pays . . . et moi-meme.” (P. 152) [“I behave like a man—or, to be more precise, I have been taught to act and to think as one who is naturally superior to women. Everything Moroccan Independence 161 allows me to do this: religion, the Coran, society, tradition, the family, the country . . . and myself.”] (P. 117) Dispossession The Sand Child begins with a crisis under the triple burden of a Koranic patriarchy, the sanctity of the male line, and impotence. We have established that a deeply religious Muslim father after the birth of seven daughters has the mad idea of disguising and rearing the eighth daughter as a son. A cornerstone of the Muslim patriarchy is the belief in the existence of a mystical and procreative bond that is preserved and continued solely through the father. The identity of one’s father, the fact of being the “ibn” or “ben,” that is, the son of so-and-so, is the single biggest determining factor of status in patriar¬ chal Maghrebi society and in some way explains almost every social aspect of the society.'^ The agnatic lineage, or male hereditary line, constitutes a nation. The family is first in all considerations. Every¬ thing is subordinated to the family. The father is the absolute source of all power. He distributes all revenues and assigns all duties, work, or routine responsibilities. It is the patriarch’s law that stands; it is the father’s will that is law. Many aspects of Moroccan and other tradi¬ tional patriarchies can be explained in terms of, for example, forms of inheritance, the tendency to disinherit daughters, the taboo of vir¬ ginity, the veneration of the dead, the association of age with authority and wisdom, the prestige of ancestors, and a host of linguistic facts. If a man does not produce a son, the agnatic line is broken, lost, and a nation disappears. Impotence can be seen as a loss of identity and, in¬ deed, of life. The impotent male finds himself not only separated from but also threatened with losing his identity, not only symbolically but in real and actual terms. Linguistically, therefore, it is quite interest¬ ing to note that the male sex organs—the penis and the testicles — are referred to as nafss (breath [of life]) and rouh (soul, life). Thus, with¬ out a son, in spite of his seven daughters, the father feels impotent, that is, diminished, devalorized, devirilized, dispossessed, and dying, with only ashes between his legs or, more aptly, with sand and the desert where there should be life, breath, and the soul. Hence, in part, the title The Sand Child. In this sense, then, we see that impotence is 162 Counterstorytelling associated with sterility and, in terms of legacy, with economic dis¬ possession and racial annihilation. In the broadest terms, this novel is a long meditation on disposses¬ sion, particularly in the form of impotence—economic, affective, and sexual impotence that leads ultimately to a feeling of devirilization and devalorization on the part of the Maghrebi male and female, espe¬ cially in the postcolonial context of guest workers residing in France. It is clear, then, that I read the protean form of Ahmed/Zahra as the representation of a group, of a class, of a nation. Migrancy: The Guest Worker in France The seasonal exodus of migrant guest workers from North Africa to France is a culturally destabilizing movement of dispossession. This relocation of a large, highly gendered segment of the Maghrebi popu¬ lation, this human transplantation and deforestation, this strip-man¬ ning, as it were, creates a country of women abandoned by their tradi¬ tional family leaders. Husbands, fiances, brothers, uncles, and fathers are forced to seek their economic means of survival far from the native land at the expense of their traditional and harmonious family social order. We know that the desert is expanding its domain on the Afri¬ can continent and that many are fieeing the ecological disasters. With the seasonal deparmres of the men, the economic stresses of radically transformed postindependence economies have created a human de¬ sertification or population drain in the Maghreb. One consequence is that traditional (Koranic) gender-ascribed roles are beginning to be overturned as men and women are forced by economic hardship to assume new roles and new lives that at times become a travesty of nature and a grand deceit. In the Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci points out: “The starting point of critical elaboration is the conscious¬ ness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. . . . therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”On stams inconsistency, role conflict, and consciousness, Fatouma is quite categorical in The Sand Child: Moroccan Independence 163 J’ai appris ainsi a etre dans le reve et a faire de ma vie une histoire entierement inventee, un conte qui se souvient de ce qui s’est reellement passe. Est-ce par ennui, est-ce par lassitude qu’on se donne une autre vie mise sur le corps comme une djellaba merveilleuse, un habit magique, un manteau, etoffe du ciel, pare d’etoiles, de couleurs et de lumiere? Depuis ma reclusion, j’assiste, muette et immobile, au demenagement de mon pays: les hommes et I’Histoire, les plaines et les montagnes, les prairies et meme le ciel. Restent les femmes et les gosses. On dirait qu’ils restent pour garder le pays, mais ils ne gardent rien. Ils vont et vien- nent, s’agitent, se debrouillent. Ceux qui ont ete chasses des campagnes par la secheresse et les detournements d’eau rodent dans les villes. Ils mendient. On les rejette, on les humilie et ils condnuent de mendier. Ils arrachent ce qu’ils peuvent. Des enfants. . . , il en meurt beaucoup, beaucoup trop. Alors on en fait, encore et encore. . . . Naitre garpon est un moindre mal. . . . Naitre fille est une calamite, un malheur qu’on depose negligemment sur le chemin par lequel la mort passe en fin de journee .... Oh! je ne vous apprends rien. Mon histoire est ancienne. . . , elle date d’avant I’lslam .... Ma parole n’a pas beaucoup de poids . . . . Je ne suis qu’une femme, je n’ai plus de larmes. On m’a tot ap¬ pris qu’une femme qui pleure est une femme perdue. . . . J’ai acquis la volonte de n’etre jamais cette femme qui pleure. J’ai vecu dans I’illusion d’un autre corps, avec les habits et les emodons de quelqu’un d’autre. J’ai trompe tout le monde jusqu’au jour ou je me suis aperpue que je me trompais moi-meme. Alors je me suis mise a regarder autour de moi et ce que j’ai \Ta m’a profondement choquee, bouleversee. Comment ai-je pu vivre ainsi, dans une cage de verre, dans le mensonge, dans le mepris des autres? On ne peut passer d’une vie a une autre juste en enjambant une passerelle. II fallait quant a moi me debarrasser de ce que je fus, entrer dans I’oubli et liquider toutes les traces. (Pp. 168-69) [Thus I have learned to live in dreams, to make of my life a totally in¬ vented story, a tale that remembers what really happened. Is it out of boredom that one gives oneself a different life, draped on the body like a marvelous djellaba, a magical garment, a wrap, a heavenly cloth studded with stars, colors, and light? In my reclusion, I have witnessed, mute and motionless, the razing and removal of my country: men and History, the plains and the mountains, the prairies and even the sky are just about all gone. The women and the 164 Counterstorytelling babies remain. It seems that they stay as shepherd guardians of the coun¬ try, only they have nothing to watch over. They go and come, stir about and survive. Those who have been driven from the countryside because of drought and the changing course of rivers and streams loiter in the cities. They beg. They are rejected, humiliated and they continue to beg. They eke out the existence they can. And the children . . ., too many, far too many, are dying. And so, we make more, again and again. To be born a boy is a lesser evil ... to be born a girl is a calamity, a misfortune that we sometime abandon negligently on the wayside where death passes at the end of the day. . . . Ah but I am telling nothing that you do not already know. My tale is ancient. . ., it dates from before Islam. . . . My word has little weight. ... I am only a woman, I have no more tears. I was taught from the very beginning that a woman who cries is a lost woman. ... I have developed the willpower never to be that woman who cries. I have lived in the illusion of another body with the habits and the emotions of someone else. I fooled everyone up until the day I realized I was deceiv¬ ing myself. So I began to look around me and what I saw profoundly shocked and upset me. How had I managed to live such a life? In a glass cage, in a lie, in the scorn of others. One cannot step from one life into another with a simple stride across a footbridge. In my case, I had to rid myself of what had been, enter it into oblivion, erase every trace.] (P. 130) The conflictual interactions of religion, class, gender, language, and nationality give rise to status inconsistency, which leads to role con¬ flict, which in turn leads to consciousness. Consciousness is defined here specifically as a sharpened existential awareness of levels—that in the experience of being one has shifted platforms, statuses, roles. The experience can be positive or negative in that it can lead to pleni¬ tude or fragmentation. Texts are an afliliative strucmre of eccentric elements: they are texts not as symbols of something else but as displacements of other things: texts are deviations from, exaggerations, and negations of human presence. What concerns the critic is how language signifies, what it signifies, in what form. The sexual and existential loneliness of Zahra, this female reared as a male and endowed with all of the power and authority of an eldest son, can be read as the schema of the virilization of the woman. The woman becomes the omnipotent family or clan Moroccan Independence 165 leader in the absence of men, and she explores and comes to appre¬ ciate her new role. This status inconsistency, that is, this social per¬ formance or behavior contrary to prior socialization, is not, however, looked upon as progress and gender liberation, but as a violation of the traditional social contract and as role conflict. Here the identity of the father begins to take on added meaning as the Muslim patriarch, and also as the Mandarin postindependence multinational corporate State as Patriarch in the global economy. It is Salem, the Black storyteller who sees Ahmed/Zahra as a victim of social abuse, who orients me eventually toward the social text that informs this tale. Salem’s veiled, subversive criticism of Moroccan society orients me toward my eventual decoding of the male/female character of Ahmed/Zahra: Ce personnage est une violence en soi; son destin, sa vie sont de I’ordre de I’inconcevable. D’ailleurs on ne peut meme pas s’en tirer par une pirouette psychologique. Pour parler brutalement, vous en conviendrez, Ahmed n’est pas une erreur de la nature, mais un detournement social. Enfin, je veux dire, ce n’est surtout pas un etre attire par le meme sexe. Annule dans ses desirs, je pense que seule une grande violence—un sui¬ cide avec plein de sang—peut apporter un terme a cette histoire. (Pp. 159-60) [This character is in himself an act of violence; his destiny, his life are really inconceivable. You can’t get out of it by making some psychologi¬ cal pirouette. To put it crudely, you must admit that Ahmed is not one of nature’s mistakes, but a social deviation. Anyway, what 1 mean is, he isn’t someone attracted by his own sex. With his desires totally crushed, I think only a great act of violence—a suicide with lots of blood—can bring this story to an appropriate end.] (P. 123) Malika, the circus female impersonator whom Ahmed/Zahra re¬ places, declares: “Nous sommes des nomades, notre vie a quelque chose d’exaltant mais elle est pleine d’impasses” (p. 120) [VC’e are nomads: there is something exciting about our life, but it is not an easy one] (p. 90). In the power relations of colonial patriarchy, the colonized male is always already emasculated, if not feminized (see chapter i of part 2, “Eichtal and Urbain”). This state of contrasexu- 166 Counterstorytelling ality is often intensified when the male is uprooted from the native land and forced for reasons of economic survival to seek employment in the land of the colonizer. The nomadic Ahmed/Zahra has an equivalent in the Maghrebi guest worker in France who knows the same displacement, wander¬ ing, vagrancy, status inconsistency, role conflict, identity crisis, and the same annulment of marriage, desire, and intimacy. Contrary to conventional assumptions, Jelloun’s ethnopsychiatric data reveal that these men neither rape white women, employ whores and prostitutes, nor engage in acts of retributive violence with the frequency alleged, again by conventional wisdom. However, their condition in France can only be described in terms of the most excruciating loneliness— separated from their families, humiliated by their lowered status in metropolitan France, victimized by the long-standing racial preju¬ dice against Arabs in France, despised because of their role as im¬ ported labor, stripped of all political power, administrative and sys¬ temic nonentities, deprived of affection, sexuality, and their role as procreative beings. In France these men whose gender-specific au¬ thority and power in their native land are culturally sanctioned have no one over whom to exert authority. The guest workers experience not only culture shock, but also the absence of cultural reference points. They feel culturally orphaned. Status reversed, lives turned upside down, emotions inverted, these men as Ahmed live as social eunuchs. France, the new country, is lived and experienced as the absence itself of the mother. It is lived and experienced. La Belle France, as a castrating stepmother. This host society presents itself to the guest worker also as an incessant phallic aggression: it is the repressive, for¬ eign patriarch who haunts the guest worker’s reality and psyche. The workers live as the objects of domination in a system that historically valorizes male command. From passport control officer, to police headquarters, to employer and foreman, through the intricacies and frustrations of contentious French bureaucracy, the guest worker is commanded and controlled by men. When the authority figure is a woman, the impact is all the more devastating. This social rapport is mirrored in the text in the aberrant sadomasochistic relationship between Abbas, the circus bully, and his cruel old mother, the cir¬ cus owner and boss. Many of these North African workers collapse emotionally and psychosomatically in the face of their devaloriza- Moroccan Independence 167 non, devirilization, and the recognition of their social and economic impotence, their absolute inconsequentiality. Coming from a patri¬ lineal, patriarchal nation that as colony was already feminized in its power relations with the colonizer. North African male guest workers in France undergo a second degendering process. This is their par¬ ticular form of cultural schizophrenia. In his doctoral thesis, ethno- psychiatrist Tahar ben Jelloun describes succinctly the condition of these transplanted w’orkers: Ceux qui ont connu le viol colonial sur leur propre terre et se trouvent aujourd’hui expatries, subissent, avec quelques variantes, la meme domi¬ nation, la meme alienation. L’ancienne puissance coloniale poursuit sa logique en se modernisant. L’esclavage, la negation de I’etre, I’exploita- tion capitaliste se perpetuent avec subtilite et demagogie. Hier on prati- quait le pillage des terres, aujourd’hui on exploite a domicile les hommes expulses de leur pays par le besoin et le sous-developpement, sequelles de la colonisation. Ils sont la, arbres arraches, vides, separes de la ten- dresse et du soleO. Le mepris, I’humiliation, la haine les calcinent dans leurs bidonvilles. . . . On transplante des hommes, on les separe de la vie pour mieux leur extirper leur force de travail, mais on tente aussi d’annuler leur memoire et d’entraver leur devenir en tant que sujets de- sirants. (Pp. 56, 12) [Those who have known the colonialist rape of their own land and find themselves today expatriated, are undergoing, with few variations, the same domination, the same alienation. The former colonial power pur¬ sues its same logic, simply modernizing its appearance. Slavery, the reifi¬ cation of humanity, capitalist exploitation perpetuate themselves with subtlety and demagoguery. In former times colonialists pillaged far-off lands, today in the comfort of home they exploit the men who are driven from their homelands by the need and the underdevelopment that are the aftermath of colonization. They are there, in France, violently uprooted trees, hollowed out, cut off from tenderness and from the sun. Scorn, humiliation, and hatred sear and isolate them in their slum dwellings. . . . Men are transplanted, removed from the harmonies and rhythms of daily traditional life, so as to better extirpate their labor potential, and in the process there is the attempt to void their memory and to block their natural development as subjects of desire.] 168 Counterstorytelling The condition of the guest worker in France is one of the social texts that inform The Sand Child. The situation of the Maghrebi worker in France as described in this doctoral thesis recalls Ahmed/Zahra’s dream to cure herself of the heavy burden of solimde with its invading impotence, where there are “des emotions inversees, venant d’un corps trahi, reduit a une demeure vide, sans ame” (p. 99) [“the in¬ verted emotions that come from a betrayed body reduced to an empty, soulless home”] (p. 73). Later she adds, “Je marche pour me depouil- ler, pour me laver, pour me debarrasser d’une question qui me hante et dont je ne parle jamais: le desir. Je suis las de porter en mon corps ses insinuations sans pouvoir ni les repousser ni les faire miennes. Je resterai profondement inconsole, avec un visage qui n’est pas le mien, et un desir que je ne peux nommer” (p. 88) [“I walk in order to divest myself of things, to cleanse myself, to rid myself of a question that haunts me and of which I never speak—desire. I am tired of carrying its insinuations in my body, without being able either to reject them or to make them mine. I shall remain profoundly unconsoled, with a face that is not mine and a desire that I cannot name”] (p. 164). The guest workers’ lives are mrned upside down, and the myth of the Baobab tree imposes itself as paradigm of colonial aggression, vio¬ lent deracination, status inconsistency, role conflict, and survival. Patriarchies The overlay of the Islamic patriarchy and the colonial patriarchal civi¬ lizing mission is most resonant in the father’s speech from beyond the grave: Avant rislam, les peres arabes jetaient une naissance femelle dans un trou et la recouvraient de terre jusqu’a la mort. Ils avaient raison. Ils se debar- rassaient ainsi du malheur. C’etait une sagesse, une douleur breve, une logique implacable. J’ai toujours ete fascine par le courage de ces peres; un courage que je n’ai jamais eu. Toutes les filles que ta mere a deposees meritaient ce sort. Je ne les ai pas enterrees parce qu’elles n’existaient pas pour moi. Toi, ce fut different. Toi, ce fut un defi. Mais tu as trahi. Je te poursuivrai jusqu’a la mort. Tu n’auras point de paix. La terre hu- mide tombera tot ou tard sur ton visage, s’introduira dans ta bouche ou- Moroccan Independence 169 verte, dans tes narines, dans tes poumons. Tu retourneras a la terre et tu n’auras jamais existe. Je reviendrai, et de mes mains j’entasserai la terre sur ton corps .... Ahmed, mon fils, I’homme que j’ai forme, est mort, et toi tu n’es qu’usurpatrice. Tu voles la vie de cet homme; tu mourras de ce vol .... Du fond de mon exil, je ne cesse de prier, avec les paupieres deja lourdes, avec les pensees deja figees, arretees en cet instant ou tu abandonnes la demeure et le corps, ou tu oublies I’amour et le destin, la passion de ce destin que ma volonte a forge, mais tu n’en fus pas digne. (Pp. 129-30) [Before Islam, Arab fathers threw an unwanted female infant into a hole and covered her until she died. They were right. In this way they rid themselves of misfortune. It was an act of wisdom, a brief pain, an im¬ placable logic. I have always been fascinated by the courage of those fathers—a courage I never had. All the daughters your mother gave birth to deserved such a fate. I did not bury them, because they did not exist for me. You were different; you were a challenge. But you betrayed me. I shall pursue you until your dying day. You w’ill find no peace. Sooner or later the damp earth will fall into your gaping mouth, your nostrils, your lungs. You will return to earth and it will be as if you never existed. I shall come back and with my hand pile earth upon your body. . . . Ahmed, my son, the man I formed, is dead. You, woman, are merely a usurper. You are stealing that man’s life; you will die for the theft. . . . From the depths of my exile, I never cease to pray, my eyelids already heavy, my thoughts already frozen, arrested at the moment when you abandoned your home and body, when you forgot the love and destiny that my will forged, but of w'hich you w'ere not worthy.] (P. 98) Earlier, I pointed to the overlay of patriarchies. I believe that three levels of patriarchy are discernible in the father’s pronouncements from beyond the grave. Level i is the real father, a potter by pro¬ fession, who as creative urge considers his children to be ever so much clay molded to varying degrees of imperfection and perfection. Level 2 embraces the dynamics of the Islamic patriarchy with its prin¬ ciple of male superiority and indisputable authority. Level 3, however, allows one to glimpse, in the interstices of the father’s pronounce¬ ments, the paternalistic dynamics implicit in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized that is modeled on the family image, with the colonizer as Father/Mother-King/Queen and the colonized as 170 Counterstorytelling ever so many ungrateful and indeed unworthy children. The dynam¬ ics of none of these patriarchies allow the child’s desire for indepen¬ dence, self-determination, or personal sovereignty to go unchecked. Obviously, I do not consider The Sand Child to be a failure; rather, I read it as an elaborately but not heavily veiled act of social criticism. It seems designed in part to draw attention to the lived experience of the Maghrebi male and female. De-un- and cross-gendering is related to de-un- and cross-territorialization. The blurring of sexual identities, status, and roles parallels the borderization of cultures, the blurring of frontiers, the shifting shape of populations in the global economy. The novel is a significant contribution to the study of ideology and sexu¬ ality in its successful effort to redefine the frontiers and problematics of such a study. By examining the extravagant dilemma of the psycho¬ social-sexual identity of Ahmed/Zahra, Tahar ben Jelloun succeeds in humanizing the North African. Displacement often means exile. Jel¬ loun confronts our consciousness with the complexities of the situa¬ tion of those condemned to live in exile abroad, in exile at home in the heart of their own culture, alienated in the midst of their own family. Jelloun dramatizes the extent to which one can live as a stranger, an outsider, a foreigner to others as well as to oneself. In this novel we are presented with desert people, a nomadic culture, and a poetics of the multinational nomad. The problems and the challenge of this nomadic condition are grasped in the single prayerful, plaintive query of Ahmed/Zahra: “Ressembler a soi-meme, n’est-ce pas devenir dif¬ ferent? Ainsi, je pars pour quelque temps. Je m’eloigne de vous et me rapproche de moi-meme. Je suis reduit a une solitude absolue. Etran- ger au sein de ma famiUe, je suis negligeable, absolument negligeable. Singulier et isole” (p. 104) [“Does to resemble oneself not mean to be¬ come something different? I go away for a time. I move away from you and come closer to myself. I am reduced to absolute solitude. An alien within my own family, I am negligible. Odd and isolated”] (p. 77). The previously described Baobab myth, with its emphasis on sur¬ vival, also carried a warning, for the hoUowed-out tree on occasion collapses upon a devouring elephant, crushing it to death. The Sand Child is a subversive text in its questioning of the very foundations of Moroccan society and in its depiction of the growing frustration, anger, and determination of Zahra to do something because she has nothing further to lose. From the desire for independence, self-deter- Moroccan Independence 171 mination, and personal sovereignt>’, we move to the stirrings of revolt as Zahra assumes herself: Etre femme est une infirmite naturelle dont tout le monde s’accom- mode. Etre homme est une illusion et une violence que tout justifie et privUegie. Etre tout simplement est un defi. Je suis las et lasse. (P. 94) La violence de mon pays est aussi dans ces yeux fermes, dans ces regards detournes, dans ces silences faits plus de resignation que d’indif- ference. Aujourd’hui je suis une femme seule. Une vieille femme seule. Avec mes vingt-cinq ans revolus, je considere que ma vieillesse a au moins un demi-siecle. Deux vies avec deux perceptions et deux visages mais les memes reves, la meme et profonde solitude. Je ne pense pas etre inno- cente. Je crois meme que je suis devenue dangereuse. Je n’ai plus rien a perdre et j’ai tellement de degats a reparer. . . . Je soupqonne ma capacite de rage, de colere et aussi de haine destructrice. Plus rien ne me retient, j’ai juste un petit peu peur de ce que je vais entreprendre; j’ai peur parce que je ne sais pas exactement ce que je vais faire, mais je suis decidee a le faire. (P. 155) [To be a woman is a natural infirmity and every woman gets used to it. To be a man is an illusion, an act of violence that requires no justifica¬ tion. Simply to be is a challenge. I am tired. (P. 69) My country’s violence is also to be found in those closed eyes, in those diverted looks, in those silences, which stem from resignation rather than indifference. Today I am a single woman. An old single w’oman. Now at the age of twenty-five, I consider that my old age has at least half a century to run. Tw'o lives with two perceptions and tw'o faces, but the same dreams, the same profound solitude. I do not think that I am innocent. I even think that I have become a little dangerous. I no longer have amthing to lose, and there is so much in me to repair. ... I am suspicious of my capacity for anger and destructive hatred. Nothing can hold me back anymore. I am just a little afraid of what I might do, but I have made up my mind to do it.] (P. 119) The “tw'o lives with tw'o perceptions and two faces . . . the same dreams, the same profound solimde” addresses not only the sima- tion of The Sand Child and the Moroccan context but also the larger 172 Counterstorytelling francophone question of culmral hybridity. Hybridization involves a recognition of difference and a confrontation of the incommensu- rables of cultures in contact, in contestation, and in transition. This form of double consciousness seems to carry with it more ambiguity than resolution, more indecision than solution, more displacement than stability. These issues raised in Jelloun’s text permeate the novel The Abandoned Baobab by the Senegalese author Ken Bugul. 7 The Blossoming of the Undefined Self Ken Bugul and Le Baobab foil Knowing neither exactly where she is going, nor exactly from whence she comes, torn between a Europe that rejects her and an Africa she has abandoned, Ken Bugul finds herself deprived of her own cul¬ ture and acculturated into a civilization that either holds her in con¬ tempt or values her only as an exotic object of consumption. Ken’s mind wanders, becomes diasporic, and reflects the heterogeneity of the colonized and postindependence spaces where competing sets of expectations and culmral values contend for the mind and body. Mariam Marietou, the Senegalese woman author, writes under the pen name of Ken Bugul, the protagonist of her autobiographical novel The Abandoned Baobab} Ken Bugul is caught in the slipknot, in the circular trap, of self-aversion and mimetic desire. Mais I’independance m’avait deyue. Je croyais que I’independance allait me sauver. Je ne constatais aucune acquisition d’identite propre, aucun souffle. L’independance etait comme la reconnaissance et I’offlcialisation de la dependance. (Pp. 144-45) [But independence disappointed me. I had thought independence would save me. It was not an acquiring of my own identity at all, not a breath of it. Independence was rather a recognition of dependence and making it offlcial.] (P. 125) 174 Counterstorytelling The original French title, Le Baobab fou, is extraordinarily evocative. The two elements comprising it, the substantive and its adjective, sig¬ nify foreignness (Baobab) and maladjustment (fou). The myth and reality of the Baobab tree have been previously presented in chapter 3. The details of this myth are incorporated into the first two sections of the novel, the “Pre-history” and the “History of Ken.” The title in translation. The Abandoned Baobab, with its legitimate insistence on abandonment, suggests a move from the original site of colonial vio¬ lence, the diasporic condition, and a migrant journey and narrative. The fou of the French title orients the text toward the split self and humanizes the vegetal and the fioral. A Black girl is the central character, inhabiting the rim of the in- between place at the contingent moment of articulating the recogni¬ tion of similitude and the intimacy of diflference. Violent uprooting and wrenching separation from places as well as the from self are the sensations that orient Ken’s basic preoccupation with attachment and loss, which are part of the etiology of schizophrenia. A close reading of The Abandoned Baobab strongly suggests that (i) there is a specific colonial cultural schizophrenia; (2) its narrative history is inscribed in the thematic and semiotic “errancy” of the text; and (3) the major tropes of the process are contained in the transformation (translation) of the vegetal and cultural. The point is not to pathologize Ken’s con- dition,^ but to recognize the extent to which certain behavioral and psychological processes reflect the dynamics of the social processes, political issues, and cultural dynamics confronting the people repre¬ sented by Ken’s character. Ken’s story is concerned with dislocation, with colonial, diasporic, and migrant subjectivity, and with the con¬ sequent risks of cultural schizophrenia. The Rooted and Uprooted Self Ken Bugul is in effect a lost body. Moi laminaire (The Laminarian Self) and Corps perdu (Lost Body) are titles of volumes of poetry by Aime Cesaire in which he explores a poetics and a psychology of mi- grancy, loss, and attachment for the colonized subject. The laminaire refers to seaweed that can stretch for miles into the ocean and yet re¬ main attached to the original rock formation on which it grew. The The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 175 images are fundamentally vegetal, marine, and floral and speak di¬ rectly to Ken Bugul’s longings. Her body is the incarnation of loss: alienated, exiled, shipvvrecked, uprooted, she wanders psychologically and sociologically, searching for a place to rest, to anchor herself, to flx herself, to put down roots and to blossom fully. A complex of the uprooted self organizes her obsessions and also the network of images in this work. Her sensations of violent uprooting and wrenching sepa¬ ration are questions of psychic as well as spatial dislocation. Apres avoir roule pendant quelques minutes sur la piste, I’av’ion s’etait immobilise. Je ne comprenais pas pourquoi et c’est a ce moment-la que mes tympans furent creves par le vTai depart. S’arracher L’appareil quitta le soleil dans une rage enivTante et presque doulou- reuse. J’en avals le souffle coupe et instinctivement je me retenais aux accoudoirs du fauteuil. J’avais I’impression d’etre arrache a moi-meme. (P 35 ) [After we had been taxiing down the runway for a few minutes, the plane stopped. I didn’t understand why and it was then, at that very mo¬ ment, that my eardrums were punctured by the actual departure. Tearing yourself away The plane left the sun in an intoxicating and almost painful rage. It took my breath away and instinctively I clutched the armrests. I felt as if I were being torn away from myself] (P. 25) Ken is obsessed with vegetation, flowering, and roots. None of that is gratuitous, for it is aU related to her situation as a Black woman living in a state of exile from her original homeland. The natural vegetal processes are the opposite of the social and psychological processes that Ken undergoes. The dream of the Baobab tree firmly rooted in the soil is the longing for the integration of the self, and of human¬ kind in harmony with the self, as much as it is the nostalgic dream of a paradise lost. Ken makes it clear that The Abandoned Baobab is a story about inhospitality and unhomeliness when she asserts, “ ‘Chez moi,’ cela m’avait manque toute la vie” (p. 79) [“ ‘Home’ was what I had missed all my life”] (p. 64). This complex of the uprooted self is closely linked to Ken’s medi¬ tations on the practice of colonialism in Africa and the role of the 176 Counterstorytelling French school in this process. According to Ken, the French school turned everything “upside down,” shook up everything, and hurled Africans into a perpetual state of alienation. In place of education, the French politics of assimilation has turned Africans into illogical beings in conflict with themselves and their traditions through the agency of the French school. L’ecole franyaise qui allait bouleverser mille mondes et mille croyances qui se cachaient derriere les baobabs meduses en prenant des formes humaines. (P. 115) [The French school that was to upset a thousand worlds, and a thousand beliefs hidden behind the baobab trees, paralyzed into taking human forms.] (P 98) From the village to the French school, from the south to the north, from apartment to apartment, from street to street, the experience is that of lost illusions. This constant cycle of dislocation/relocation is the experience of transculturation for Ken that leaves her in a state, not of happy “metissage culmrel,” but a graver state, that of culmral schizophrenia. Le colonialisme avait tout ebranle. Et la conscience s’etait noyee dans I’alienation d’une troisieme dimension fascinante et atroce. Mais je ne voulais pas etre consciente de tout cela et reagir. Je refusais de croire que le colonialisme en etait la seule cause. (P. 64) [Colonialism had shattered everything. And consciousness had drowned itself in the alienation of a third dimension, both fascinating and hideous. But I did not want to be aware of all of that and have to react. I refused to believe that colonialism was its only cause.] (P. 51) J’avais une famille sans structures reelles. J’etais nee trois jours avant le depart du frere. La premiere fois que je le vis j’avais dix-sept ans. La communication dont on pouvait tirer la conscience de I’instinct ne s’etablissait que par references anodines. Alors le reve commenyait, im¬ bibe d’irreel. Mais aussi surtout, le colonialisme, qui avait cree la distor- sion des esprits pour engendrer la race des sans reperes. Le colonialisme avait fait de la plupart de nous des illogiques. Je ne voulais pas I’accepter. (P. 85) The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 177 [I had a family without any real structure. I was born three days be¬ fore the brother’s departure. The first time I saw him, I was seventeen years old. The kind of communication from which an awareness of one’s instinct can be drawn was established by harmless, painless references. And so the dream began, imbued with the unreal. But also and above all else, colonialism had created a distortion of the spirit necessary to en¬ slave a race of people, leaving them no frame of reference. Colonialism had made inconsequential people of most of us. I didn’t want to accept that.] (P. 71) The Fallen Seed and the Lost Bead The “Pre-history of Ken” and the “History of Ken” are two distinct preambles to the autobiography proper in The Abandoned Baobab. At first glance, the “Pre-history of Ken” appears to be merely a child¬ hood idyll describing the joys of a sister and her brother as they con¬ spire to steal sugar from an authoritarian mother in order to sweeten and eat the luscious, rare, ripe, yellow fruit of the Baobab tree. The “Pre-history” can be characterized as an epic, for the story repre¬ sents an epoch in African civilization —traced from precolonial times to colonial times, its peaceful times, its destruction by fire, the miracu¬ lous survival of the Baobab tree at the center of the village, the renewal of the civilization by an extraordinary stranger on an extraordinary steed, the reconstruction of the civilization around the Baobab tree, the introduction of train tracks and trains as well as goods transported on them, such as factory-made shoes. The poetic crafting of the two parts alerts the reader to the themes of continuity and survival. There is the mysterious old man, an ageless immortal creature who is the only one left in “the village of disaster.” It is through this character that the first connections with the title of the book are established, for like the baobab, he is characterized as “fou” or mad, and it is he who remembers the former inhabitants who “abandoned” the village and the Baobab tree after a great conflagration. II ne restait dans le village sinistre qu’une creature sans age. Nul ne savait d’ou il venait. II n’avait au monde que le soleil, les baobabs et I’infini de chaleur. II ne connaissait rien d’autre, a ce qu’il semblait. . . . “Je ne 178 Counterstorytelling mourrai jamais,” disait-il souvent. “C’est un fou” avaient decide ceux qui avaient emigre plus loin . . . “Salut les jeunes, j’avais deja reve que vous viendriez vous installer ici. J’ai toujours vecu, et croyez-moi, je suis immortel. Apres le feu, Us sont partis et je suis reste. Dans mille ans je serai encore-la. Une chose me preoccupe, c’est ce jeune baobab: il est sorti de terre comme plante par ces dieux d’autres mondes. Je fais des recherches et un jour je percerai le secret, ce baobab est lie a un evene- ment qui va bouleverser une generation entiere.” (P. 21) [The only one left in the village of disaster was an ageless creature. No one knew from where he had come. All he had in the world was the sun and the infinite heat. It seemed that he had no knowledge of anything else. ... “I shall never die,” he often said. “He is mad,” decided those who had left for farther distances. “Greetings my people,” he said, “I had already dreamed that you would come and settle here. ... I have always been alive and believe me, I am immortal. After the fire, they left and I remained. In another thou¬ sand years I’ll still be here. One thing only is on my mind, and that is this young baobab tree: one morning it came out of the soil as if it had been planted by gods of another world. I am doing research, and one day I shall pierce its secret; this baobab is linked to an event that wUl shake an entire generation.”] (P. 13) It is observed in the pre-history that “the newborn was always a re¬ incarnation.” The continuity-survival theme is further reinforced by the resemblance between two daughters of different generations, Ken and the pre-history daughter, Codou, who is merely a source of ex¬ asperation for the mother. Codou, as Ken will be, is a sensuous, con¬ templative dreamer. Both girls’ worlds will be destroyed: Perdue dans ses reves de jeune fille, elle pensait au jour ou elle se marierait avec le fils du berger dont la haute stature et la carrure athletique la fai- sait frissonner chaque fois qu’eUe le voyait. L’huile prit feu. . . . En une minute, tout le village etait un brasier attise par le vent qu’un mauvais esprit avait envoye pour en detruire I’harmonie. (P. 18) [Lost in her young girl’s dream, she was thinking of the day she would marry the shepherd’s son, whose tall stature and athletic carriage made her tremble every time she saw him. The oil caught fire. ... In one The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 179 minute the entire village was ablaze, fanned by the wind that an evil spirit had sent to destroy its harmony.] (P. 11) The theme of survival is reinforced as well by events that bind the two respective mothers. The original mother portentously shatters her water jug at the well, spilling water onto a fallen baobab seed just prior to the conflagration; the new founding mother loses an amber bead of her shattered necklace by the little baobab tree that has begun to sprout. The narrative subsequently develops the complementarity and interchangeability’ of the baobab seed and the amber bead: Le noyau du fruit du baobab n’avait pas bouge car il etait fixe a la terre par I’eau que la mere avait renversee. Une semaine apres, le debut de I’hivernage, le noyau germa a nu: on vit une petite tige portant precieuse- ment une feuille. Les averses, les pas des etres humains et les sabots des animaux I’epargnerent miraculeusement et bientot une jeune plante frele se reveillait avec le soleil et se couchait avec lui. (P. 17) Le plus jeune des enfants s’etait refugie dans les cuisses chaudes de la mere en se serrant tres fort. Cherchant a accrocher un de ses bras au cou de la mere, il avait casse le collier d’ambre qu’elle avait porte pour le voyage. Le collier s’eparpilla comme cette chaleur qui embaumait cet univers fantastique qu’etait la savane, le pays du soleil et de la lumi- ere. . . . une des perles avait trouve dans ce sable, sous ce baobab, dans ce village desert un abri qui I’accueillit en silence. (P. 20) [The pit of the baobab fruit had not budged, for it had been rooted in the soil by the water the mother had spilled. One week later, the rainy season began, the seed germinated: a tiny stalk with a delicate leaf could be seen. Steps of human beings and animal hooves miraculously spared it, and soon a frail young plant would rise and go to sleep with the sun. (P. 10) The youngest of the children took refuge between the mother’s warm thighs holding on to himself very tightly. While trying to put one arm around the mother’s neck, he had broken the amber necklace she had worn for the trip. The beads scattered like the heat that embalms the fan¬ tastic universe that was the savannah . . . the land of sun and of light. . . . one of the beads had found shelter in the sand, under the baobab, a shel¬ ter that silendy bade it welcome.] (Pp. 12-13) i8o Counterstory telling One floral, the other mineral, both seed and bead get lost in the earth to reemerge, replicating, thus, the cycle of Persephone, the ma¬ ternal goddess of fecundity, who must spend a season in the under¬ world to return in spring. The bead, in particular, is an amber bead of solidifled sap that duplicates the golden yellow of the baobab fruit and reflects the village chromatics forged by the relentless sun at its zenith: “Nous etions a la veille de la saison des pluies. . . . Le village de Gouye avait revetu une couleur diaphane. Les cases etaient jaunes, le sable jaune, les animaux jaunes, les etres humains jaunes. II faisait tres sec et le soleil craquait sourdement tant il faisait chaud” (p. 15) [“It was just before the rainy season. . . . The village of Gouye had taken on a diaphanous color. . . . The huts were yeUow, the sand yel¬ low, the animals yellow, the humans yellow. It was very dry and the sun crackled soundlessly—it was that hot”] (p. 8). The amber bead, lost by the mother of the first family to resettle in the village after the great fire, is found generations later under the Bao¬ bab tree by the two-year-old girl, Ken. Inspired by the women of her village who wear beads on diaper pins in their pierced ears, Ken pushes the amber bead deeper and deeper into her ear canal. The auricular piercing shifts very quickly to piercing vocalics of the scream. The history observes: “The labyrinthine depths of a child’s thinking and of its imagination are so completely unknown!” The piercing dimension of the Persephone sign (see conclusion) is phonologically suggested in the first half of her name (percer in French means “to pierce” and perce-oreille, “earwig”—ear-piercing insect). Ken’s history ends with: “Comme je voudrais dire a la mere qu’elle ne devait pas me laisser seule a deux ans jouer sous le baobab. . . . I’harmonie etait brisee. Ce cri perpant, sous ce baobab denude dans ce village!” (pp. 30-31) [“How I wanted to tell the mother that she should not leave me alone at age two under the baobab tree. . . . The harmony was shattered. That piercing scream under the denuded baobab in the village”] (p. 22). The scene is prepared by a description of the silence that reigns in the village. Both in the pre-history and in the history silence is a pre¬ lude to trauma, understanding, awareness, and “piercing” first con¬ sciousness. The pre-history has as its major motifs shattering, scat¬ tering, the loss of culture, and the loss of balance (the inner ear). The depth of significance behind the scream is what the autobiography proper will “remember” and analyze: abandonment by the mother, at- The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 181 tachment and loss, the sense of having been born without having been conceived, colonialism, independence, a philosophy of migrancy, and “the double-edged blade of consciousness.” I turn now to a discussion of the madness that the American trans¬ lation of the title elides. During great moments of political transition, economic catastrophe, and social upheaval that characterize decolo¬ nization, independence, and postcolonialism, insanity is often a sign of the disorder, incoherence, and excess of the historical moment. In 1951, in an essay entitled “The Man of Culture and His Responsibili¬ ties,” Aime Cesaire makes the point: Notre devoir d’hommes de culture, notre double devoir est la: il est de hater la decolonisation, et il est, au sein meme du present, de preparer la bonne decolonisation, une decolonisation sans sequelles.^ [Our duty as men of culture, our double duty lies therein: it is to hasten decolonization, and it is, within the immediate context of the present, to begin to prepare a solid decolonization, a decolonization without serious aftereffects.] The sequelles, or aftereffects, can also be translated as “postsurgi- cal scars,” “posttraumatic syndromes,” or “residual effects.” In the context of Cesaire’s statement, sequelles implies an awareness of the potential insanity of the postindependence moment during which, subsequent to the nation, the mind must be decolonized. Cesaire’s position as a man of culture has always been that the artist has moral and social responsibilities and should be the most useful citizen of his “tribe.” Through the 1950s, the artist’s duty was to hasten not only the decolonization of the old French colonies but also to promote the disalienation of the mind of the formerly colonized subject who had internalized the systematic ideological devaluation of Black humanity and culture. Cesaire’s agenda has been the reconstruction of Black nations after independence as well as the development of new con¬ cepts of the self and self-esteem. In the postindependence moment, artists were to become inventors of being, propagators of a new spirit, engineers of souls, multipliers of new men and women. In The Abandoned Baobab there is a leitmotiv of burning, scorching, and scarring. The autobiography is concerned with the postsurgical scars, the aftereffects, the traumas, the complexes, the psychoses and 182 Counterstorytelling neuroses that the man of culture would have spared the decolonized subject. Ken bears the scars of her mental colonization. Remember¬ ing her French education, Ken muses, “J’etudiais avec rage. Quand malgre moi je me couchais, je continuais a analyser dans ma tete le Discours de la Methode.” [“I studied furiously. . . . and when I’d go to bed, against my will, I would continue to analyze the Discourse on Method in my head.”] From its begirmings, francophone literature has sought refuge from the constraints of the French Cartesianism, rationalism, and logic that informed the colonial system of domina¬ tion and exploitation. Fanon states: “Pour le colonise, I’objectivite est toujours dirigee contre lui”'* [For the native, objectivity is always di¬ rected against him]. Before Fanon, Aime Cesaire had declared his opposition to the paralyzing grip of colonial logic upon the mind and existence of the colonized subject. To free herself of the grip of ratio¬ nalist categories upon her consciousness that seem to have left her in a state of radical divorce from the rich life of her other African self, Ken discovers the liberating effects of intoxication and insanity, in which there is a certain phoenicism, or promise of rebirth, through suicide: Grisee par le champagne, j’etais aussi grisee par mon autre moi-meme qui jouissait de ces moments qu’on voudrait vrais, ou I’etre se suicide lit- teralement dans I’illusion. ... la conscience de ce moment-la le rejet total de tout equation de la raison, du reel. Je me sentais comme sortie d’un gouffre qui m’etais autre que mes realites et celles de la vie. (Pp. 126-70) [Befuddled by the champagne, I was equally intoxicated by my other self, which enjoyed these moments I would so much want to be true, moments in which one literally commits suicide in illusion. . . . my con¬ sciousness of that moment was the total rejection of all equations of rea¬ son, of what is real. I felt as if I had come out of the pit that was nothing other than my and life’s realities.] (Pp. 107-8) The Madness That Remembers, Sees, and Frees Embedded in the poetics of Aime Cesaire is a ritualized performance of madness, intoxication, and phoenicism —as inherent risks of the kind of thinking necessary to bridge the gap between those languages, cultures, ideologies, and discourses that, because of their respective The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 183 politics and worldview, appear incommensurably and irreconcilably at odds with one another. Madness in Cesaire is related to the dis¬ orientation and dislocation that are the consequences of cultural up¬ rooting and the consciousness of being systematically alienated from one’s virtuality and thwarted in one’s fundamental desires for self- realization. In therapeutic terms, madness in Cesaire is a potent space of release from foreign cultural sanctions and judgments. It is a rich space of shame and blasphemy, of acting up and acting one’s way out of assigned invisibility' or stereoty’pical roles: Parce que nous vous hai'ssons vous et votre raison, nous nous reclamons de la demence precoce de la folie flamboyante du cannibalisme tenace Tresor comptons: la folie qui se souvient la folie qui hurle la folie qui voit la folie qui se dechaine (Cahier, 48) [Because we hate you you and your reason, we claim kinship with dementia praecox with flaming madness of persistent cannibalism treasure let’s count madness that remembers madness that howls madness that sees madness that is unleashed {Notebook, 49) Je declare mes crimes et il n’y a rien a dire pour ma defense Danses. Idoles. Relaps. Moi aussi J’ai assassine Dieu de ma paresse de mes paroles de mes gestes de mes chansons obscenes J’ai porte des plumes de perroquets des 184 Counterstorytelling depouilles de chat musque J’ai lasse la patience des missionnaires insulte les bienfaiteurs de I’humanite Defie Tyr. Defie Sidon. Adore le Zambeze L’etendue de ma perversite me confond! {Cahier, 52) [I declare my crimes and that there is nothing to say in my defense Dances. Idols. An apostate. I too I have assassinated God with my laziness with my words with my gestures with my obscene songs I have worn parrot plumes musk cat skins I have exhausted the missionaries’ patience insulted the benefactors of mankind. Defied Tyre. Defied Sidon. Worshipped the Zambezi the extent of my perversity overwhelms me!] {Notebook, 53) In these passages, Cesaire uncovers the value of the salutary, “sav¬ ing,” and therapeutic madness that allows the subject to accuse, ex¬ pose lies, and evacuate frustrations, rage, resentments, and outrage. Cesairian madness is, for the colonized person, a process of dis- alienation and decolonization of the mind. After realizing the futility of nativist mimicry or chic appropriations of the dominant culture, madness is a strategy for the production of meaning, being, and action. This emancipatory madness begins with Caliban’s cursing and evolves into expropriative gesmres that deconstruct, decenter, desta¬ bilize, renew, and expand the embrace of language, culmre, ideology, and discourse so that they yield to the expression of the colonized person’s worth, genius, and worldview. Neologisms abound, such as the celebrated negritude from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: “Haiti, where negritude stood up for the first time and declared its humanity.” Etymologically, negritude contains in its semes the sugges¬ tions of a new Black attitude, beatitude, pulchritude, lassitude, and study (etude) of Black people, civilizations, and history. In the Note- The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 185 book, as speech-act performativity, the neologism nigritude effects a parturition of self: Je force la membrane vitelline qui me separe de moi-meme je force les grandes eaux qui me ceinturent de sang. ASSEZ DE CE SCANDALE! Accommodez-vous de moi. Je ne m’accommode pas de vous! {Cahier, P- 56) [I am forcing the vitelline membrane that separates me from myself, I am forcing the great waters which girdle me with blood. ENOUGH OF THIS OUTRAGE! Put up with me. I won’t put up with you! (Notebook, p. 57) car il n’est point vrai que I’oeuvre de I’homme est finie que nous n’avons rien a faire au monde que nous parasitons le monde qu’il suffit que nous nous mettions au pas du monde mais I’oeuvre de I’homme vient seulement de commencer et il reste a I’homme a conquerir toute interdiction immobilise au coin de sa ferveur et aucune race ne possede le monopole de la beaute, de I’intelligence, de la force. (Cahier, p. 76) [for it is not true that the work of man is done that we have no business being on earth that we parasite the world that it is enough for us to heel to the world whereas the work has only begun and man still must overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength.] (Notebook, p. 77) Ken’s thought process takes systematic inventory of the psychoses and neuroses affecting the colonized person as well as the stereotypes 186 Counterstorytelling of Africans and, in particular, the Black woman in the European col¬ lective consciousness. Madness, for Ken, is essentially a problem of thought, that is, confused, tormented thinking. Ken’s thinking de¬ nounces the practice of French colonialism in Africa and its continu¬ ing aftereffects. It is a thinking process that continually questions the effects upon the African psyche of the French politics and process of assimilation, which turns out to be, in fact, a process of alienation. For Ken, madness is nothing more, nothing less, than the state of mind that results from the entanglement (slipknot) of questions and chi- astic logic that precipitates the thinking—postindependence—subject into the fulfillment or the emptiness of a double consciousness: La conscience constituait tout naturellement la lame a double tran- chant. II ne fallait pas avoir la conscience de I’ambigui'te. (P. 124) [Consciousness consisted quite naturally of a double-edged blade. The awareness of ambiguity had no place here.] (P. 106) It is, however, precisely her awareness of this ambiguity that leads Ken through a crisis of identity, a double-edged experience of alien¬ ation, the pain of attachment and loss, cycles of melancholy and ela¬ tion, feelings of worthlessness and the contemplation of suicide. As discussed in Part i, postcolonial countermodernity is a time and space of dream, myth, and madness. Paradoxically, only such phe¬ nomena can tolerate and contain the teeming tension of antinomies and the extraordinary “realities” of the experiences of colonialism, the challenges of decolonization, the culmral, ideological, and psychologi¬ cal conflicts of independence and postcolonialism. The pseudonym Ken Bugul in the Wolof language means “the child no one wanted.” Indeed, The Abandoned Baobab is the story of a child buffeted by cir¬ cumstances—abandoned by her mother, torn from her native land, assimilated by the French school, wandering in a Europe that rejects her, returning to the Mother Africa she herself had rejected. Ken Bu¬ gul writes her madness, alienation, hysteria, and panic. Ken is a “lost body” who “looses it” in the metropolitan environ¬ ment. Her early insanity finds refuge, however, in writing as a cure, and in so doing reveals itself to be an eminently philosophical, meta¬ physical, and existential state of analytic reflection. The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 187 L’arrivee des Blancs avait sape des fondements sacres, les avait dis- loques pour faire du colonise un angoisse a perpetuite. Ne pourrions- nous pas nous rassembler et surgir, comme la-bas le soleil sait paraitre brusquement! (P. 102) Les envahisseurs nous avaient separes, portes les uns contre les autres et nous n’etions pas arrives a nous en sortir. Et comment parler d’une lutte noire, d’un pouvoir noir, d’une culmre noire, de I’unite africaine, si nous n’avons pas encore resolu ce probleme? (P. 107) [The arrival of the Whites had undermined sacred foundations, had dismembered them, in order to turn the colonized into an anguished people forever more. Couldn’t we reunite ourselves and emerge, just as down there the sun knows how to suddenly appear?] (P. 85) [The invaders had separated us, had set us against each other, and we hadn’t managed to escape from that. And how can we speak of Black struggle. Black power. Black culture, African unity, if we haven’t yet re¬ solved this problem?] (P. 90) Throughout the text, Ken is referred to in French, English, and Wolof as “folle,” “crazy,” and “dof.” Ken Bugul’s “insanity'” is not blind, violent indirection. Her madness unfolds as an alternative space of exploration and cogitation as she experiences the splitting of the self through the wrenching experience of exile and cultural interaction peculiar to the postcolonial period. Ken’s madness is a phenomenon of thought. She cannot, nor would she know how to, prevent herself from thinking. The novel begins under the sign of the overdetermina¬ tion of meaning and the emptiness of meaning; II y a des foules de sentiments, de multiples ressentiments que nul ne peut dire, encore moins decrire. Je crois que tout ce qui se passe en nous, nous ne I’exprimons jamais entierement. Car cela nous depasse. (P. 51) [There are seas of emotions, multiple feelings and resentments that no one can express, much less describe. I believe that nothing of what goes on inside of us is ever entirely expressed. For it is beyond us.] (P. 38) Ken’s dementia arises from a postindependence world in conflict, a world of thoughts and concepts in conflict: 188 Counterstorytelling Les formules se choquent. Perdu, I’etre cavale dans la reflexion, la me¬ ditation. Les notions initient, les idees foisonnent, les projections s’epar- pillent, les comparaisons comparent. Chacun essaie un chemin dans le vide, mais la fuite incite a la creation et creer c’est combler le vide, le seul vrai adversaire de I’homme. (P. 22) [Formulas collide. Lost, human beings roam around inside thoughts, meditations. Notions introduce themselves, ideas are born, plans grow profuse, comparisons compare. Each one tries a new path in emptiness, but flight inspires creation, and to create is to fill the void, humankind’s only true enemy.] (P. 15) Alienation is a mode of experience in which the individual feels out of touch with him/herself. The condition often includes a pano¬ ply of uncertainties: role conflict, role reversal, questions about what role the subject is expected to play, doubt about his or her own self¬ hood, and feelings of dehumanization, helplessness, and futility. The tragedy and grandeur of Ken Bugul’s alienation is in its double scope as evidence of her otherness vis-a-vis not only European culture, but also her gradual alienation from African culture. Ken discovers her¬ self a stranger unto herself and to her own culture long before coming to France. She is caught, torn, twisted and split in a crisis of identity: Duboisian double consciousness leads to cultural schizophrenia. Dans le village de la mere, je ne parlais qu’en franyais avec les jeunes gens et les jeunes filles qui frequentaient I’ecole frangaise. Ayant trouve cette meme annee que dire bonsoir a quelqu’un pouvait signifier aussi au revoir, bonne nuit, je le balanyais a tout le monde. Je croyais avoir trouve un moyen de me rassurer en me faisant “toubab.” Toujours les revmes de mode de Paris qu’on pouvait acheter de seconde main au marche, tou¬ jours bonsoir a tort et a travers, toujours faire un tour dans le village pour me montrer, chaussant des chaussures a talons aiguille qui me donnaient si chaud et m’empechaient de marcher gracieusement, le jupon que je faisais depasser expres pour le montrer. Les decrepages permanents des cheveux, I’imitation des coiffures occidentales qui donnaient des wsages destructures, le vernis rouge comme du sang qui me coulait des doigts. Ah Dieu! Que j’etais epuisee de vouloir plus que “ressembler,” me de¬ former. (P. 138) The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 189 [In the Mother’s village, I spoke only French with the young people who went to the French school. Having just learned that year that say¬ ing “Bonsoir” to someone could mean “See you again” as well as “Good night,” I threw it out to everyone. I thought I had found a way to feel con¬ fident by acting “white.” Always with Paris fashion magazines I bought second-hand at the market, alw’ays “bonsoir” left and right, always taking walks around the village to be seen, with high-heeled shoes that made me hot and kept me from walking gracefully, the slip that I purposely let show, the straightened hair, the imitation of Western hairdos that brought the face into disarray, the blood-red lacquer that dripped off my fingers. Oh, God! I became so exhausted from wanting more than to “look like,” from deforming myself.] (P. 119) Je n’avais eu routes ces explications que quelques annees plus tard. J’avais toujours ete en dehors des evenements de la famille. Les chemins de nos mondes avaient pris de sens differents. Les rapports n’etaient pas scelles. A I’epoque, je voyais cette distance avec bonheur. Je fonyais de plus en plus dans la colonisation des temps nouveaux. . . . Les memes questions se chevauchaient, les memes aspirations vers I’Occident s’amplifiaient de plus en plus. L’identification etait difficile. Je consommais deux realites d’une fa(on contradictoire. Farce qu’au fond de moi, la nostalgic du lien me hantait. Dechiree! Les talons aiguille dans le sable chaud qui m’enveloppait jus- qu’aux chevilles, le gras qui degoulinait de mes cheveux decrepes jusqu’a la brulure, marcher en me serrant les fesses. Ft parfois I’envie de m’aban- donner comme les femmes du village, cette grace que j’appreciais el rejetais a la fois. J’apprenais par coeur les chansons occidentales et voulais les vivre telles. De plus en plus le fosse se creusait, desesperement. L’Afrique me rappelait a elle par ses elans, ses instants de poesie et ses rites. Mais je tenais bon avec les valeurs apportees par la colonisation. Je ne pouvais retourner sur mes pas, ni mane jeter un coup d’oeil en arriere. (Pp. 142-43; emphasis added) [I didn’t get all these explanations until several years later. I’d always been on the outside of family events. Our paths had taken different directions. The relationships weren’t confirmed. At the time, I saw this distance as something fortunate. I was sinking deeper and deeper into the colonization of the times. . . . The same questions w'ould overlap each 190 Counterstorytelling other the same aspirations toward the West were becoming more and more magnified. Identification was difficult. I was working to achieve two realities in a contradictory fashion. In my innermost self, the yearning for a bond haunted me. Torn in two. Spiked heels in the hot sand that enclosed me up to my ankles, grease that dripped down from my straightened hair all the way to my burn, my walk with tightened buttocks. And sometimes the desire to let myself go like the village women, that grace that I both treasured and rejected at the same time. I learned the songs from the West by heart and wanted to live them that way. More and more the gap widened, desperately Africa called me back with her life force, her moments of poetry and her rituals. But I held on tight to the bond I had made with the values that colonialism had brought. / could not go back anymore, I could not even glance backward.] (P. 123; emphasis added) In the extraordinarily rich passages just cited, the evolution of ex¬ perience is from assimilation to alienation to an early splitting of the mind in the context of the collision of two cultures. They also highlight the difference between imitation and identification. Imitation is the need to be like the Western Other, whereas identification for Ken will be the process of differentiation and the recognition of the intimacy of difference. The dementia praecox claimed in the Cesaire passage cited on page 183 is an early insanity, usually a prelude to schizophrenia or the splitting of the mind. As she is “sinking deeper and deeper into the colonization of the times,” Ken is aware of a withdrawal or a splitting off from the outside African world and her family. This “mild” schizo¬ phrenia will become more conflictual when Ken migrates to Brus¬ sels and undergoes a graver pattern of psychological reaction to the stresses of life as she immerses herself “in the depths of self-analysis: to be a woman, a rigid woman, to be a child without any notion of parents, to be Black, and to be colonized” (p. 93). Ken muses further: Pourquoi n’avoir pas prevu la reaction de la femme noire au neo-colonial- isme? . . . Contenir la sourdeur des pulsions qui assurent en partie I’equi- libre. (P. 90) [Why had they not foreseen the Black woman’s reaction to neo-colo- nialism? One must absorb the muteness of the drives that partly ensure equilibrium.] (P. 113) The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 191 Cette solitude que j’avais retrouvee durement, avec le choc d’avoir perdu, ici, mes ancetres les Gaulois. Le reflet dans le miroir, le visage, le regard, cette couleur qui me distinguait en me niant. Cette solitude jus- que dans les draps des amants d’un soir; ce besoin lancinant des autres, introuvables. (P. no) [To this loneliness, so harshly found again, now was added the shock of having lost my ancestors, the Gauls. The reflection in the mirror, the face, the look, the color that set me apart while negating me. The lone¬ liness that follows one all the way into the sheets of the one-night stand; that throbbing need for other people, who cannot be found.] (P. 93) The traumatic event in Ken’s life is her sense of having been aban¬ doned by her mother. It is in Brussels during late adolescence that Ken obsesses on her ambiguous relationship with the composite Mother, who is the mother, the grandmother, and Mother Africa. Oh mere que vous ai-je fait? Qu’avez-vous fait? Ah, si vous me voyiez en ce moment, comme je voudrais mourir! (P. 176). [Oh, mother what did I do to you? What have you done? Ah, if you were to see me at this moment, oh, how I would want to die!] (P. 153) Je n’avais rien et je cherchais toute I’enfance dans toutes les situations que je vivais dans le pays du remplacement oii je m’abandonnais dans le tragique depuis le depart de la mere. (P. 177) [I had nothing and was looking for my entire childhood in every situa¬ tion in a country that had replaced my own, where I gave myself whole¬ heartedly to tragedy ever since the mother’s departure.] (P. 154) Ken’s anxiety is the consequence of momentous transitions —from a familiar childhood environment characterized by communal care, devotion, and rimals, into a different culmral space filled with great expectations. Later in life, any loss is experienced as a reactivation of the early loss of the mother, the community', and familiar ways. II n’y avait que le desir fondamental et la necessite de I’affection, de toutes les emotions qui donnaient raison, poesie a la vie. Chacun a sa maniere, se jetant dans ces dechirements, ces etats ou desesperement on 192 Counterstorytelling se savait perdant et victime. II ne fallait pas arracher I’enfant du ventre de la mere. II ne fallait que la mere parte. (Pp. 178-79) Qu’avais-je fait? Qu’avait fait la mere? (P. 79) [All that was left was the basic desire and the necessity for affection, for all the emotions that give life sense and poetry. Each in his own way would throw himself into these heartbreaks, these states in which one knew oneself to be the loser and victim. The child ought not to be pulled out of the mother’s belly. The mother ought not to leave.] (P. 156) [What had I done? What had the mother done?] (P. 157) Explanations of schizophrenia vary according to the type of society: urban society seems to show a higher incidence than agricultural so¬ ciety. Industrial (postcolonial) societies seem to create a higher predis¬ position to schizophrenia than do agricultural societies. Further, there is the suggestion that in large, developed urban centers, schizophre¬ nia seems most prevalent among the unmarried, immigrants, those of low social status, and people who belong to ethnic minorities. There is no recognized single cause of the disorganization of the personality known as schizophrenia. It appears that genetic factors produce a vulnerability to schizophrenia, with environmental factors contributing to different degrees in different individuals. Just as hu¬ man personality is the result of the interplay of cultural, psychologi¬ cal, biological, and genetic factors, schizophrenia may result from an interplay of genetic factors and environmental stressors that can trigger neuro-psycho-biological mechanisms leading to the disorder.^ Scientists do not agree on a specific formula that is necessary to pro¬ duce the disorder: “Symptoms unique to schizophrenia have not been identified. No single symptom can be considered pathognomonic of this disorder. Rather, it is characterized by a polythectic cluster of symptoms, usually expressed in a particular course or pattern.”® In other words, no “bad” gene or biochemical defect has been proven responsible for schizophrenia. No one stressful event (such as a death in the family or, in the case of Ken, the departure of the mother and her sense of abandonment) seems sufficient, by itself, to trigger the psychological disintegration of schizophrenia. Scien¬ tists concur that, most likely, combinations of these factors produce schizophrenia." The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 193 As the etymolog>' {shizein and phren, phrenos) suggests, schizophre¬ nia is the manifestation of a split, a break, or a clash in thoughts and thought processes. Ken reflects on the paradox of her alienated condition and of her divided selves: “L’alienation? Moi qui n’avais jamais connu de milieu, de famille, issue d’une generation condam- nee, moi qui n’avais aucun repere, comment pourrais-je m’aliener? Or, I’ambiguite etablie, Timpossibilite de I’alienation en etait peut-etre deja une. Je soufflai un bon coup, comme j’en avais I’habimde apres chaque moment de flottement ou mon dedoublement prenait cette forme desesperee parce que sans autre issue que soi; mais qui etait justement soi et comment I’apprivoiser pour etre en paix?” (p. 124). Alienation? I, who had never known a center, a family, born from a condemned generation, I, who had no frame of reference, how could I be alienated? Yet, the established ambiguity, the impossibility of alien¬ ation, was perhaps in and of itself a form of it. I breathed deeply as I always did after every moment of floating, when my divided selves took this desperate form because there was no exit but itself; but who exactly was the self and how could I tame this self in order to be at peace? (p. 105). Formerly known as dementia praecox, which Cesaire salutes in his denunciation of the limitations, tyrannies, and crimes of reason in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, schizophrenia mani¬ fests itself in adolescence or in the early twenties and can take the form of a radical, paradoxical dissonance between a brilliant intellectual life and the breakdown of affective and social relationships. Such a disso¬ nance and breakdown characterize the life of Ken in The Abandoned Baobab, where one observes the sociogenesis of Ken’s self-a\'ersive reactions and behaviors. The chaotic language of the schizophrenic translates the alterations in perspective and thought that are the con¬ sequence of the interplay of psychosocial crises and environmental stresses.* Ken’s cerebral and linguistic disorganization is Fanonian in the sense that it emerges from “what Fanon recognized was the central role played in our human behaviors by our always linguistically consti¬ tuted criteria of being (that is, our human skins, represented masks ).” ® While schizophrenia is found more frequently among the lowest socioeconomic classes, poverty itself is not a direct cause of schizo¬ phrenia. Conditions associated with poverty, however, may be impli¬ cated in the disorder.'^ Ken’s evolution in social status from inter¬ national student in Brussels to photographer’s model, hatcheck girl. 194 Counterstorytelling nightclub hostess, masseuse, and prostitute traces a social, moral, and psychological decline that results in a schizophrenic panic and sui¬ cide attempt: “A number of smdies suggest that schizophrenics are not necessarily born to poverty. Instead, it appears that schizophren¬ ics ‘drift downward’ in social class after they become ill. Thus, like many factors associated with schizophrenia, poverty may be a result rather than a cause of illness.” " Ken does not demonstate the positive symptoms of schizophre¬ nia that represent an exaggeration or distortion of normal function, such as hallucinations, delusions, and hearing voices when they are not there. In her social decline, as outlined above, and in the evolu¬ tion of her personality as she struggles with the challenges of race, assimilation, self-worth, gender, sexuality, self-aversion, and cultural conflicts as they get played out in a European capital in the seven¬ ties, Ken succumbs in varying degrees to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia that represent a diminution or loss of normal function. Negative symptoms of schizophrenia include “affective blunting (loss of the ability to express emotions fluently), alogia (impoverished non¬ fluent speech), avolition (loss of drive), anhedonia (loss of the ability to feel emotional attachment or experience pleasure) and attentional impairment. These negative symptoms account for a great deal of the emotional and social morbidity of schizophrenia, since they lead to social isolation and withdrawal, difficulty in holding a job or remain¬ ing in school and impaired ability to relate to others.” Scientists concur that research into the psychosocial factors involved in schizophrenic behavior is related to its etiology and pathogenesis and that consideration must be given to environmental events, per¬ sonality characteristics, subjective experience, and individual adap¬ tive mechanisms and capabilities.'^ It is the cultural moment and context that produce Ken’s dilemma. Ken’s illness is her consciousness of what she is undergoing. Medical- izing social disorders limits the possibility of a cure. What is needed, in addition, is a sociodiagnostic. The point of cultural schizophrenia is to transcend pathologizing schizophrenia, to move beyond Ken’s example as the bio-ontogenetic problem of an individual woman in order to place her shattering experience, examples of which multi¬ ply daily in urban centers from Brussels and Paris to New York and The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 195 Montreal, into a broader process of socialization such as Fanonian sociogeny. Sylvia Wynter makes this point in assessing Fanon’s con¬ tribution to the concept of a sociodiagnostic: Fanon noted the extent to which all native and colonialized subjects had been conditioned to experience themselves as if they were, in fact, as genetically inferior as the hegemonic “learned discourse” of contemporary scholars ostensibly represented them (as obsessively as those of Colum¬ bus’s times had as negatively represented the torrid zone/antipodes). . . . Fanon sought to relate the “aberration of affect” that led to these be¬ haviors, to a specific sociosystemic organizing process that had, in turn, induced the “aberration of affect” itself. . . . Freud, said Fanon, had placed the emphasis on the individual. He had therefore based the disci¬ pline of psychology on an ontogenetic perspective, but ‘‘‘'besides ontogeny, there is sociogeny, [said Fanon]. The problem of the black man and of the colonial native’s self-aversive reactions was clearly not an individual problem. *•* In the wake of Fanon, look for the explanation of our human behav¬ iors not in the individual psyche of the ostensibly purely bio-ontogenetic subject, but rather in the process of socialization that institutes the indi¬ vidual as a human, and therefore, always sociogenetic subject.'^ Ken Bugul, as pointed out earlier, thinks constantly about her situa¬ tion in the world. Her “cogito” does not lead to a logical, stable, and triumphant affirmation of who she is. Ken’s cogito is a quest for identity. Very early in her experience she realizes the function of her interactions with others, especially her interactions with white men, through whom she feels valorized and revealed unto herself. The pro¬ cess is the discovery of self through alterity—through one’s otherness and through the others who have made you an “Other”: C’est ainsi qu’avec Louis debuta ma premiere idylle en Occident. Idylle qui me servait a m’expliquer, a m’integrer, a montrer que j’etais comme eux: qu’il n’y avail aucune difference entre nous, que eux et moi, nous avions les memes ancetres. (P. 54) [And so it happened that my first romance in the West was with Louis. The romance served to explain myself, to integrate me, to show that I 196 Counterstorytelling was like them, that there was no difference whatsoever between us, that they and I had the same ancestors.] (P. 42) The cosmopolitan city of Brussels, with its inhabitants from the four corners of the globe, especially women, contributed to the awaken¬ ing of Ken’s feminist consciousness. It is her decision to abort Louis’s child that initiates her contact with women of varied cultural back¬ grounds who find communion together in the anteroom of the abor¬ tionist’s office. The scene reveals the functioning of Ken’s mind as she is constantly struck by the endless ironies of their condition: the anteroom that strangely resembles a cathouse, the doctor who is a butcher and an opponent of racial mixing, who reveals this as he is probing deep within her flesh, and the realization of her own shame about being pregnant with Louis’s child. It is precisely this kind of meditation on her condition that keeps Ken hovering at the edge of lucidity and panic, madness and shame. Such a state is the destruc¬ tive, disabling potential of life in the culmrally hybrid space. II y avait quelque chose qui ressemblait a une salle d’attente, mais on aurait dit plutot une piece d’un bureau de recrutement ou s’alignaient des femmes de toutes les couleurs, des Arabes, des Africaines, des Antil- laises. Chacune avait fair de vivre une tragedie propre a elle. . . . Elies avaient la meme couleur. Nous etions ensemble sans I’etre. Nous nous regardions sans nous voir. Nous etions des femmes et nous avions les memes cauchemars que ne connaissaient que les femmes. . . . Aucun homme ne se trouvait dans cette salle d’attente qui ressemblait a une antichambre de maison close. Les femmes, des qu’elles se trouvent ensemble ont fair si garces. Mille pensees defilerent dans mon imagina¬ tion, de Gouye oii je suis ne jusqu’au jour oii un professeur d’histo-geo me seduisit, mon voyage en Occident, mon contact avec les Occiden- taux, mes rencontres et celle qui m’avait mene dans cette salle d’attente oii je me rendais compte que les femmes, toutes les femmes, avaient le meme destin. (Pp. 55-56) [Something there resembled a waiting room, but I would sooner have called it a recruitment office where women of all colors were lined up, Arabic, African, Caribbean. Each one looked as if she were living her own private tragedy. .. . They had the same color. We were there together without being together. We were looking at each other without seeing The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 197 each other. We were women and surely we had the same nightmares, those that only women know. There was not a single man in this waiting room, which resembled a brothel. As soon as women are alone together, they seem so much like tarts! A thousand thoughts went through my head, from Gouye where I was born to the day I was seduced by a history and geography teacher, my trip to the West, my contact with Westerners, my encounters gener¬ ally, and the specific one that had led me to this waiting room, where I realized that women, all women, have the same destiny.] (P. 43) Ce type etait un bourreau. II exploitait la femme jusque dans ses en- trailles. (P. 56) [This guy was an executioner. He exploited woman all the way to her entrails.] (P. 44) Le soir, Louis me proposa a nouveau de nous marier, de garder I’en- fant, d’aller vivre ailleurs, meme en Afrique. Pour moi, il n’en etait pas question. J’avais quitte I’Afrique depuis a peine trois mois. Comment pourrais-je y retourner avec une grossesse et un mari blanc? (P. 63) [That evening, Louis once again proposed that we get married, keep the child, go to live elsewhere, in Africa even. I wouldn’t hear of it. I had left Africa just barely three months earlier. How could I go back there, pregnant and with a white husband?] (P. 50) Dans I’immeuble ou nous habitions, il y avait des etudiants africains. Une Italienne venait les voir, ils me la presenterent juste au moment de mes ennuis. Cette rencontre m’apporta une idee plus nette des rapports entre femmes. Ma conscience feministe etait nee. (P. 63) [In our building there were other African students. An Italian woman used to visit them, and they introduced her to me just around the time of my difficulties. That encounter gave me a much clearer idea of the rela¬ tionships between women. My feminist consciousness was born.] (P. 50) A se demander si les femmes ne vivaient pas les memes choses partout. (P. 65) [It leads one to wonder whether women don’t live through the same things ever^'where.] (P. 51) 198 Counterstorytelling Ah les femmes! Concevoir, admettre, tolerer, servir! (P. 86) [Ah, women! Conceive, admit, tolerate, serve!] (P. 72) Nous parlions des problemes de la femme en cette seconde moitie du vingtieme siecle. Je frequentais de moins en moins mes compatriotes. J’etais souvent avec les Blancs. (P. 67) [We would talk about the problems of women in the second half of this twentieth century. I spent a great deal of time with white people.] (P. 53) Ken’s feminist consciousness does not lead her into the trap of level¬ ing universals and containment of a system of correspondences that would blind her to the specificity of her condition. Ken understands very quickly that an espousal of the first-world European feminist agenda simply locked her into the old racial hierarchies, with Black women, at best, simply being ignored. Her feminist consciousness progressively moves toward the contemplation of her situation as a Black woman in Europe, for she recognizes: “je m’identifiais en eux, ils ne s’identifiaient pas en moi” (p. 67) [“I identified myself in them, they did not identify themselves in me”] (p. 53). For “them” Ken re¬ mains absolutely an “Other.” The “in them” and “in me” emphasizes the extent and the importance of the identification process as a struc- mred relation to what it is in the Other. The “alterity process,” referred to above, leads Ken into the dan¬ gerous slipknot of attempting, herself, to exploit the European com¬ modification of the Black woman’s body through fashion, exoticism, and sexual commerce. C’etait I’epoque oii I’Occident s’exotisait. Ce qui nous differenciait, c’etait qu’elle etait une Blanche, mariee, riche et que j’etais une Noire “desequilibree,” une aventuriere. (P. 73) [It was the period when the West was becoming enamored of the exotic. What made us different was that she was white, married, and rich, while I was an “unbalanced” Black woman, an adventurer.] (P. 59) Partout j’etais la seule Noire, certes pas I’ambassadrice du peuple noir, mais a defaut des Pygmees ou de Masai a moitie nus, celle qui delirait The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 199 avec eux Blancs, dans une peau noire. J’etais celle chez qui chacun vou- lait laisser sa carte de visite; avec qui chacun voulait parler. J’etais le hap¬ pening de tout ce monde des arts et des mondanites. Culture occidentale et un eventail de connaissances memorisees sans methode et projetees tous azimuts me faisaient apprecier par ces mecenes et philanthropes des temps nouveaux. J’allais done partout et j’etais partout celle qu’on remarquait. Farce qu’elle etait noire, et aussi parce que, par desespoir, elle s’accrochait et osait. Elle osait la transparence, elle osait le deguise- ment, elle osait rire, elle osait pleurer, mais au fond etait amere. (P. loi) [Ever>’where I went I was the only Black woman, and surely not as a lady ambassador of the Black people but, as there were no Pygmies or half-naked Masai, I w'as the one to carry on wdth them, the white folks, in my black skin. I was the one to whom everyone gave his calling card, with whom everyone wanted to talk. I was the happening of this whole w'orld of arts and social events. Western culture and a whole range of bits of knowledge, memorized without any order, projected in a helter- skelter fashion, made these Maecenases and modern-day philanthropists appreciate me enormously. And so I went ever>’where, and everj’where I was the one they noticed. Because she w'as Black, and also because she hung on and she was daring, out of sheer despair. She dared to be trans¬ parent, she dared to disguise herself, she dared to laugh, she dared to weep, but deep down she was bitter.] (Pp. 84-85) Ces gens riches etaient libres de faire ce qu’ils voulaient, ils absorbaient la diaspora pour I’originalite. “Nous avons une amie noire, une Afri- caine” etait la phrase la plus “in” dans ces milieux. La Negresse apres les lionceaux, et les singes, avec les masques Dogon et d’lfe. J’etais cette ne¬ gresse, cette “chez vous autres,” cette “toi, en tant que noire, il faudrait que . . .,” cet etre supplementaire, inutile, deplace, incoherent. (P. 101) [These rich people were free to do whatever they wanted, they were engrossed in the diaspora because it was something new and original. “We have a Black friend, an African woman” was the most fashionable sentence in those circles. The Negress, after the lion cubs and the mon¬ keys, with the Dogon and Ife masks. I was that Negress, that “down where you live,” that “you, as a Black woman, you ought to . . . ,” that supplementary being, useless, displaced, incoherent.] (P. 85) 200 Counterstorytelling The consumption of Africa reaches absurd and riotously funny proportions in the opening scene of chapter 8 of The Abandoned Bao¬ bab, when the Brussels’ Furriers and Diamond Dealers’ Association throws a lavish African soiree complete with Ken as a “real” African coat-check girl, an “authentic” African band in exile, and of course all guests in the most lavish furs and diamonds poached and pillaged from the jungles and mines of the Dark Continent. The scene reaches its climax when one of the guests arrives with a leopard on a leash. The leopard is driven crazy by the smell of lamb roasting on a spit. Ken dives for cover under a mound of furs in her care, and the Afri¬ can band members seek a hiding place behind the stage. The Whites are incredulous, for, after all, Africans should be accustomed to wild animals. The exotification-commodification process loses its allure and pushes Ken into profound self-analysis on the relations between Black women and White men, the commercial consumption of the Black woman’s body, and her complicity in these processes. “Oh, Ken, ne va pas chercher des considerations la ou il n’y en a pas, la ou il n’en faut pas. Une femme ne peut etre rien d’autre que de la con- sommation.” (P. 120) [“Oh, Ken, don’t start looking for considerations where there aren’t any, where there shouldn’t be any. A woman can be nothing other than a consumption.”] (P. loi) Ken’s thinking leads her to cross-examine herself: she functions as judge and defendant and especially as analyst and analysand: Paul et Hdene Denoel s’en faisaient tant pour moi, a mesure que je plongeais dans les bas-fonds de I’autopsychanalyse: etre une femme, une femme rigide, etre une enfant sans notion de parents, etre noire et etre colonisee. (P. no) [Paul and Hdene Denoel were so worried about me that I immersed myself in the depths of self-analysis; to be a woman, a rigid woman, to be a child without any notion of parents, to be Black, to be colonized.] (B 93 ) Prostituee au Blanc, je manquais une des faces de I’ambiguite. . . . L’homme blanc et la femme noire, la vie, un enchevetrement d’histoire et de meta-histoire. (P. 125) The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 201 [Prostitute to the white man, one of the sides of ambiguity missing. . . . The white man and the Black woman, life, a jumble of history and meta¬ history.] (P. 106) It is, in fact, Ken’s need to share affection that entangles her in social/commercial/sexual relations of all varieties: modeling, nude photography, “hostessing” in nightclubs and saunas, menages a trois, heterosexuality, bisexuality, and a lesbian relationship. Although Ken aborts, prostitutes herself, does not marry, and is herself an aban¬ doned child, her disposition is generously maternal. The more aban¬ doned people are, the more Ken loves them. She welcomes into her embrace all of the hippies, beatniks, and wandering souls “of the rag¬ tag and dreamy diaspora of the 1970s.” Ken’s experiences in the European “Promised Land,” as she refers to it, provide her with a revelatory perspective on the African ex¬ perience. In Ken’s thinking processes, there is a constant boomer¬ ang effect: as she reflects upon her condition in Europe, she is con¬ stantly compelled to compare a European cultural phenomenon with the African cultural values she has abandoned. She observes that “la sexualite est culture et atmosphere” (p. 65) [sexuality' is culture and atmosphere] (p. 52), and that “Dans tout exode, il y a alteration de I’echelle des valeurs” (p. 65) [In every exodus there is a change in the sets of values] (p. 51). The question of abandonment, the need for affection, and reflection on the sociosexual and contrasting cul¬ tural values come together as Ken emerges as a figure of maternity' while caring for her former lover, the bisexual Jean Werner, who suf¬ fers from a “contagious” viral hepatitis. She w'arms him and holds him tightly against her breasts: iMalgre les apprehensions pour moi des gens et du medecin, je dormais avec lui, le serrant tres fort contre moi comme pour aspirer toute sa douleur. Je buvais dans son verre, je I’embrassais tout le temps, je ne vou- lais pas I’abandonner dans la solitude de la maladie et de la souffrance. Ses parents, ses enfants, ses rares amis, se tenaient a distance quand ils venaient le voir. Dans ce pays, les malades etaient seuls, les handicapes seuls, les en¬ fants seuls, les vieux seuls. Et c’etaient les etapes les plus riches de la vie humaine. La-bas tout le monde est integre, concerne, entoure; tout vit ensemble. 202 Counterstorytelling Meme I’arbre donne rombre et la fraicheur, a son utilite culinaire, ou therapeutique, il est un lieu de meditation. Je ne fus pas contaminee et Jean Wermer ne fut pas abandonne. II se retablissait tres bien et je n’arretais pas de lui jouer du theatre et de lui raconter des histoires droles. Plus les gens etaient abandonnes plus j’aimais m’approcher d’eux. (P- 97 ) [Despite the apprehension of most people, including the doctor, I would sleep with him, holding him very close to me as if to inhale all his pain. I drank from his glass, I kissed him all the time, I didn’t want to abandon him to the loneliness of illness and suffering. His parents, his children, his rare friends kept their distance when they came to visit him. In this country, the sick were alone, the handicapped were alone, the children were alone, the elderly were alone. And those were the richest stages in a human life. Down there, everyone was integrated, concerned, surrounded; every¬ thing lived together. Even the trees gave shade and freshness, had their culinary or therapeutic uses, were places for meditation. I was not contaminated and Jean Werner was not abandoned. He was recuperating very nicely and I wouldn’t stop performing for him and telling him funny stories. The more abandoned people were, the more I enjoyed getting closer to them.] (P. 97) In Le Baobab fou, it becomes increasingly evident that geography, as Hector Bianciotti asserts, “which has primarily to do with surfaces, is the most superficial form of exile.” In the text the problematics of exile reveal a succession of separations and losses of harmony along a via dolorosa marked by loss of the mother tongue and cultural fiu- ency, expulsion of the child from the mother’s lap, weaning, and loss even of the uterine paradise of the African mother: C’etait la pleine lune, mais endeuilee comme la mere la lune s’etait re- fugiee dans les nuages qui arboraient une terne couleur jaunatre. J’avais la tete sur les cuisses de la mere. Ces cuisses chaudes qui me rappelaient celles de ma grand’mere qui m’en voulait parce que j’avais ete inscrite a I’ecole fran^aise. Elle me haissait par la suite et elle me regardait comme une souillure, je la degoutais. (P. 59) The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 203 [The moon was full, but, in mourning, it had fled into the clouds, which spread a lusterless yellowish color. I had my head on the mother’s thighs. Those warm thighs reminded me of the grandmother’s, who was angry with me because I registered at the French school. Afterward she hated me, regarded me as a blemish; I disgusted her.] (P. 46) Je me croyais ne sans conception. Je me retrouvais colonise dans le groupe des “sans giron de la mere sans lieu pour reposer la tete.” (P. 128) [I believed I’d been born without having been conceived. I found my¬ self colonized again in the group of those wTo have “no mother’s lap, no place to rest their head.”] (P. 109) II ne fallait pas arracher I’enfant du ventre de la mere. II ne fallait que la mere parte. (Pp. 178-79) [The child ought not to be pulled out of the mother’s belly. The mother ought not to leave.] (Pp. 155-56) Ken lives in a permanent state of exile —social and political, psycho¬ logical and emotional, geographic and metaphysical. This exilic form of alienation is fundamentally tied to the maternal imago. Ken’s alien¬ ation also involves a form of repression; Je n’avais jamais pu parler de moi. En face de Laure et Franpois, je ne me basais que sur des references. J’ecoutais, je suivais, je participais, mais ce n’etait pas moi. Ils me depouillaient, me vidaient, m’etalaient. (P. 102) [Never had I been able to talk about myself. Faced with Laure and Francois, I based myself only on references. I w'ould listen. I’d follow along. I’d participate, but it wasn’t me. They were stripping me, empty¬ ing me out, displaying me.] (P. 85) Saisir I’autre. Un autre moi-meme commengait a se sentir responsable. Je cherchais le refuge depuis la perle d’ambre dans I’oreille, pourtant je savais que ce n’etait pas un abri, toute cette enchere. (Pp. 101-2). [To grasp the other. Another me began to feel responsible. I was look¬ ing for refuge ever since the amber bead in my ear, and yet I knew that this, this whole auction block wasn’t a shelter.] (P. 85) 204 Counterstorytelling Moi qui avais reve d’un foyer, d’un pere, d’une mere, d’ancetres, moi qui voulais etre reconnue! J’etais jetee dans la cage des fantasmes inas- souvis et des chevauchees dans le reve surreel. (P. 99) [I, who had dreamed of a home, of a father, of a mother, of ancestors, I who wanted to be recognized! I was thrown into the cage of unful¬ filled fantasies and was taking wild rides into the world of surreal dream.] (P. 82) Ken’s vague dreams of return to the mother’s womb become a thinly disguised death wish. In The Abandoned Baobab these preoccu¬ pations give rise to a haunting poetry of crossroads, crossings, bridges, and goings and comings. They concretize the desire to cross the foot¬ bridge that leads to the Promised Land, to reverse roles, to straddle worldviews, to hurdle the distance between myth, reality, and dream. Les larmes coulaient de ce puit de solitude qui etait mon ame. Je me laissais pleurer et m’entendais parler de suicide. Suicide? Le terme m’avait toujours effraye en meme temps que fascine. Le suicide etait si rare au village. Je n’y avais jamais connu de suicide. Le cas de suicide se passait toujours ailleurs. Le motif en etait telle- ment sacre qu’on n’en parlait qu’au grands moments. Si le suicide etait tout ce que j’avais trouve pour remedier a cette angoisse qui semblait s’etre installee en moi pour toujours, je ne pouvais pas me permettre d’hypothequer ma vie a un pretexte. (P. 171) [Tears were flowing from the well of solitude that was my soul. I let myself cry and heard myself talk of suicide. Suicide? It was a term that had always frightened me and fascinated me at the same time. In the village suicide was so rare. I’d never known of one there. Suicide always happened somewhere else. Its motive was so sacred that it would be talked about only at very important moments. If suicide was all I could find to remedy the anguish that seemed to have pervaded me forever, I couldn’t afford to mortgage my life to a pretext.] (P. 149) Ken’s depression-melancholia mode can be read as a cultural symp¬ tomatology pointing to the problems of imitation, projection, iden¬ tification, and a sense of loss and mourning. In such a mode, the schizophrenic typically feels hopeless, worthless, and considers life an unbearable torment. There is often the desire to punish oneself by The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 205 self-destruction, or there is, at least, much evidence of suicidal think¬ ing. Ken’s extreme case of alienation leads to temporary madness and to the contemplation of suicide. J’etais a I’ultime etape ou il n’y avait plus que le suicide pur et simple. Sans analyse. (P. 178) [I’d reached the final stage where only suicide was left, pure and simple. Without any analysis.] (P. 155) It is, however, important to note that Ken’s death wish is not so much a desire for self-annihilation as it is an ardent Phoenix-like desire, a surrealist desire, to die in order to better become. As self¬ punishment, Ken considers suicide to be an end as well as a begin¬ ning—in short, to be a rebirth. La conscience de tout ce qui m’etait arrive si loin du village ou je suis nee, me faisait prier Dieu de me faire renaitre comme si presque un quart de siecle n’avait jamais ete. (P. 180) [My consciousness of everything that had happened to me so far away from the village where I was born made me pray to God to let me be born again as if almost a quarter of a century hadn’t happened.] (P. 157) The Third Dimension: Cultural Schizophrenia and the Challenges of Translation Schizophrenia, as I use it here, refers to that reactive schizophrenia typified by Ken’s existence. Reactive schizophrenia is precipitated by events in an individual’s life and is characterized by relatively mild thought disorders of the schizo-affective manic-depressive U^pe, with recurrent cyclical melancholia and moods of elation and depression. The Abandoned Baobab by Ken Bugul forces the reader to confront the phenomenon of cultural schizophrenia. Metropolitan centers such as Paris and Brussels are magnets for migrants from the former colonies, the protectorates, and territories who search for improved economic, political, social, and cultural lives. Undeniably, these urban centers are culturally dynamic and stimu¬ lating. How’ever, “these rich tapestries of cultural difference” rarely 2 o6 Counterstorytelling succeed day by day as “big tents,” “beautiful cultural mosaics,” or “harmonious melting pots.” These metaphors of harmony seek to depoliticize the political. Particularly since decolonization, with the forced return of colonials to the homeland and the increased num¬ bers of immigrants and guest workers and their combined competitive entry into the workforce, cosmopolitan centers have become conflic- mal spaces. Inevitably, because of commerce, trade, treaties, wars, colonialisms, borrowings, prestige, domination or subordination, aU cultures undergo hybridizations of some kind. Of the many discus¬ sions of metissage culturel, transculturation, and cultural braiding, the one I find most interesting is that of the French philosophical thinker Michel Serres. Le Tiers-Instruit {The Third Nature), with the her¬ maphrodite-twin-rainbow reverie of Harlequin as the embodiment of metissage, would envision cultural blending as an elevatory, almost as¬ cetic, process of self-instruction and ennoblement leading to cultural harmony and enrichment—the inevitable consequence and benefit of contact, exchange, and marriage with alterity. “Tout apprentissage consiste en un metissage” [Every apprenticeship involves a process of hybridization]; “Aime I’autre qui engendre une troisieme personne en toi, I’esprit” [“Love the other who engenders a third person in you, the spirit”]. For some a vision such as Serres’s could be a bit anodyne. Homi Bhabha would insist that the importance of hybridization is the pres¬ ence of difference at the point of the articulation of alterity. Any claim to an ongoing difference is always surmounted by its displacement; hybridity allows one to confront the incommensurable without solv¬ ing it. While Serres’s vision is utopian, perhaps, his analysis is not simplistic. It is an ethic that does not seek to gloss over, depoliticize, or repress the conflictual dimensions of colonialism, decolonization, postcolonialism, and migrancy. In fact, Le Tiers-Instruit can be read both as a recognition of the extraordinary challenges laid down by contact with the Other and as an appeal for harmony, understanding, and mutual growth. In The Abandoned Baobab, Ken Bugul is forced to confront the dual cultural forces that have shaped her double con¬ sciousness and given rise to her third consciousness. Serres’s and Ken Bugul’s texts can be read as meditations on mi¬ grancy, the challenges of which are part of the etiology of cultural The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 207 schizophrenia. Ken’s dislocations and relocations will be punctuated by her moves from the tiny bush village of N’doucoumane to the vil¬ lage of the French high school, to Dakar, to Paris, to Brussels, from street to street, from apartment to apartment. Not merely a spatial phenomenon, moving is profoundly psychological and sociological in its implications. As observed in The Sand Child by Tahar ben Jelloun, one does not move from one life to another simply by crossing a foot¬ bridge. Migrancy entails status inconsistency, role conflict, and shifts in consciousness that, together, constitute a radical learning experi¬ ence. Partir exige un dechirement qui arrache une part du corps a la part qui demeure adherente a la rive de naissance, au voisinage de la paren- tele, a la maison et au village des usages, a la culture de la langue et a la raideur des habitudes. Qui ne bouge n’apprend rien. Oui. Pars, divise-toi en parts. Tes voyages risquent de te condamner comme un frere separe. Tu etais unique et refere, tu vas devenir plusieurs et parfois incoherent, comme I’univers, qui au debut eclata, dit-on, a un grand bruit. Pars, et alors tout commence, au moins toute explosion en mondes a part. Tout commence par ce rien. Aucun apprentissage n’evite le voyage.'" [Leaving is a wrenching experience that tears one part of the body away from the part that remains attached to the shores of one’s birth, to the neighborhood of one’s family relations, to the house and village of customs, to the culture, to language, and to the straightjacket of habits. He who does not move learns nothing. Yes, leave, divide yourself into parts. Your voyages run the risk of condenrming you to the fate of a sepa¬ rated sibling. You were unique and with reference points, you are going to become multiple, at times incoherent, like the universe which in the beginning exploded, we are told, in a big bang. Leave, and everyTbing will begin in a world of explosions into separate worlds. Everything be¬ gins with this little effort. No learning can take place without displacement.] In The Abandoned Baobab, Ken sums up the challenge of migrancy very simply by observing that “one cannot simply replace one con¬ sciousness with another.” She goes on to analyze her double schizo- 2o8 Counterstorytelling phrenic consciousness as giving rise to a third dimension within the unconscious. The culturally schizophrenic are challenged to make contact with this third dimension of consciousness: Contenir la sourdeur des pulsions qui assurent en partie I’equilibre, I’epa- nouisssement du soi defini. Les jours passaient comme des reves ina- voues. L’etre qui devait naitre dans le subconscient comme les termites font leurs termitieres se dissimulaient dans une tierce dimension. (P. 113) [One must absorb the muteness of the drives that partly ensure equi¬ librium, the blossoming of the undefined self. The days went by like unavowed dreams. The being that was to be born in the unconscious, like termites making their anthills, was hiding inside a third dimension.] (P- 97 ) Ken’s sense of hope for herself and the African future, as well as her intellectual and mental competence, prevent her from committing clini¬ cal suicide. She dies unto herself in order to free herself of the mental colonization that has precipitated her into the destructive space of cul¬ tural schizophrenia. The equilibrium of the passage above reminds the reader that Ken’s story is concerned with balance and survival in postcolonial societies. Ken’s “epic,” as she refers to her life, is an example of what can be referred to as “the challenges of translation,” that is, the tremen¬ dous struggle involved in negotiating the transit from one culture to another. The struggle involves maintaining one’s psychological sta¬ mina and equilibrium in the circulation of ideas and in the traffic of desires between cultures, during inevitable alteration of the values of non-European communities. As a consequence, one is aware of the Echo-Narcissus temptations. In the Echo phenomenon of assimilation, one surrenders com¬ pletely, as Ken did, to “becoming” French. Leon Damas’s poems “Hiccups” and “Sellout” (see chapter 2) address this pattern, this parodic existential absurdity and the rebellion against it. The Narcis¬ sus imperative, in which one retreats into the contemplation of self and, particularly, one’s cultural heritage for the purpose of cultural af¬ firmation, is discussed by Aime Cesaire in “Narcisse noir” (see chap¬ ter i). The challenges of the postcolonial global community make either choice unviable. We are obliged to oscillate between the Narcis- The Blossoming of the Undefined Self 209 sus position of allegiance to our own culture and the Echo position of assimilation. It is the challenge of transnational adaptability that can lead to a schizophrenic panic, such as the schizophrenia depicted in Ken’s story of transculturation. Resistance to the wrenching life experiences of postcolonial economies involves not simply denunciation, nor the celebration of the past, nor nostalgia for an Edenic return to sources; rather, resistance involves the study of emergent problems, of the potentially disabling experiences of cultural hybridity, of the failures of migrancy and transplantation, and of the difficult negotiation of the sociopolitical/psychosexual challenges of the postcolonial period. This, for me, is the merit of such a disturbing text as Le Baobab fou, because all of these challenges are “caught” in its web. Ken returns to Africa at the end of the text in order to rediscover what she abandoned. Like Cesaire’s laminarian seaweed, Ken dis¬ covers herself still attached to the site of her origins. Perhaps, in her search for an inclusive transnational fluency, Ken w'ill explore the con¬ structive spaces of cultural schizophrenia where Echo, the assimila- tionist self, and Narcissus, the nativist self, w’ill not vie for the soul and psyche of the postcolonial subject—but where the two will give birth to that third dimension, where the lost balance of the inner ear, which she pierced and traumatized as a child, will be recovered, and where healthy survival in the enabling hybridity of a cross-culmral postcolo¬ nial global village will be assured. Ken’s ability to slip the potentially strangling knot of cultural conflict derives from her ability to under¬ stand and internalize the European moves, but then to evacuate the internal held of illusions, complexes, desires, and lies that had led her to the contemplation of suicide. The madness that w^as initially self¬ destructive eventually serves as an anticolonialist strategy and hence becomes emancipatory for Ken. The processes of cultural hybridity allow one to confront the “incommensurables,” “the collision of for¬ mulas” in postcolonial contexts, without necessarily solving them. As Ken survives the temptation of suicide, there is abandonment of Europe and a new displacement to the rediscovery of the lost Mother Africa. As she takes up a new life beneath the standing but dead Bao¬ bab tree, the reader senses the beginning of a new autobiography of Ken Bugul that will trace “the blossoming of the undefined self.” Ill Counter confession 8 Words Proffered in Pain Gerard Etienne, Shame, and the Counterconfession To speak as though tomorrow I will die . . . Mzwake Mbuli, poet, rock musician, tortured South African political prisoner In the Denunciatory Tradition “I was ‘a graduate’ of the peculiar institution . . . with my diploma writ¬ ten on my back.’’ It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them. I could not always curb my moral indignation for the perpetrators of slaveholding villainy long enough for a cir¬ cumstantial statement of the facts.”' Thus spoke Frederick Douglass ( i 8 i 7?-95), the American slave who escaped from Maryland and be¬ came an abolitionist lecturer, orator, publisher, politician and, toward the end of his life. United States minister resident and consul general to Haiti. His life’s purpose was to “energetically assail the ramparts of Slavery and Prejudice, be they composed of church or state, and seek the destruction of every refuge of lies, under which tyranny may aim to conceal and protect itself.”^ In francophone America and fol¬ lowing the tradition of the narrative politics of a Frederick Douglass, Gerard Etienne is one of the most denunciatory, provocative, and 214 Counterconfession aggressive writers from the Haitian diaspora. Born in Cape Haitian, Haiti, he currently lives, writes, and teaches in the heart of Acadia in New Brunswick, Canada, where he is a professor of linguistics and journalism. Throughout his narratives and writings, Douglass drew inspiration and moral indignation from his whip-striped back, the bound wrists, and the bloody cracked feet of the martyred slave body in nineteenth-century America. In his writings, Etienne draws inspiration and moral indignation from the tortured human flesh of his Haitian compatriots. The aggressiveness of his prose and poetry emerges from the repressive sociopolitical realities of Haiti during the 1957-1990 dictatorships of the Duvalier regimes. Etienne’s writing is a testimony that denounces the undemocratic Haitian history of social injustice—its exploitation and oppression of the Haitian masses not only by foreign merchants but especially by a succession of feudalist totalitarian Haitian leaders. Etienne’s work is intellectually challenging in that it raises questions that assault neat, comfortable conceptions of race and racism, culture and acculturation, sanity and insanity, the namre of forced exile, the representation of the Haitian woman, and the status of Haitian literamre, as well as Haitian voodoo and con¬ sciousness. The pivotal text in the career of Gerard Etienne is entitled Le Negre crucifie, recit (The Crucified Black, Narrative).^ It is, indeed, the text that sketches the breadth of philosophy and psychology contained in Etienne’s most recent novel. La pacotille^ Despite the Christological and Eucharistic suggestions in the title, with its focus on the mar¬ tyred Black body, the shattered mind and broken speech, the novel is not about the expiatory elevation of a Black host. The crucifixion of this Haitian political prisoner does not lead to redemption. Unlike the death of Christ, the crucifixion of a Black man has never saved the world and led to the regeneration of the human spirit. The narra¬ tive is preoccupied with the psychological shifts provoked by pain of all kinds—physical, psychic, political, and moral. All of these forms of pain are sharpened and brought to the surface of consciousness through the actual experience of torture during the last forty-eight hours of the prisoner’s life. The narrative succeeds in moving beyond the specificity of one detainee in the confines of a tropical prison to embrace the daily martyrdom of the Haitian people. Under the suc¬ cessive metamorphoses of Duvalier regimes, the entire country has Words Proffered in Pain 215 seemed a vast dungeon, with the entire populace as political prisoners and the bourgeois capitalist elite as an army of torturers. Le Negre cru- cifie, recit marks a mrning point in the career of Gerard Etienne, not only because of the vehemence of the language and the social critique contained therein but also because this text—with its seeming auto¬ matic WTiting, obsessions, flashbacks, and flashforwards—maps the moral, political, symbolic, and affective universe of Gerard Etienne. In his writings there is a renunciation of the patriarchal, a Jungian, Bachelardian embrace of the feminine within the man, and a feminist critique of the Black Haitian woman’s condition. There is also in this w’ork an elaborate meditation on the diverse experiences of exile from one’s country while living abroad, as well as the peculiar sense of for¬ eignness one can experience within one’s country, one’s family, and the self. As my analysis will demonstrate, for me Le Negre crucifie, recit functions as the unconscious of Etienne’s literary corpus. It is the inter¬ text that informs all other Etienne texts and upon which these texts — novels and poems —all converge. In all of his w'orks, Gerard Etienne bears wimess to the paradoxes of the history of the “First Black Re¬ public” and the immiserization of the Haitian people. Etienne dreams of a future of democracy in Haiti w'hile documenting the atrocities of Haitian life under a Black totalitarian kleptocracy. The fundamen¬ tal narrative force in francophone literary culture is counterstorjtell- ing and its related, dependent genre, the counterconfession, of which Etienne’s work is a fundamental example. For the subjugated, the counterconfession is a form of survival through a linguistic project and productivity outside of the confessional scenes of the prescribed and coercive spaces of the church confessional, the courtroom, or the torture chamber. Torture The question of torture^ is a constant in Francophone literary cul¬ ture, and yet in some w’ays, beyond the “rememory” of the brutality' of the slave experience, torture is repressed and is a part of the “un¬ speakable.” The irony is mordant as Aime Cesaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, confronts the brutality', savagery, and beastliness of the “European civilizing mission”: 216 Counterconfession The conclusion is inescapable: compared to the cannibals, the dis¬ memberers, and other lesser breeds, Europe and the West are the incar¬ nation of respect for human dignity. But let us move on, and quickly, lest our thoughts wander to Algiers, Morocco, and other places where, as I write these very words, so many valiant sons of the West, in the semi-darkness of dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers, with such tireless attention those authentic marks of respect for human dignity which are called, in tech¬ nical terms, “electricity,” “the bathtub,” and “the botdeneck.” ^ Cesaire specifically evokes the case of Algiers in the Discourse on Colonialism. In the 1966 film Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Ponte- corvo, the colonel in charge of putting down the unrest is interviewed by the world press, particularly concerning the use of torture by the French as a means of domination, control, and extortion of informa¬ tion about the rebel underground. An American journalist raises the question of the “methods used by paratroopers” to gather informa¬ tion once they have arrested suspects. A French journalist dismisses the discreet circumlocutions of the American and says directly, “Let’s talk about torture.” Colonel Mathieu, the commanding officer, re¬ jects the term torture, preferring the concept of “interrogation” as a valid “method” against clandestine organizations. Mathieu explains that the “problem” is simple: The Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) wants to expel the French from Algeria and the French want to remain. When FLN activists are arrested, they maintain silence ac¬ cording to their strict code of behavior for at least twenty-four hours in order to allow the FLN time to reorganize its strategies, safe houses, and meeting places. The “question” according to Mathieu becomes: “Is France to remain in Algeria? If your answer is still ‘yes,’ you must accept aU the consequences.” The consequences seem to be the inevi¬ tability of tormre. The interview segment is a moment of moral questioning and justi¬ fication of the violence and the use of torture in the French campaign to maintain its colonial domination in Algeria. It is also a sublimated version of the “confession scene” in political torture, and Mathieu re¬ fuses the role of the interrogated, transforming his interrogators into collaborators. This segment is followed by a torture sequence that re¬ calls the opening scene of the film in which an emaciated Algerian trai- Words Proffered in Pain 217 tor succumbs to the pain of torture. The opening scene features only slaps to the face. The room, however, is full of the tools of the tormre trade: water, shower nozzles, rubber hoses, electroshock equipment, and tape recorders to document “confessions.” The sequence follow¬ ing the interview has an eerie religiosity. Organ dirges accompany scenes featuring a succession of prisoners and different means of tor¬ ture, which follow one another like a string of prayer beads. There is suffocation, water torture, the burning of flesh with a blowtorch, and electroshock while French policemen, either fascinated or indifferent to the human suffering, smoke, laugh, and engage in conversation. Some prisoners are trussed up and suspended from the ceiling, to be subjected to all manner of corporal invasion. Other prisoners hang as though from a crucifix, with heads rolled back and eyes gazing ques- tioningly like so many images of Christ on the cross. A woman with a single tear streaming down her face gazes unblinkingly at the broken bodies, like a Mother Mary staring at the crucified body of Christ. The film sequence complements the reading of Etienne’s Negre cruci- fie, recit. The challenge to nations who have successfully thrown off the colo¬ nial yoke is to guard against replacing the old domination with a new one. Cesaire’s theater of decolonization deals with the challenges that face the newly independent nation and the legacy of the dehumaniz¬ ing process of colonialization that Cesaire explicates in his Discourse on Colonialism: For my part, if I have recalled a few details of these hideous butch¬ eries, it is by no means because I take a morbid delight in them, but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization, that I wanted to point out. (P. 19) 218 Counterconfession In particular, Cesaire’s plays indict the excesses and pitfalls of na¬ tional consciousness and postindependence leadership. AH too often, the revolutionary leaders become dictators, as in the case of Mobutu of Zaire, as exposed in the play A Season in the Congo, or earlier in history. King Henri Christophe of Haiti, whose mad and impos¬ sible dreams for the Haitian people are dramatized in The Tragedy of King Christophe. For Gerard Etienne, the Haitian author of Cri pour ne pas crever de honte {Scream to Keep from Dying of Shame) f part of the shame is due to his disappointment in the legacy of the Haitian revolution of 1804, the betrayal of the Haitian people by a succes¬ sion of despots as bloodthirsty as the former colonial leaders, and the treachery of Black-on-Black criminal domination and exploitation. The Political Prisoner In this century of Gandhi, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Audrey Sakharov, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Dennis Brutus, Nel¬ son and Winnie Mandela, and Mzwake Mbuh, the words of the politi¬ cal prisoner often have been the thorn in the side of society, its con¬ science and moral gadfly. The limbo status of the political prisoner, the physical and psychological abuse of the detainee, and the daunt¬ ing apparatus of a legal system are but signs of the times. Testify¬ ing, testimony, and moral testament are three of the driving narrative principles of francophone literary culture. Testifying, testimony, and testament are secular and nonsecular phenomena. To testify is to bear witness, to give evidence as a witness, to make a solemn oath or affir¬ mation in a judicial inquiry for the purpose of proving or establishing some fact. Testimony properly means only such evidence as is deliv¬ ered by a witness, either orally or in the form of affidavits or depo¬ sitions, in the trial of a cause. Testament refers to the disposition of one’s real and personal property.* In the religious, musical, and liter¬ ary contexts, testifying, testimony, and testament overlap. Testifying is to bear witness in church, to stand and make personal testimony, an avowal of faith and belief in God. In many Black churches, before the services commence, there is a period in which all members who so desire are permitted to stand and make verbal proclamations and avowals of their belief in God and confess their foibles and sins. Con- Words Proffered in Pain 219 fession of one’s sins, bad deeds, and life story originally took place in church, but it now also takes place in music and literature and through other forms of art.® In Etienne, the reader wimesses the auto- diegetic narrator challenging the self to remember every horrific detail of past political sufferings and social indignities, thus placing the self and society on trial. Those in attendance, the reader-narratees, are wimesses. It is particularly in the wTiting of the tortured political prisoner that these phenomena—testifying, testimony, and moral testament— emerge in greatest relief to become a genre. For the dominated out¬ group, the tormre chamber and the courtroom, the torturer and the cross-examiner, are flip sides of the same fundamental experience. In colonial situations, both the torture chamber with its sadomasochistic rules of the game and the courtroom with its ponderous, suppressive rules of evidence and procedure extract certain coerced, led, or lim¬ ited statements. This observation leads to an expansion of the discus¬ sion of counterstorjtelling (see chapter 4) with the dynamics of what might be a subgenre. Such narratives might properly be called counter¬ confessions. This genre would include the statements that are either prevented from inscription into the courtroom or the torture scene or are withheld intentionally by the victim. Counterconfessions are the voluntary narratives existing outside of, but in direct counterpoint to, torture-chamber confessions and courtroom testimony. These narra¬ tives reveal the experiences, thoughts, intentions, driving emotions, moral dilemmas, and the “irrelev’ant” and “inadmissible” evidence that the participants feel compelled to relate once freed from the co¬ ercion or gag of the torturer or the cross-examiner. It is a counter- offensive to the interrogation {une contre-offensive d I’interrogation; see La pacotille, p. 253). In its content and tone, Gerard Etienne’s WTiting is a model of the counterconfession, as the following example from La pacotille suggests: Refus de mon bon ange de ceder aux rugissements des loups-garous. Plutot la mort que la home, le suicide que I’humiliation, le debordement d’un fleuve que le bouillonnement d’une source. (R 21) [Refusal of my good angel to yield to the roars of the werewolves. Rather death than shame, suicide than humiliation, the overflow' of a river rather than the boiling of a spring.] 220 Counterconfession The passage cited points to an interior monologue that refuses in¬ scription into the scene of torture and that is part of the language of counterconfession: Si seulement on ecrivait un seul poeme qui dirait un corps mutile. (P. 207) [Ah ... if only one could write a poem that could express a muti¬ lated body.] The experiences of physical torture, exile, cultural schizophrenia, and the grand dream of a woman liberator are the organizing obses¬ sions in the work of Gerard Etienne. His novel La pacotille is driven, in a word, by the concept of dislocation. The text is structured in nar¬ rative blocks that alternate between the past and the present, the loss of will and the recovery of psychological stamina, and the changes in locale and decor that reflect the contemporary psychic and geo¬ graphic dislocation of the Haitian diasporic experience, particularly between the United States, Canada, and Haiti. The narrative is driven from obsession to obsession, shifting among reflections on the moral condition of La pacotille, on the torture by the beast, and the painfully ravishing dream of a female opposite who is redeemer, mediator, and liberator. The feminine obsession is completed by the protagonist’s tyrannical, carnal love for the lost mother and the complexity of his sense of abandonment and exile. Historical documentation, flrsthand testimony, journalistic reporting, inventories, statistics, poetry, con¬ fessions, dreams, visions, songs, rhythms, and screams: the full range of verbal expression is exploited in La pacotille. La pacotille.' The Title Gerard Etienne does not forge neologisms, as do many francophone writers, but he invests his vocabulary, nouns especially, with a poly¬ semy that confers on the word all of its multicultural and historical force. The novel title is an example. A deflnition of la pacotille that embraces the diflferent contexts in which it is used in the novel as well as its usage in plantation societies might read as follows: Words Projfered in Pain 221 Pacotille: notin. Term used to designate the inauthenticity of objects such as jewelry, furniture; the poor quality of a house, such as a shack; cheap goods often of local or regional manufacture; in certain former highly racially mixed colonial societies, e.g., Brazil, term used (pacotilha) especially to designate Mulattoes or those Blacks who ap¬ proached the ideal of humanity, beauty, and intelligence but who, nonetheless, would never attain it according to the racial assimilationist m>lhology of the dominant society, which unceasingly reminded them of their inferiority; term of subordination, contempt, and WTetched- ness; term of pity, affection and self love, a term of value, therefore, with ontological, social, and racial dimensions; a child, a dispossessed being, buffeted by life’s tragedies, an uprooted wandering person; in Creole, old clothing and metonymically the wearer of such; nothing, a nothing (person), a person who has nothing and is considered less than human by the ruling elite, the wretched of the earth; a person whom another can use, treat, and mistreat as an object, slave, or prey.'° La pacotille and the Beast The precise identity of la bite, the dehumanized despot, the animal or the beast in La pacotille, evolves in relation and according to the cir¬ cumstances and experiences of the pacotille, identified as a crucified, tormred Haitian Black, a Haitian immigrant and/or the protagonist named Ben Chalom, all of whom are sons of peace. The beast is a ter¬ rible patriarch, a father, the storm-trooper secret police, the corrupt in the service of the grand beast, the monster, the president of the nation that is a “pigsty.” Most often the beast has the identity of the political leader according precisely, in my opinion, to the meaning that Frantz Fanon gives this term: The leader or Le leader, is, more often than not, a son of the people who, once elected by the people and enjoying full electoral and presidential powers, betrays the people by imposing a dictatorship that is nothing less than a transformation of the old colo¬ nialism into a new intraracial colonialization. The leader replaces the former colonial officer and himself becomes a beast using the same arsenal of control as the former colonial power in order to expand and consolidate his personal wealth and power. The beast resorts to 222 Counterconfession forced labor, slavery, repression, terror, massacres, deportations, the police, the domination of one ethnic group by another, and torture. The beast seems to have the fantastic or uncanny power to change forms and to be omnipresent through time and space. The beast is the old colonizer, as Cesaire describes him in Discourse on Colonial¬ ism, the new leader in the person of Francois Duvalier, President-for- Life, “the most ferocious of beasts in the Caribbean,” {La pacotille, p. 143) the ton-tons Macoutes or secret police, the Canadian, French, or American immigration officer. This latter figure is a milder incar¬ nation of the beast, but Ben Chalom’s encounters with the various immigration officials also reveal the acceleration of his neurosis. In the shape of a shadow or an alter ego, the beast can insinuate himself into the psyche in the form of the madness that inhabits the will and mind of the oppressed: Quoique je fasse, je demeure un zombi de la bete. Ou que je sois, la bete est sur mes traces. {La pacotille, P. 224) [Whatever I do, I remain a zombie of the beast. Wherever I am, the beast is on my trail.] N’etre qu’un bourreau, toute sa vie, sans un seul moment de bonheur oii le coeur vibrerait aux douleurs des autres. Arracher les ongles d’un prisonnier, le transporter dans un cercueil d’un endroit a I’autre. Briser ses os a coups de pierres. Suivre les preceptes des intemporels. Demeurer enferme dans la haine, la peau du faible, I’envie de la solitude du faible, ceci jusqu’a la vieillesse, voila la bete. (P. 56) [To be only an executioner, all of one’s life, without a single moment of the kind of happiness where one’s heart vibrates in sympathy with the pain of others. Tearing out the fingernails of the prisoner, transporting him in a casket from one place to another. Breaking his bones under the crushing blows of rocks. Following the rituals of the demonic. To remain shut up in hatred, the skin of the weak, the envy of the solitude of the weak, and all of this up through old age—that is the beast.] J’avais prononce le nom de la bete. Une seule fois. Dans une meta- phore. Voila qu’il s’en souvient. . . . il a pu identifier le parasite qui m’a fait connaitre tant de nuits blanches. (P. 253) Words Proffered in Pain 223 [I had pronounced the name of the beast. One single time. In a meta¬ phor. x-Vnd there he remembers it. . . . He has been able to identify the parasite that has caused me to know so many sleepless nights.] D’etre la chienne de la bete. (P. 254) [To be the she-dog bitch of the beast.] A travers vos confidences, j’ai cru comprendre que cette bete-la a ete produite par votre peuple. (P. 254) [According to your revelations I believe I understood that this beast has been produced by your people.] Obsession quotidienne, Tlmmigration canadienne. Permettez monsieur que je vous etrangle, que j’incendie votre ville, que je marche sur votre cada\Te. Permettez monsieur I’Officier qu’avec mon baton magique je vous transporte dans mon ecurie pour faire mon chemin de croix, de la meme faqon que votre Christ sous les griffes d’une bete, sous les bottes d’un bourreau. . . . Je vous rends un grand service en vous etranglant. Je vous debarrasse de la plus cruelle maladie qui detruit votre race, la haine d’une espece. (P. 148) [Daily obsession, Canadian immigration. Allow me. Sir Officer, to stran¬ gle you, to burn down your city and walk on your corpse. Permit me, Mister Officer, with my magic wand to transport you into my stable so that you might redo my road of the cross in the same way as your Christ under the claws of the beast, under the boots of an executioner. . . . I am doing you a great service by strangling you. I am ridding you of the cruelest affliction that is destroying your race, the hatred of another race.] This last passage constitutes a multiple allusive redescription of the colonizer’s various incarnations through history. The following pas¬ sage exposes Ben Chalom’s awareness of the damage also done to him by his experiences, obsessions, and neuroses. On trouvait au debut une explication a mes troubles de personnalite. L’exil force. Le depaysement qui rend la vie amere. Encore plus amere pour ceux qui ne reverront jamais leur coin de terre. On le comprend. 224 Counterconfession Ce qu’on ne comprend pas, c’est la destruction de la personne par la personne, c’est le plaisir de se saigner dans son cercle, de succomber au moindre repli de la conscience. (P. 167) [In the beginning they found an explanation for my personality dis¬ orders. Forced exiles. Homesickness which makes life bitter. Still more bitter for those who will never ever again see their corner of the earth. It is understandable. What is not understandable is the destruction of the self by the self, it is the pleasure of bleeding oneself in one’s circle, of withdrawing to the innermost regions of the mind.] Shattered Consciousness: From the Dynamics of Torture Toward an Aesthetics of Pain Le Negre crucifie and La pacotille are exposes of the dynamics of the torture of political prisoners in Haiti. In their literariness, these texts elaborate an aesthetics of pain. The silent scream, as depicted in paint¬ ings such as the Guernica of Pablo Picasso and as seen on innumer¬ able posters from countries dominated by totalitarian regimes, is uni¬ versally recognized as a symbol of torture. The gaping mouth of the scream, such as the one figured on the cover of the second edition of Le Negre crucifie, draws attention to the two fundamental aspects of the torture process—the physical and the verbal. The ensemble of physi¬ cal and verbal relations between the torturer and the prisoner always comes down to relations of domination and subordination. The verbal relations include the interrogation, the confession, the screams, and the voice both of the torturer and the prisoner. The physical relations include the torture, the voice and shouts of the torturer as instruments of command, the voice and screams of the prisoner as expression of compliance, the body of the torturer which inflicts pain, and finally, the flesh of the prisoner, the site of pain in the extreme where the body as flesh becomes a carnal knowledge of the point of intersection between life and death. The torturer, on one elementary level, is seeking “information” or “confessions.” In the grander scheme of domination, what is sought is the recognition by the prisoner of the power of the tormrer and the omnipotence of the political regime he or she represents. In Etienne’s Words Proffered in Pain 225 words, the aim of torture is “the pulverization of the mind” {La paco- tille, p. 51). The task of the torturer is to break the prisoner’s will, first by isolating him from the world so as to better expose the pris¬ oner to his own constitutional fragility by inflicting upon him physical, psychological, and spiritual pain. Nothing is eliminated as a potential weapon in the torturer’s arsenal of pain. He of course uses the instru¬ ments traditionally associated with tormre, such as those that figure on the aforementioned cover of the second edition of Le Negre crucifie: handcuffs, eye bandages, whips, branding irons, shackles, the boot, the rack, the head screw, the spiked iron collar, the cippus, the stock, and so on. One learns from Etienne’s works that tormre, as an insti- mtion, perverts the function of the most banal objects and uses them to inflict pain. The comforts of civilization such as water, electricity, furnimre, walls, doors, windows, the dog, and cigarettes become ene¬ mies. State-sponsored tormre, totalitarianism, and brutal repression of the kind seen in Haiti result in a contamination of ever>thing that is the norm. The law, the court, judges, medicine, and the hospital and doctors are accomplices that align themselves against the politi¬ cal prisoner. The most intimate experiences become experiences of terror: sleep, sexuality, and the prisoner’s body and physiology’ are mrned against him in order to humiliate him in the extreme. Every¬ thing is perverted, but, especially, everything is deconstructed so as to contribute to the disintegration of the mind of the prisoner. While the emphasis seems to be on the physical tormre of the body, the ultimate goal is the destruction of the mind. This process of destruction of the mind is dramatically documented in an example taken from recent history outside of the Haitian context. Under the Fascist regime of Mussolini, at the trial in 1928 of the Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), the state prosecutor declared, “We must stop the workings of this man’s brain for the next twenty^ years.” " From the example of Gramsci one can conceive of the tormre of a political prisoner as the resolution on the part of authorities to shut down and destroy the functioning of the political prisoner’s mind. One learns from the fate of Etienne’s pacotille: La bete veut recommencer a zero. La seule chose, dira-t-elle a la milicienne, c’est la pulverisation de la 226 Counterconfession pacotille jusqu’a ce qu’il fasse nuit dans ses yeux, que ses cendres soient repandues sur les perrons de la cathedrale, qu’il reconnaisse I’erreur de sa mere pour I’avoir poussee. (P. 51) [The Beast wants to start all over again. The only thing that matters, it said to the woman soldier, is to smash this pacotille to pieces until there is nothing but night in his eyes, until his ashes are spread on the grand steps of the cathedral, until he recog¬ nizes the mistake his mother made in giving birth to him.] J’ai cesse de compter les coups de fouet, de matraque, de coups de pied. Elle n’arretera jamais de frapper malgre les consignes du Chef des tortionnaires avant le supplice. Decapiter la pacotille en se foutant du cri des femmes, des betes dociles, des oiseaux migrateurs. La decapita¬ tion d’un corps humain, du genre humain, d’un membre de la race. La decapitation. Plus une settle compensation a la laideur de la bete, aux gaz qui lui petent le ventre, aux ulceres qui la font deparler durant les cere¬ monies aux esprits. Saigner La pacotille, decapiter un garfon, rompu aux idees d’egalite, de justice, d’amour-propre. Toujours sous les griffes de la bete. (P. 51) [I stopped counting the lashes of the whip, the blows of the club and the repeated kicks. The woman soldier will never stop hitting despite the orders of the chief of torturers before the flogging. The only thing that matters is decapitating the pacotille, not giving a shit about the screams of the women, those docile beasts, those migratory birds. The decapita¬ tion of a human body, of the human species, of a member of the race. No further illusions about the ugliness of the beast, with the gases that explode from his belly, the ulcers that make him speak in tongues during dark ceremonies with the spirits. Stick and bleed the pacotille, decapitate this boy flUed with ideas of equality, justice, and personal dignity. Always under the claws of the beast.] One notices the tenacity with which the pacotille cultivates his at¬ tachment to the homeland and to the memory of his innocence as weapons against the beast. Je ne veux pas me tenir pour battu en me laissant absorber par un nou¬ veau pays. (P. 101) Words Proffered in Pain 227 [I don’t want to simply give up as beaten by allowing myself to become comfortably assimilated in a new country.] Oh non. Je ne dois pas du tout me sentir a I’aise a la cafeteria du Cen¬ tre social. Je ne renoncerais a la corde qui me relie au pays. (P. 218) [Oh no. I must not allow myself to feel comfortable in the cafeteria of the social center. I would never break the cord that ties me to my coun¬ try.] Avec tout ce qui peut rendre a un gosse sa virginite, ses fantaisies lumi- neuses, ses soirs legers, ses jeux a la marelle, ses mots d’amour au coeur des demoiselles. (P. 176) [With the wish for everything that can give back to a child his vir¬ ginity, his shining fantasies, his light airy evenings, his hopscotch games, his sweet words of love spoken to the heart of innocent young maidens.] Si je pouvais m’oublier un seul instant afin de retrouver ma virginite, quelle victoire sur la bete, quel triomphe en ce bas monde. (P. 242) [If I could forget myself just for an instant in order to recover my vir¬ ginity, what a victory over the beast, what a triumph in this low and rotten world.] The Narratology of the Counterconfession The question of form imposes itself because Le Negre crucifie has as its subtitle the word recit, or narrative. Normally, narrative refers to “the history,” to the diachronic, and one has recourse to speaking of a referential text and a chronology. In textual semiotics, however, the narrative refers to the structure underlying the discursive manifes¬ tations.In Etienne’s texts, most often the narrator is autodiegetic, that is, inside the narrative and also the main character. I repeat a point made earlier that in Etiennian narrative, the reader witnesses the autodiegetic narrator challenging the self to remember every hor¬ rific detail of past political sufferings and social indignities, thereby 228 Counterconfession placing the self and society on trial. Those in attendance, the reader- narratees, are witnesses. The subtitle underscores the literary act of witnessing. This literary act is perhaps the most powerful form of witnessing. Both Le Negre crucifie and La pacotille are narratives. Here the literary act of witnessing is a fictional narrative illustrating, with the effect of facticity through documentation, the seemingly fantas¬ tic and unspeakable truths of political detention and physical torture. The narrative is crafted to provoke a reaction of outrage in the reader. The Negre crucifie or the protagonist in La pacotille is, himself, au¬ thor, wimess, actor, participant-in-history, observer-journalist, narra¬ tor, and survivor. The closer le negre or la pacotille is to death, the more determined he is not to lose his memory, the more sensitive he is to the possibility of the loss of memory, and the more determined he is to recount, recite, narrate, document, and write his memoir, or counterconfession. When one understands the struggle on the part of the political prisoner to maintain a measure of coherence in his consciousness, which has been shattered by the experience of torture, the character¬ istics of this narrative of the Negre crucifie are more understandable: fragments, a chorus of “characters” as foils of the self; a thought process that moves forward in fits and starts; thoughts and speech interrupted most likely by the physical and verbal interventions of the torturer; flashbacks; reappearing thoughts, seemingly unmotivated observations, zigzags in the narrative sequence; and temporary unin¬ telligibility. These phenomena, along with the tone of urgency and an orality in the writing style, raise the question of whether or not this narrative can be called automatic writing. I think not. What matters, however, is that there is an impression of automaticity. As the semio- tician Michael Riffaterre would say: La difference definitoire, c’est que le texte automatique fait fi de toute logique, bouleverse les sequences temporelles, ignore la referentialite.. . . Qu’elle soit spontanee ou imitee, je I’appellerai effet d’automatisme. Tout texte ou cet effet est observable appartient au genre dit “ecriture auto¬ matique.” . . . Sa litterarite ne consiste pas a etre une dictee du sub- conscient, mais a en avoir fair. Les incompatibilites qui ont cet effet sont de veritables agrammaticalites. . . . L’absurde, le non-sens, par le fait Words Proffered in Pain 229 meme qu’ils genent le decodage, contraignent le lecteur a une lecture di- recte des structures.*^ [The defining diflference, is that the automatic text dismisses any con¬ cern for logic. . . . upsets temporal sequences, ignores referentiality. Be it spontaneous or feigned, I shall call it an impression of automaticitv'. Every text where this effect is observable belongs to the genre caOed “automatic wTiting.” Its literariness does not consist of being a dictation of the unconscious but of appearing to be such. The incompatibilities that have this effect are true agrammaticalities. . . . The absurd, non¬ sense, in that they disturb easy deciphering, force the reader to do a direct reading of the structures.] Le Negre crucifie as a narrative is an act of survival through linguis¬ tic productivity. In Le Negre crucifie, recit the reader falls upon the phrase “to think by a juxtaposition of images.” A cogito of torture is being elaborated: I am in deep pain, I am dying, I am going “to think,” be it only “by a juxtaposition of images” (p. 83) and there¬ fore I shall survive. The narrative as a notation of the thoughts that coursed through the pulverized mind of the prisoner is “reproduc¬ tive.” According to Julia Kristeva, there is productiidty when the text (recit/narrative) makes work of language.'"* In maintaining the ten¬ sion between the physical and the verbal dimensions in the torture of the political prisoner, the narrative can be conceived of as a defense against the destruction of the flesh, against the disintegration of the mind, and against the invasion especially of the silence of death. This is talking for survival and talking in order to testify, to bear wimess and testimony, and to leave a moral testament. The writing is, indeed, to quote from a title of a volume of Etienne’s poetry, Le Cri pour ne pas crever, the scream as a defense against succumbing to death. After escape, writing becomes a victory over oblirion. One of the overwhelming experiences of the political prisoner is the fear that no one knows what is happening, that he or she has been forgotten, and this fear is reinforced by the torturers. The counterconfessional tes¬ timony of the surviving political prisoner becomes therefore a triple victory over shame, personal and collective amnesia, and the intimi¬ dation tactics of torture and human rights abuse. The need to testify is clearly articulated in La pacotille: 230 Counterconfession II faudra raconter, oui, raconter aux dieux absents de mes tribulations, si je sors du cauchemar. . . . Meme dans un long cauchemar. Contre de nouvelles formes de mi¬ crobes, ces tueurs aux dents longues, ces demons au menton carre qui detraquent ma parole, mes mots, mon feu, ma poesie. Oui. II faudra raconter la fuite des esprits sous la mitraille, raconter, raconter mon negre, sans tricherie, avec le souci de la verite, la verite de ma deposses¬ sion, de mon impuissance devant la verge du major Romain, raconter. Seigneur, jusqu’a ce que se libere I’oiseau de I’espoir de la masse de poussiere couvrant mon cimetiere tropical. (R 21) [I must recount all of this, yes, tell the absent gods of my tribulations, if I come out of this nighmare. . . . Even in a long nightmare. Against new forms of germs, against these killers with long fangs, these square-jawed demons who unhinge my speech, unsettle my words, stir up my fire, shake up my poetry. Yes. I will have to tell of the flight of the spirits under machine gun fire, re¬ count, tell, my black brother, without deception, with the scruples of truthfulness, the truth of my dispossession, of my impotence in front of the penis of Major Romain, tell it all, dear Lord, until the day comes when the sweet bird of hope will rise from the deep dust that covers my tropical cemetery.] Language as work and project allows the prisoner to regain control, be it but momentarily, of his body and even allows him to give orders to his torturer: a perverse and defiant kind of masochistic contract develops between the torturer and tortured. Une fiamme sort de ma bouche. Je la lance en haut des chateaux qui sont des siecles de typhoide d’un peuple depossede de sa matrice et de ses champs de bananes. Fornique-moi, Chef, jusqu’au coucher du soleil. Fornique-moi. Farce que j’ecris ton nom sur mes excrements, fornique-moi pour ga. Je sais qu’a ce moment on est en train d’ecrire une histoire semblable aux his- toires des Revolutionnaires cacos qu’on raconte, les soirs a la chandelle celle d’un condamne a mort, aux oreilles de bourrique, d’ecrire mon en- fance sur des feuilles de cocotier, sur le sang, sur le mensonge. (P. 35) Words Proffered in Pain 231 [A flame shoots out of my mouth. I hurl it above the castles that are the centuries of uphoid of a people dislocated from its matrix and its banana plantations. Fuck me, Boss, until the sun goes down. Because I am writing your name on my excrement. Fuck me for that. I know that at this time a story is being written similar to the stories told about the peasant “Caco” Revolutionaries at night by candlelight the story of a man condemned to die, with the ears of a donkey, writing my childhood on coconut palm leaves, on blood, on the lie.] As a narrative, Le Negre crucifie is WTitten in incomplete phrases and fragments that express the broken, fractured body parts that lit¬ ter the tropical cemetery of Haiti. One might be tempted to speak of Etienne’s orality, when in fact his narrative is more stream-of- consciousness interior monologue that is experimenting with novelis- tic form and music—the gamut of human expressivity, including and especially writing itself (labels often obscure more than they fllumi- nate). One must be cautious and clear when describing orality in a text by a Black wTiter, because, unfortunately, as Eileen Julien has under¬ scored, “orality” has become a metonymy for “African.” An urgency and a certain orality in the highly wrought writing style of this narra¬ tive underscore the rich semantic field signified by the term parole or word. This text is parole in that it is a plea. It is parole evidence, as the record of a life lived and as eyewimess testimony; as a conditional release from prison, as in “on parole”; as ‘‘‘'parole d'honneurff word of honor, in which the individual swears to maintain silence concern¬ ing the details of a dread event. The irony is that Le Negre crucifie, as a narrative, is consciousness transcribed in w^ords, parole, and honor written. Etienne writes the “unspeakable.” Gerard Etienne’s fragmented style is perfectly illustrated in the fol¬ lowing paragraphs, which expand my sense of the orality of his writ¬ ing. There are blocks and angles of expression that isolate events and emotions or give temporal, spatial, and affective perspective to events and emotions. The result is the effect of a certain geometry and cal¬ culus in the seeming dementia of language. In terms of ekphrasis, his style approaches that of cubism and expressionism, as is seen in the painting Davertige, which appears on the cover of La pacotille. If I have 232 Counterconfession insisted on the word (parole), I can emphasize equally the rhythm of the Etiennian paragraph as being imposed by recurring syntactic structures in the initial position. These rhetorical parallelisms punctu¬ ate the fragments, or writing blocks, with melodic, semantic, or pausal rhythms that contribute to the text’s orality. Obsession quotidienne, I’lmmigration canadienne. Si au moins on con- naissait I’officier qui va vous recevoir, si au moins on connaissait le fonde de pouvoir a qui on a aifaire, on pourrait lui faire des yeux doux, van- ter sa beaute, son intelligence, la superiorite de son pays par rapport a la France; on pourrait jouer a I’ange, a I’enfant de choeur de I’oratoire Saint-Joseph, au negre qui consent a baisser la tete devant monsieur Blanc, a se faire traiter en esclave, en perpetuel gargon de cour; on pour¬ rait reconnaitre son inferiorite, I’avilissement de sa race, rhumiliation de ses ancetres pendant quatre cents ans d’esclavage; on pourrait jouer a la victime de mechants loups de la meme maniere que le President qui, en assassinant, crie pourtant au secours; au gar^on qui a perdu sa virgi- nite avant meme I’age de la croissance; on pourrait oflfrir une soeur en victime expiatoire, jurer sur la tete de sa mere qu’on se montrerait recon- naissant, qu’on accepterait meme d’etre une fois par semaine le valet de chambre de celui qui vous a sorti du petrin. (P. 142) [Daily obsession, Canadian immigration. If at least one knew the offi¬ cer who was going to receive you, if at least one knew the power exercised by the person one is dealing with, one could flatter him, praise his beauty, his intelligence, the superiority of his country compared to France: one could play the angel, the choir boy from St. Joseph’s, play the nigger who consents to bow his head before Mr. Whitey, who allows himself to be treated as a slave, as a perpetual boy: one could recognize his inferiority, the vileness of his race, the humiliation of his ancestors during four hun¬ dred years of slavery; one could play the victim of treachery ... in the same way as the President who while assassinating someone screams for help; one could play the boy who has lost his virginity well before ado¬ lescence; one could oflFer a sister as a sacrificial victim, could swear on the head of one’s mother that one would show oneself to be grateful, that one would accept being the valet once a week of the person who would get you out of this mess.] Words Proffered in Pain 233 Rarely binary, the structure is most faithfully a compound three- part jazz harmony: /_/_/_/. Still more rhythmic and marked by reiteration is the following example, in which Etienne himself seems to be addressing the question of counterstorytelling, that is, the his¬ tory of colonization from the perspective of the colonialized; Dans les brousses africaines ou il nous apprenait le peche en nous faisant decouvrir la nudite des femmes. Dans les cases de nos ancetres oii le ge¬ nie negre sauva le Blanc des maladies qu’il ne connaissait pas. Dans les bois du pays ou le negre entra sa langue dans le cul du Blanc afin de le debarrasser des vers qui le rongeaient, des parasites qu’il attrapait pen¬ dant sa longue traversee du desert. Deux mille ans, monsieur TOfficier. Deux mille ans font vu avec sa fleche abattant des animaux pour le festin des rois, pour les ciboires en ivoire, en cuivre, en argent. Cela ne s’est jamais dit. On ne I’a jamais appris, monsieur I’Officier. On detruirait la civilisation si on disait aux enfants blancs qu’autrefois, dans une colonie fran^aise, le negre apprenait tout seul a lire au milieu de Blancs anal- phabetes, si on enseignait I’histoire, la vraie, celle de la race qui, meme decimee dans les negriers, pouvait quand meme trouver le courage pour construire des villes ou sa presence donne maintenant la trouille aux memes vagabonds qui n’ont jamais voulu que le soleil engendre d’autres especes que la leur. (P. 147) [In the African bushes where he taught us of sin by explaining to us the nudity of our women. In the huts of our ancestors where black genius saved the white colonizer from the illnesses he did not understand. In the woods of the country where the black stuck his tongue up the white man’s ass in order to rid the European of the worms that ate at his insides, and the parasites he caught during his long trek across the desert. Two thousand years, Mr. Officer. Two thousand years saw him with his bow and arrow bringing down animals for the feast of kings, for the platters in ivory, copper, and silver. That was never spoken of. We never learned about that, Mr. Officer. Civilization would be destroyed if one told the white children that before, in a French colony. Blacks learned to read all by themselves among illiterate Whites, if one were to teach all of the his¬ tory, the full and complete one, that of the race who even after having been decimated by the slave traders could just the same find the courage to construct cities where their presence instilled fear in the same vaga- 234 Counterconfession bonds who had never wanted the sun to give rise to any species other than their own.] In these typical Etiennian paragraphs, one notes an urgency that is linguistically realized by (i) regular syntactic breaks, as in: In the Afri¬ can bushes where he . . . the huts of our ancestors where black genius .. . In the woods of the country where the black; (2) a language stripped of all unnecessary or nonfunctional grammatical elements; (3) an elimi¬ nation of introductory elements or presentations: one enters directly into the heart of the subject without preparation or transitions as in Daily obsession, Canadian immigration; (4) a preference for nouns or nominalization; and (5) the suppression of conjunctions, verbs, and predicate forms. The result would be a movement or structure such as the following: Coeur battant. Souffles. Elle marche. Pas de voitures sur la route. Heart beating. Hufflng and pufflng / She walks / No cars in the street. Gerard Etienne, or the Theology of Exile Particularly in Negre and in the long poem Cri Etienne elaborates the problematics of modern exile. At the time of the publication of the first edition of Le Negre crucifie, recit, Claude Roy wrote: “I received Le Negre crucifie, recit like a wave so violent sweeping over me that, still today, I remain stunned from it.”With such responses, how then can one explain the relative silence that surrounds Etienne’s work, which can only be described as extraordinary? Absent from most antholo¬ gies and most of the so-called panoramas of francophone literature, Etienne’s work is nonetheless noted by the great curator and critic of Haitian literature, Leon-Frangois Hoffman. Writing about the novels of Haitian exiles who attacked the Duvalier regimes, Hoffman refiects, Je pense . . . au Negre crucifie de Gerard Etienne. ... La chose n’a rien d’inusite en soi, nous avons vu que la politique est une preoccu¬ pation constante des romanciers haitiens, et ce des les origines. Ce qui est nouveau, c’est I’extreme violence et I’obsession de la torture qui se retrouvent dans les romans publics dans les vingt dernieres annees . . . pour autant toutefois que ce soit vraiment un roman: I’auteur a sous-titre son oeuvre: “recit.” II s’agit en fait du long monologue hallucine d’un Words Proffered in Pain 235 prisonnier politique a la veille de son execution, qui se voit et se dit cru- cifie, “cloue au Carrefour du Cimetiere, exactement a Tangle des rues Monseigneur Guilloux et Alerte.” Cette litanie insoutenable denonce les tortures et les executions, la misere, la salete, la maladie et la famine du peuple, les plus sadiques perversions sexuelles et le gouvernement des Americains par Haitiens interposes. D’une faqon qui meriterait une ana¬ lyse detaillee, Gerard Etienne disloque la syntaxe pour la recreer selon une nouvelle logique, desarticule le temps et, a coups d’images inusitees, se forge un langage personnel. ... la recherche non pas tant de nouveaux themes que d’un enrichisse- ment des themes existants par une nouvelle expression.!'^ [I think of Le Negre crucifie, recit, by Gerard Etienne. In and of itself the theme is not unusual, we have seen that politics are the constant pre¬ occupation of Haitian novelists, and this from the beginning. What is new is the extreme violence and the obsession with torture that is repeated in the novels published in the last twenty' years. To the extent that it can be called really a novel, the author has subtitled his work “Narrative.” It is in effect a long hallucinatory monologue by a political prisoner on the eve of his execution who sees himself and declares himself crucified, “nailed at the Crossroads of the Cemetery, exactly at the intersection of the streets Monseigneur Guilloux and Alerte.” This unbearable litany denounces the torturings and executions, the misery, the filth, the sickness and the famine of the people, the most sadistic sexual perversions and the gov¬ ernment of the Americans through Haitian intermediaries. In a way that would merit a detailed analysis, Gerard Etienne dislocates syntax in order to recreate it according to a new logic, disarticulates time and tenses and with strokes of unusual imagery, forges for himself a personal language. . . . There is not so much the search for new themes as there is an en¬ richment of existing themes through the expression of a new' language.] Although the sense of impotence weighs upon the exiled writer, there exists in Gerard Etienne an awareness of the power of the w'ord that proclaims the truth as well as the necessity of breaking the silence, as this excerpt from Cri indicates: Ah! vous seriez contents si je me taisais Alors crevez crevez avec ma verite 236 Counterconfession Mourez avec mes cris avec mes laideurs Je vous force a vomir votre portrait cette plate litterature ou dans la boue vous roulez oubliant I’esclavage et votre ami le Chef Crevez vous m’entendez Et quand Us auront porte les murs du palais sur leurs epaules d’esclaves Vous resterez seuls avec Michaux et ses dieux grecs Car bouffons mes amis nous voila rassures car leur logique formelle pourrit notre poesie (P. 62) [Ah! You would be very happy If I were to shut up Well then, burst, explode with my truthfulness Die with my screams With my uglinesses I am forcing you to throw up from your own self-portrait This flat literature Where you wallow in the mud Forgetting slavery and your friend the Leader Die, do you hear me? And when they will have carried the walls of the palace Upon their shoulders of slaves You will be left alone with Michaux And his Greek gods Because my friends, you buffoons. Here we are reassured For their classical logic rots our poetry.] Is this a manifesto for a more engaged literature? Etienne seems to be responding to the silence, hesitation, and uneasiness that have for so long surrounded his name and the reception of his work. What is the explanation for this silence? Is it the shock—indeed, the scandal — of his uncompromising style, his indefatigable attention to detail in the description of torture, the horrors, and sexual cruelty, his unleashed subjectivity in a state of psycholinguistic delirium that no longer rec- Words Proffered in Pain 237 ognizes the proprieties of good taste? Is it his strident, staccato tone? His vox clamantis in deserto John-the-Baptist style? Bearing witness is more than memory; it involves the integration of memory and recol¬ lection and the analysis of past events for the benefit of the commu¬ nity. Etienne’s work is, above all, a bearing witness to everything that has befallen him, and especially everything that has happened in Haiti under the Duvaliers. 6 memoire accrochee au passe douloureux des esclaves . . . par-dessus mon silence et mon analphabetisme . . . (P. 23) Maitre de mes souffrances bourreau de mes amours donne-moi la force d’escamoter le mal. . . . Et ne me demande pas de poetiser mes langages. Je suis de la race des voleurs, des assassins. . . . (P. 24) J’ai besoin de ta colere . . . J’ai besoin de ta haine pour . . . J’ai besoin de mon passe, papa. (P. 35) Rends-moi ma memoire pour inscrire dans ma poesie chaque geste du puissant, mon ennemi, pour que je n’oublie rien, pas meme les cadavres de mes amis sur lesquels dansaient les valets du Chef, pas meme les orgies de Rochambeau qui invitait les femmes a venir assister a I’egorge- ment de leurs maris, pas meme le refus d’une negresse de s’asseoir pres de moi pendant que des bandes de carnavals noyaient dans le clairin les douleurs d’un peuple de mendiants Le passe est a moi. . . . Je veux I’assumer, papa. . . . I’assumer (P. 36) [O memory clinging to the painful slave past. Over and above my silence and my illiteracy . . . Master of my sufferings executioner of my loves Give me the strength to overcome the pain. . . . And please do not ask me to poeticize my language. I am of the race of thieves, of assassins. . . . I need your anger. . . . I need your hatred in order to . . . I need my past, man. 238 Counterconfession Give me back my memory in order to inscribe into my poetry every gesture of the powerful one, my enemy, so that I will forget nothing, not even the corpses of my friends upon whom the leader’s valets danced, not even the orgies of Rochambeau, who used to invite wives to come so that they might attend the slaughter of their husbands, not even the refusal of a black girl to sit next to me while carnival gangs drowned the pain of a people of beggars in cheap rum The past is mine. ... I want to assume it, man. . . . assume it.] The existence of this Haitian voice is a perpetual state of exUe — social and political, psychological and emotional, linguistic, geo¬ graphic, and metaphysical. Although he uses the word exile often, the word, the sensation, or, rather, the experience that is most Etiennian is that of “la dechiruref the tear, the rip, the tearing away, the rend¬ ing, or the wrenching. “La dechirure” is the sense of the deep wound suffered and the gap created by the wrenching experience of the sepa¬ ration of the self from a preferred place, milieu, persons —even from a favored self. These breaks are paradoxical in that they are at one and the same time a devastating blow to the emotions and an awaken¬ ing of consciousness. The loss of harmony leads to the recovery of the native land and the lost self through the work of the imagination, language, and “poetic creativity.” Rather than poetic creation, Gerard Etienne might say “poetic escape,” although the language in the text is not so much escapist reverie as it is revolutionary protest, rage, and outrage. As the crucified Black tells us in Negre: II y en a qui font avec leurs ongles des bateaux sur les murs de leurs cellules pour se sauver de la prison. (R 85) [There are those who with their fingernails on the walls of their cells make little boats in order to escape from prison.] du mendiant mon ami mon double mon dechirement J’ecris mon exil. (Cri, p. 11) [From the beggar my friend, my double, my unbearable pain I write my exile.] Words Proffered in Pain 239 les bras en croix .... (Cri, p. 12) Je ne sais comment etudier ton absence Je veux te dire ma dechirure Je veux te dire ma t>’phoide la vie me saigne la vie me tue J’irai chercher un peu de pluie pour prolonger un poeme de mer (P. 13) J’ecrirai grand dieu mon premier testament avec une forte douleur au ventre et a I’esprit avec un rien d’amour dans ma vie d’exile (Cri, p. 15) [My arms crossed I do not know how' to study your absence I want to tell you of my deep wound I want to tell you of my t>'phoid Life is bleeding me Life is killing me I shall have to search for a bit of rain To prolong my poem of the sea I shall write great god my first testament With a tremendous pain in the belly And in the spirit With not a sprig of love in my life as an exile] I’image se developpe sous I’acide et I’amour lance ta vie par-dessus I’impuissance (Cri, p. 16) [The poetic image is developed out of acid and love Raise your life over and above this impotence] The prisoner is confronted with the need to write and, at the same time, the impossibility of writing, which forces him to use the very elements of his incarceration as writing tools: the walls of the prison, his excrement, his blood, or coconut leaves, and especially the tablet of his mind. In Le Negre crucifie, exile reveals itself to be a succession of experi- 240 Counterconfession ences of separations and losses of harmony along a via dolorosa. This way of the cross leads back to the Haitian mother. Forced departure from the mother country, the loss of the mother tongue, expulsion of the child from the knees of the mother, weaning, and, finally, birth are experienced as a series of falls from paradise. A perfect example of survival through linguistic productivity is the letter the death-row prisoner writes in his mind to his mother. Si j’ecris a ma mere, pense mon personnage, pour lui dire qu’elle a eu tort de m’avoir mis bas! Chere maman, je t’ecris une lettre. Ne t’occupe pas des mots. Dans cette lettre, ils ont des pattes de mouches. Chaque phrase va te faire vomir. Tu sais que la langue des Blancs de France n’est pas faite pour ma cervelle. C’est une langue de taureau a dix comes, chere mere. Je t’ecris pour te dire que j’ai mal de vivre loin de toi, que depuis ton dernier voyage, je mets mon pigeon dans la derriere des poules. Mon pere me laisse courir dans le quartier avec des pantalons dechires. D me fouette le matin, le midi et le soir. La domestique de Madame Rodriguez vient de faire un bebe sans jar- rets. Les zombis de cette femme sont responsables de ce malheur. Je ne sais si tu as une radio dans le pays des Dominicains. Mais tu dois savoir qu’il y a d’autres figures apres le massacre des Roinegres d’Haiti, d’autres coquillages aussi. Je fais le serment de te mordre et de te faire crier. Ce sera ma fafon de te remercier de m’avoir mis bas, un jour de noirceur. Je te demande pardon. J’ai besoin de rentrer encore dans ton ventre pour sortir vingt ans apres. Je dis ce qui est dans ma tete. Je n’aime pas mentir. II faut me faire confiance, car je perds chaque jour la dignite de la parole. II me faut aussi des livres de depotoirs. Les negres d’Haiti n’ont pas de livres de depo- toirs. Ni des journaux ou Ton montre aux enfants I’electricite. En ecrivant cette lettre, je te fais mal, beaucoup de mal. Ce n’est pas bien d’aimer sa mere, comme je t’aime. Cela me rends de plus en plus negre. Si tu savais comment on est en Haiti: un zombi sous les bottes du Chef. Maintenant, d’autres details. Les bateaux des Americains sont dans la rade de Port-au-Prince. Deux tontons devant moi crachent la tubercu- lose. II y a aussi les enfants d’Eloise, tu t’en rappelles? Ils ont toujours des plans de la tete aux pieds. Ensuite, il y a mon ventre qui me fait mal. Words Proffered in Pain 241 Je ne sais pas ce que j’ai dedans. II est comme un ballon dirigeable qui risque de peter un jour. Aujourd’hui, j’ai dit beaucoup de choses. Je n’ai pas d’amis, maman. Tu comprends pa, toi. Mon personnage lit et relit la lettre. Pour lui c’est une faiblesse d’ecrire comme pa. II dechire la lettre et la mange. On le regarde faire. La foule est enragee. II faut t’accepter comme tu es, pense-t-il. (P. 41) [What if I write to my mother, thinks my character, in order to tell her that she was wrong to have dropped me into this world! Dear Mother, I am writing a letter to you. Don’t worry about the words. In this letter they have a spidery scrawl. Each sentence is going to make you throw up. You know that the language of the whites from France is not made for my brains. It’s a language of a bull with ten horns, dear mother. I am writing to you in order to tell you that I suffer from living far from you, that since your last trip home, I stick my bird into chickens. My father lets me run about the neighborhood in torn pants. He beats me morning, noon, and night. Madame Rodriguez’s servant has just given birth to a baby without legs. The zombies of this woman are responsible for this misfortune. I don’t know whether you have a radio in the country of the Dominicans. But you must know that there are more problems after the massacre of certain prominent men in Haiti, more political mess as well. I swear when you return that I am going to bite you and make you cry out for having given birth to me. It will be my way of thanking you for having dropped me one black day. I’m sorry, please forgive me. I just want to go back inside your belly and not be born until twenty years from now. I am saying what is in my head. I don’t like to lie. You have to believe in me, because every day I am losing the dignity of speech. I also need schoolbooks. Blacks in Haiti don’t have schoolbooks. Nor even news¬ papers where one can show electricity to the children. I know I am causing you pain, great pain. It’s not good to love one’s mother the way I love you. It just makes me more and more a weak Black man. If you only knew how we exist in Haiti: a zombie under the heel of the Leader. 242 Counterconfession Now, more details. The ships of the Americans are in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Two secret policemen in front of me are spitting up from tuberculosis. There are also Eloise’s children, do you remember them? They still have yaws from head to toe. And then, there is my belly that aches. I don’t know what’s inside of me there. It’s like a dirigible balloon that runs the risk of exploding one day. Today, I have said lots of things. I have no friends, mother. Do you understand that? My character reads and rereads the letter. For him it is a weakness to write like that. He rips up the letter and eats it. We watch him. The crowd is outraged. You must accept yourself the way you are, he thought.] Without any real action in terms of plot development Le Negre cru- cifie is composed of shouts, screams, memories, desires, projects, and projections into the future while the prisoner-narrator awaits death, at times longing for it. This situation of imminent death and dreams of the future is the crucial contradiction that opens the door onto lit¬ erary creation, that is, onto the subtitle, the recit, or narrative. This tortured Black man, detained in one of the leader’s infamous prisons, most often in a state of delirium from physical pain, dialogues with himself or with his double, whom he addresses as “my character,” “you,” “my portrait,” “my shadow,” and “the beggar.” As foils of the self, they possess “a disturbing strangeness and yet a strange famil¬ iarity.” The above-cited letter to the mother exemplifies elaboration of the different dimensions of exile and alienation. It posits these ex¬ periences as being fundamentally related to the maternal image and obsession. In canto 7 of Cri, Etienne writes: L’absence de toi dans mes bnilures I’absence de toi dans mon desir la tdevision-corde ombilicale le reliant a la terre mere. (P. 37) [The absence of you in my burning sensations The absence of you in my desire . . . The television-umbilical cord tying him to the motherland.] Words Proffered in Pain 243 In the letter to his mother, the prisoner outlines the problems of his dechirure, or gaping, deep wound. The overwhelming sensation is one of abandonment, of a tearing away and expulsion, which has as a consequence at least five diflFerent levels of alienation. Birth is re¬ called as a fall and exile from the uterine garden of the mother, with the two successive expulsions from the mother’s breast and knee. The prisoner’s exile is typically modern in that it is a marginalized state of one who lives as an outsider in the heart of his most intimate com¬ munity. This alienation is spatial, linguistic, social, and political. The mother is absent. Absence is always experienced as a longing for the maternal, the motherland, the mother tongue, the family, the com¬ munity. In Etienne’s universe, the coordinates of his space will be marked by Port-au-Prince, Haiti, France, Canada, Quebec, Montreal, New Brunswick, and Moncton. The fifth dimension of the prisoner’s alienation takes the form of psychological repression. After the ex¬ pressive release of pent-up emotions—the composition of the letter— “his character,” as the text indicates, eats the letter—an act that sig¬ nals the return of the psychological mechanism of repression. The eating of the letter represents the unwillingness or inability to let go of his emotional pain. Etienne’s counterconfession is the transcrip¬ tion of the enduring effects of torture and the daily pain of life under a dictator. pour cette torture que je traine a mon reveil et pour routes les amours interdites a ma race d’esclaves L’Espoir est une route, une rue: . . . cette route vers la terre natale (P. 17) [For this torture that I drag with me during my every waking hour and for all of the loves forbidden to my race of slaves Hope is a way, a street: . . . This road toward the native land] je t’ecris aujourd’hui mon premier testament dans un cri de honte etranger a mon sang Je te I’ecris avec la meme haine dans la prison les memes accords lyriques qui terrassent mes ennemis J’ai dit les betes et ma legende 244 Counterconfession la honte et ma faiblesse J’ai mis les doigts dans ma gorge ou s’inscrivent des clameurs gonflees de revokes. (P. 64) [I write for you today my first testament In a scream of shame foreign to my blood I write it for you with the same hatred as in prison The same lyrical harmonies that brought down my enemies I have told of the beasts and my legend The shame and my weakness I have dug fingers into my throat Where the swollen clamorings of revolt inscribe themselves.] There is in Etienne’s work a poetics of desire and projections, silence and shouting. In Le Negre crucifie and Cri, anguish and the implosions of potential, frustrated desires are most often concretized as a sensa¬ tion of swelling from within; the aching stomach, the belly bloated, “comme un ballon dirigeable qui risque de peter un jour” [like a dirigible hot-air balloon that runs the risk of exploding one day, the long-dormant volcano]. The locus of loss and lack seems to nurture a desire to break out of the state of negation, to leap forth, and to hurdle obstacles, as well as a will to open, to puncture, to pierce the sky with one’s will, presence, and witness. lance ta vie par-dessus I’impuissance . . . {Cri, P. 16) [Raise your life above this impotence.] Je me suis mis a chanter, a danser, a trouer le ciel, a perforer mon esto- mac, comme si ma souffrance etait a I’origine du monde, que j’etais fait pour porter des cathedrales sur mes epaules et retrouver mon equilibre apres chaque regard de pitie. (P. 27) [I began to sing, to dance, to pierce the sky, to puncture my stomach, as if my suffering were at the origin of the world, as if I had been made to carry cathedrals on my shoulders and regain my equilibrium after each look of pity.] Words Proffered in Pain 245 Void que mes voiles se deploient lentement . . . et je ne regrette pas que tu m’aies faqonne O ma noirceur mon genie . . . (P. 43) [And so now my sails unfold slowly and I do not regret that you hav'e fashioned me Oh my blackness my genius] Shame The primal scream in Etienne’s work seems to me at one and the same time a compensatory gesmre, an exorcism, an affirmation of life, a bearing wimess, and finally silence and solitude broken. It is a ges¬ ture of protest “against a world of torturings, tears, cries, injustices, against the drought that persists in Haiti despite the rain that ravages the countryside” (Negre, p. 105). The primal scream is also the recog¬ nition of and deliverance from shame. The shame evoked in the letter to the mother and in Cri pour ne pas crever de home is developed later in Le Negre crucifie. J’ai honte d’etre un demi-homme a qui on refuse un peu d’eau. Meme I’eau des morgues. Honte de sentir monter en moi tant de haines. De voir des bras tendus, d’entendre des discours dont chaque mot est un crime commis a minuit. Honte des negres qui se cachent le jour pour sortir la nuit enlevant aux meres de famille leurs fils, leurs fiUes, leurs oncles, leurs tantes, leur papa, leurs domestiques. Honte de ma figure noire. Honte de cette decomposition de moi en mille consciences, en noms sans his- toire qui pulverisent le peu de Revolutions qu’on veut encore laisser a mon ccEur. (P. 83) Mon vocabulaire a des bornes. Le seul mot de misere est deja pour moi un livre de philosophie. (P. 87) [1 am ashamed of being half a man to whom they refuse to give a little water. Not even the water of stagnant ponds. Ashamed of feeling rise within me so many hatreds. Of seeing my arms hang down help¬ lessly, of hearing speeches whose every word is a crime committed at midnight. Ashamed of those Black men who hide during the day only 246 Counterconfession to come out at night kidnapping from mothers their sons, their daugh¬ ters, their uncles, their aunts, their fathers, their servants. Ashamed of my Black face. Ashamed of this decomposition of myself into a thousand consciousnesses, into names without stories that crush the few revolu¬ tionary thoughts that still remain in my heart. My vocabulary has some limits. The word misery alone is already for me a book of philosophy.] This is panopticism, in the most horrific Foucauldian sense, of the universal widespread techniques of coercion of all the forces and the bodies of a given society made to submit to the sovereignty of the dic¬ tator. The omnipresent gaze of the beast also has, as a consequence for Etienne, shame in a Sartrean sense. Shame implies the recognition of what one has become, in particu¬ lar the recognition that one is as the Other sees one—as a nothing, as less than human, as a pacotille. Shame is also the awareness of oneself as simultaneously invisible, yet visible, that is, of one’s status as an object fixed by the Other’s gaze, and knowledge that one’s individual freedom and self-determination have been engulfed and denied by the intrusive, coercive freedom of an omnipotent Other. In the passage above, Etienne transcends his objectified, humiliated, and atrophied status to accede to an awareness of the self as full of possibilities in a humanistic, economically democratic society.'® Etienne undeniably writes for a Haitian public. The experience of the Haitian diaspora, however, expands the space from the island to the Americas, Europe, and Africa. At the end of Le Negre crucifie, the prisoner can only state: Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne suis pas un negre d’Haiti, mais un homme du monde. (P. 146) [All that I know is that I am not a nigger from Haiti but a man of the world.] Etienne’s position reminds us of the original context in which the word nigritude was originally used by Cesaire in the Notebook of a Re¬ turn to the Native Land: “Haiti ou la negritude se mit debout pour la premiere fois et dit qu’elle croyait a son humanite” [Haiti where negritude stood up for the first time and stated that it believed in its Words Proffered in Pain 247 own humanity]. Further, Etienne’s declaration recalls the centuries- old affirmation by the freed Carthaginian slave Terence, who declared his feelings of solidarity with humanity in the phrase from his play Heautontimoroumenos {The Man Who Punishes Himself): “Homo sum; human! a me nihil alienum puto” [I am a man: therefore nothing that is human is strange to me]. Etienne acknowledges his affinities with Quebecois, Acadian, and American culture. His vision addresses what is fundamentally human, but through the lens of his very particular Haitian experiences. For Etienne, torture and exile are experiences of expansions, bridges, borders, and crossroads. The letter to the mother is for me the key microtext that summa¬ rizes the knot of tensions present throughout Etienne’s work and that reveals the complexity of his exilic state. The nostalgia for a return to the prenatal paradise, a vague death wish, the mystical vision of an af¬ fective union, the desire for an integration of the split, fragmented self, the drive to become something other, and utopian dreams of a univer¬ sal harmony are the preoccupations that give rise to Etienne’s poetics of crosses, crossings, and crossroads. Hermes-Saint Peter-Legba, all guardians of crossroads, twins, Gemini and Marassa, the voodoo twin demigods —all make their presence felt in Etienne’s discourse. They are figures of differentiation, frontiers, endings, and initiations. As em¬ bodiments of the crossroads, they express the desire to be free of the limbo state, to cross the bridges that lead to the promising beyond, to move beyond the present to make the transitions, and to transcend the distance between history and myth, reality, and dream. They drama¬ tize a Janus vision that is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. For Gerard Etienne, language and exile are passions in the religious sense of suffering and exaltation, asceticism and elevation; and yet, the crucified Black prisoner is not a figure of realized redemption, ecstasy, or fulfillment. The Christological symbolism is ironic and dismrbing. This tortured Black prisoner is often what not only Terence but also Charles Baudelaire would call THeautontimoroumenos, the man who punishes himself through his own personal pain. “Je suis done mon propre bourreau” {Negre, p. 79) [I am therefore my own executioner]. It is this personal suffering that expands the consciousness of the pris¬ oner to an all-embracing human compassion. Gerard Etienne, creolophone, francophone, anglophone, professor of linguistics at the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, is a man 248 Counterconfession of the world. He is indeed a man of the crossroads, a nomad, a Black wandering Jew, an uprooted man solicited by many voices, by many demons, by many languages. The subtitle of the preceding section— A Theology of Exile—is inspired by the complexity of the ironized Christological experience of Etienne’s work. Hector Bianciotti’s de¬ scription of a linguistic adventure grasps the ambiguous adventure of the passionate, linguistic exile of Gerard Etienne (see chap, i, PP- 52 - 53 )- Gladys or the Etiennian Woman O toi mon compagnon, mon double imaginaire, nous avons franchi les ronces, les volcans et la peur. Nous avons accompagne nos morts au purgatoire et fait pivoter le ciel autour de I’amour. Arbre tordu de ma raison pour qui j’ecris la vie a conquerir, laisse ta melopee pour mes peuplades en deuil. Car je crie et je veux mourir sans tes nuits de fraicheur qui frissonnent en moi comme une brise de mai.^o [Oh you, my companion, my imaginary double, we have crossed over the brambles, the volcanoes and the fear. We have accompanied our dead to purgatory and made the sky pivot around our love. Twisted tree of my reason for whom I am writing of the life to be conquered, leave your recitative for my tribes in mourning. For I cry out and I want to die deprived of your nights of freshness which shiver through me like a breeze in the month of May.] As the above excerpt suggests, in Gerard Etienne’s texts the projec¬ tion and doubling of the self lead to a complementary recit or counter¬ confession that analyzes the paradoxes, torturous temptation, and difficulties of love under racist and totalitarian conditions. The fol¬ lowing excerpt from an interview-discussion of his novel Une Femme muette is one of the most condensed illustrations of the functioning of Etienne’s analyses and literary creation: Words Proffered in Pain 249 Lorsque Gros Zo annonce a Penny une blonde de Toronto, qu’il est marie, Penny qui sort avec Gros Zo lui dit: “T’es un menteur, T’es un hypocrite . . Alors Gros Zo lui replique: “Mais non, la femme dont il s’agit est un esprit.” Penny lui dit: “Mais ce n’est pas possible. Si c’etait un esprit tu n’en aurais pas parle avec tant de chaleur.” Et elle decide d’aller en Haiti rencontrer Maitresse Erzulie. Toutes les filles de I’hopital sont d’accord avec elle, s’il y a une Maitresse Erzulie dans la vie de Gros Zo il faut que tu allies la rencontrer. Mais Penny, craintive, demande a Gros Zo: “Bon, Napoleon, et si Maitresse Erzulie refuse I’autorisation?” Et Gros Zo de repondre: “C’est pas possible. Elle I’aurait fait pour une negresse mais pas pour toi. Parce qu’au fond, Maitresse Erzulie est une blonde aux yeux bleus, elle a de longs cheveux, elle est svelte comme toi. Done tu comprends, pour toi Maitresse Erzulie ne refuserait pas son au- torisation pour que je t’epouse.” C’est comme qa dans la vie reele des negres hai'tiens: Maitresse Erzulie, c’est notre femme en premieres noces. Je me rappelle, a ce moment j’avals des problemes en Haiti, et mes par¬ ents sont alles voir un hougan, la premiere qu’il leur a dit: “Ecoutez, il est temps que Gerard epouse Maitresse Erzulie. Done voila, toute ta vie, a partir de quatorze ou quinze ans, on t’ap- prend a coucher avec une femme blanche, une blonde aux yeux bleus. Toute ta vie, tes fantasmes, tes psychoses, tes nevroses, tout ga passe par Maitresse Erzulie. Parfois tu te couches sur ton lit, tu ejacules, en pleine adolescence, et on te dit le lendemain matin: Tu as fait I’amour avec la Maitresse.” Ou encore: tu vas au lit le soir, tu mets du parfum sur ton lit, esperant que Maitresse Erzulie vienne coucher avec toi. Mais c’est triste ga dans la vie d’un peuple. Ainsi quand Gros Zo dit a Anne-Marie que “T’es une negresse. Je ne t’aime pas,” ou bien “Ma femme revee est une blonde.” Qu’est-ce que tu veux? C’est ancre meme dans notre sub- conscient. Voila ce que le vodou fait de nous aujourd’hui. Mais attention, je ne dis pas qu’il n’y a pas la une richesse extraordinaire. . . . C’est ex¬ traordinaire ce que tout ce fantastique vodouesque peut nous apporter au niveau meme de notre esthetique. Et ga, je I’exploite systematique- ment dans mon oeuvTe.^' [When Gros Zo announces to Penny, a blond from Toronto, that he is married. Penny, who is dating Gros Zo, says to him, “You are a liar, you’re a hypocrite.” Then Gros Zo responds to her, “No, no, the woman in question is a spirit.” Penny says, “But that’s not possible. If it were a spirit, you would not have spoken of her w'ith such passion.” And she 250 Counterconfession decides to go to Haiti to meet her. All the girls at the hospital agree with her, if there is a Mistress Erzulie in Gros Zo’s life you have to go and meet her. But Penny, fearful, asks Gros Zo: “Well, little Napoleon, and if Mistress Erzulie does not give her permission?” To which Gros Zo responds, “That is not possible. She would have acted that way for a negress, but not for you. Because basically Mistress Erzulie is a blond with blue eyes, she has long hair, she is svelte like you. So you can under¬ stand, for you Mistress Erzulie would not refuse to give her permission for me to marry you.” It is that way in the real life of Black Haitians: Er¬ zulie is our first wife. I remember, at a time when I had some problems in Haiti, and my parents went to see a voodoo priest, the first thing he said to them: “Listen, it is time for Gerard to wed Mistress Erzulie.” So there your entire life, from about fourteen or fifteen years of age, you are taught to sleep with a white woman, a blond with blue eyes. Your entire life, your fantasies, your psychoses, your neuroses, aU of that is filtered through Mistress Erzulie. Sometimes, in the bloom of adoles¬ cence, you go to sleep in your bed, you ejaculate, and you are told the next morning, “You made love with the Mistress.” Or what is more, you go to bed at night and you perfume your bed, hoping that Mistress Er¬ zulie might come sleep with you. But that is sad in the practical life of a people. Thus, when Gros Zo says to Anne-Marie, “You are a negress. I can’t love you” or “My dream woman is a blond,” what can one do? It is anchored in our subconscious. That’s where we are currently in our historicity. But, hold on, I am not saying that there is not in all of that an extraordinary richness. ... It is quite extraordinary what the voodoo fantastic can bring to us on the level of our aesthetics. And all of that, I draw on systematically in my work.] This remarkable statement condenses in its texture certain analyti¬ cal categories at work in Etienne’s project, such as the analysis of the fantasmatic doubling of the Haitian woman. Through his characters and in interviews, Etienne reveals his appreciation of the richness of Haitian voodoo, which he accepts and assumes as an undeniable onto¬ logical variable in the collective consciousness of the Haitian people. For Etienne, Haitian voodoo is a resource, a rich source of poetic ex¬ citement. Nonetheless, he questions the effect of voodoo upon the psyche of the Haitian people, particularly with regard to the Haitian woman and the figure of Erzulie, the voodoo goddess of the waters. Words Proffered in Pain 251 beauty, and love. This analysis illustrates the provocative nature of Etienne’s work. Gerard Etienne’s analysis of Mistress Erzulie, the voodoo goddess of the waters, beauty', and love, and the effect her depiction has upon the collective psyche, is intimately related to his concern about the depiction of the Haitian woman in literature. I have already discussed the functioning of the mother image in relation to the exilic mode in Etienne. In considering the woman in the discourse of Gerard Etienne, I have limited the choice of text to Gladys (1963), Dialogue avec mon ombre (1972), Le Negre crucifie (1974), and the essay “La Femme noire dans le discours litteraire haitien” (1979; The Black Woman in Haitian Literary Discourse). These are the texts in which the first portraits of women in Etienne are sketched. There are few critics of the representation of women in Haitian discourse as severe or as generous as Gerard Etienne. Etienne seems to escape the traps of Haitian literary tradition that inadvertently (perhaps) established a tradition of humiliating “binary fantasmatization” of the Haitian woman. This inherited system of symbolic values constructs, accord¬ ing to Etienne, a binary opposition between the black-skinned woman and the lighter-skinned mulatto. The opposition perpetuates a racist, feudal, and colonial vision reinforced by a low romanticism that ex¬ ploits antitheses based on a set of assigned values of lighmess and darkness. The character portrayals of the Black and Alulatto women systematically oppose Black and White, the savage and the civilized, the peasant and the bourgeois, the servant and the lady, night and day, filth and cleanliness, impropriety and propriety, voodoo and ratio¬ nality, excess and moderation, consumption and veneration, secrecy and openness, dishonesty and honesty'. It is a tradition that, according to Etienne, closes off our imagination to the existential value of the Haitian woman, and in which the construction of Black female figures rests upon a series of distortions and negations that run the risk of perpetuating the mj'ths and stereoU'pes that have distorted the image of the Black woman’s humanity and denigrated and even denied her importance in Haitian history.^^ La pacotille laments; “Pas moyen d’avoir de la bonte dans un pays oii il faut s’endurcir pour aimer, rester bouche bee devant un cou- cher du soleil, une onde de riviere. . . . dans un pays ou un regard de tendresse se transforme automatiquement en provocation de la force 252 Counterconfession milicienne” (p. 96) [There is no place for kindness in a country where you must harden yourself in order to love, remain spellbound before a sunset, before the scintillating waters of a river.... in a country where a look of tenderness is automatically seen as a provocation by the mili¬ tary force]. Gerard Etienne wishes to hide nothing. Thus his universe is of necessity violent: the violence of torture, of the social and politi¬ cal misery in Haiti; the violence of a man who understands, firsthand, what it means to be raped; the violence of the living conditions, the truths, and emotions he exposes. Let us take, for example, Le Negre crucifie, in which Etienne protests the violence of his countrymen. Mon personnage pleure. L’amour est impossible. . . . Que tu es lache, papa, plus lache qu’un homme qui maltraite sa femme apres I’avoir prise toute la nuit. te battre comme un soiilard qui bat sa femme. Histoire de vengeance ou d’impuissance. Comme un papa prete qui fouette a mort son fils prete. Histoire encore d’impuissance. Comme tes soldats qui me fouet- tent a mort, Chef. Histoire d’un people de demons. L’am our est une faiblesse en Haiti. (P. 111) [My character is crying. Love is impossible.... How cowardly you are, brother, more cowardly than a man who mistreats his wife after having had her all night long. You should be beaten like a drunkard who beats his wife. A story of vengeance or impotence. Like a tit-for-tat father who beats his son to death tit for tat. Another story of impotence. Like your soldiers who beat me to death. Leader. The story of a people of demons. Love is a weakness in Haiti.] Et puis, il n’est pas question de penser au futur, dit-il a la fille. II n’est pas question de penser aux temps qui viennent. Ils se rendent compte de leurs precipices, les verites qu’ils voudraient se dire. Entre eux, c’est I’ombre eternelle. Comme si un negre devait se separer de son ame et couper ses doigts qu’il jetterait apres aux chiens affames. (P. loi) Je lui dis qu’en Haiti, I’amour est impossible. . . . Je lui dis qu’en Haiti, I’amour est un os jete aux chiens, qu’il n’est pas question d’aimer. (P. 102) Words Proffered in Pain 253 Cette lachete en moi, en toi, la paresse qui nous tue, nous empeche de vi\Te loin d’ici, dans un coin au fond de la met, dans un chateau au fond de la met, toi sirene, moi baleine. (P. 48) Elle veut le consoler, lui dire que la vie est un combat sans fin. (P. 74) Nounoune, la remorque de mes pensees (P 52). [And then, it is no question of thinking about the future, he says to a girl. There is no question of thinking of times that are coming. They realize from their perches the truths they would love to say to each other. Between them there is the eternal shadow. As if a Black man should sepa¬ rate himself from his soul and cut off his fingers which he would toss to ravenous dogs. I tell her that in Haiti, love is impossible . . . I say to her that in Haiti, love is a bone tossed to the dogs, that there is no question of loving in Haiti. This cowardice in me, in you, the laziness that kills us, that prevents us from living far from here, in a corner at the bottom of the sea, in a castle at the bottom of the sea, with you as a mermaid, I as a whale. She wants to console him, tell him that life is not an endless com¬ bat. . . . Nounoune, the towline of my thoughts.] There is violence, yes, but in Etienne there is also tenderness, and especially gratefulness, for and to the woman who is “the towline of his thoughts”—lifting him from the daily miasma of life to the rev¬ erie of utopian spaces. Etienne constructs a nontraditional portrait of the Black Haitian woman that attempts to grasp this woman in her existential complexity, particularly in relation to the excesses, abuses, and weaknesses of the colonial, military, bourgeois, feudal, patriar¬ chal Haitian male. A systematic reading of Etienne’s works reveals lexical constants that point to certain obsessions that “chart” a psyche. The trajectory of emotions and experiences relating to the woman is: violence, pain, wandering; thirst, water, rest; dreams, daydreams, intimacies, expan¬ sion of the soul, the grand dream of return (union and reconciliation with the woman), mother, the mother tongue, and the mother coun¬ try. Daydreams in which the protagonist lives out the present in happy 254 Counterconfession images are always, in Etienne’s works, luminous projections of the feminine. What manner of woman is Etienne’s female character? The Etiennian woman is fleeting in all senses of the term. She is running away, disappearing and unseizable. She is many disjointed traits: a sketch and a minimalist, cubist, at times surrealist portrait. For the protagonist she is an object of desire who seems unattainable. She can inspire fear, especially the fear of abandonment. She is a being dreamed of and constructed from a matrix of maternal conflicts and affiliations. She is a tangle of contradictions, kindred spirit, imaginary double, sister. She is the being in whom all the contradictions of the soul and the unconscious seem resolved. For the Etiennian feminine, the gender of nouns in French is impor¬ tant when one considers the preponderance of feminine phenomena with which She is associated: consciousness, conscience, consolation, tenderness, fear, poetry, strength, imagination, inspiration, contra¬ diction, elevation, and shadow are all feminine nouns and entities in Etienne’s work. She is the reflection and the likeness of the universe. She is also the reflecting mirror and, as such, the reflection as well as the opposite, a repetition and a difference. Together, He and She form a chiasmus or a repetition through reversal. She is the feminine projection of certain aspects of his unconscious, his tenderness, his potential, and his wounded self, as well as the incarnation of strength when he is weak. She is his opposite in that she is the embodiment of the questions and psychological torments that plague him according to the demands of life. As a mediating spirit she is his guide toward full self-realization. She is the guide to love, the guide through life, through shadows toward revolution, to death. At times, she has a name — Gladys, Nounoune, Josette, Evelyn, Deborah, Natania, Michaella, Guilene, and, especially. Mother, the true mother, the mother tongue, the mother country. The water imagery offers Etienne’s characters, as dreamers, the in¬ toxicating escape into the intimate realm of the maternal feminine. The escapist and utopian visions are expressed in the structure and strength of the lyric. When the imagination idealizes the masculine and the feminine, they become values and, as such, allegorical, thereby conferring upon the lyric the grandeur of the epic. Gladys becomes “A Song of the Haitian People.” This poetry was written by Etienne in his youth and prior to Le Negre crucifie. The tone, language, and Words Proffered in Pain 255 style are relatively classical, if not precolonial, in their Edenic quali¬ ties. A selective reading of verses from this long poem illustrates the transformation in which, through the “marvelous” simultaneity' of the poetic process, the singular embraces the plural and the personal lyric expands to embrace the national epic, and in which the idealized composite woman is the incarnation of an all-embracing, positively totalitarian, utopian vision of Haitian society. C’est I’heure de cueillir les roses de la lune Leve-toi Bien Aimee LE GRAND REVE arrive. . . . J’ai fait le tour de moi pour trouver ton image. . . . Le souffle de mon message fraternel . . . cette etemelle chanson de I’Homme errant. . . je ne sais et ne sens qui je suis. . . . Gladys mon immaculee . . . Jusques a quand resteras-tu sourde a mon appel. . . . O femme venue parmi deux pensees paralleles. Femme que je mettrai sur les etages d’une vision qui prend aujourd’hui la forme d’un monde recree, j’habiterai tes lots de terre encore mal defriches, ton espace et ta physionomie, ton Univers et ta substance, se parlant gentiment. . . . ton ombre . . . un ange . . . mon double . . . Passe et repasse belle Hirondelle Mon PEUPLE attend I’eau pure des mornes et I’unisson des levres blasees fera germer I’humain de I’or. . . . Je te salue magique vision qui te fais chair dans ma poesie. . . . Mais toi mon double dans I’illusion dis-moi veux-tu I’essaim des songes pour qu’a la vie j’apporte des grottes ou nous ferons I’indivisible. . . . Femme muette suspendue au fil de I’azur filets graduels du froid et savane brulante Femme demi-rose accrochee au sommeil Espace compris entre le songe et la matiere Femme envahie de nuages familiers . . . 256 Counterconfession quand sur la route de la paix la main dans la main . . . Nous irons le front charge de fruits pour que soit faite chair I’idee d’un monde reel. . . . o GLADYS ma chambre inondee de contraires je t’ai chantee et te chanterai dans I’hosanna des songes Un jour peut-etre nous couperons ensemble de petites tranches de vie quand I’espece aura jailli de I’union des coeurs. . . . je t’attendrai mon univers de mon SOURIRE toute ome de lumiere que nos bras auront forge pour de meilleures recoltes. . . .23 [It is the hour to gather the roses of the moon. . . . Stand up Beloved the grand dream is come. . . . I have searched my being in order to find your image. . . . The inspirational breath of my fraternal message . . . This eternal song of the wandering Man . . . I do not know and cannot feel who I am. . . . Gladys, my immaculate conception . . . Until when, for how long, will you remain deaf to my call. . Oh, woman come from among two parallel thoughts. Woman whom I shall place on the plateaus of a vision that takes the shape today of a world re-created, I shall inhabit your plots of still unfilled soil, your space and your physiognomie, your Universe and your substance, speaking one to the other with kindness. . . . your shadow ... an angel. . . my double . . . Pass by and pass by again beautiful Sparrow My PEOPLE await the pure water of the high hills and the song in unison of indifferent lips will germinate a golden humanity. . . . 1 salute you magical vision who is made flesh in my poetry. . . . But you my double in illusion Tell me won’t you of the swarm of dreams so that to life I might furnish the grottoes Words Proffered in Pain 257 where we shall accomplish the indivisible. . . . Mute Woman suspended in the azure blue sky gradual threads of the cold and of burning savanna Woman half-pink hanging on to sleep Space caught betw’een reverie and materiality Woman overtaken by familiar clouds . . . when on the route tow'ard peace hand in hand . . . We shall go forth our brows laden with fruits so that the idea of a real world will be made flesh. . . . OH GLADYS my chamber flooded with contradictions I have sung of you and shall continue to sing your praises in the hosanna of dreams One day perhaps we shall cut together small slices of life when the species will have sprung from the union of hearts. . . . I shall await you my universe w’ith my SMILE All adorned with lights that our arms will have fashioned for better harvests. . . .] In the so-called “Unnecessary Preface” to Gladys, the Haitian poet Leon Laleau underscores the intimate symbolic relationship between man, water, and woman. In Le Negre crucifie, the prisoner suffers a constant thirst, and woman is often portrayed as a figuration of Aquarius, the Water Bearer, the spring, the source, from which ema¬ nates a revitalizing energy, courage, strength, and determination. It is in the extraordinary portrait of the crucified Black woman that ten¬ derness and pity' are seen as acts of insolence and provocation by the military power structure. Je vois une femme. Elle assiste a la chose et veut me donner une cruche d’eau. II y a un fusil pointe sur ses seins. Le chef lance I’ordre de violer routes les femmes du Pays: femmes cor- billards, femmes poules, femmes charognes. Tout cela pour la femme qui a essaye de mettre un peu d’eau dans ma bouche. Parmi les femmes qui sont la, il y a une qui se distingue des autres. Elle a une robe couleur chadeque. Ses cheveux sont une touffe de baya- hondes. 258 Counterconfession Pitie, dit-elle. On I’entend a peine. Les soldats du chef ronflent. La femme tombe deux fois. Deux fois, elle se releve. (P. 34) [I see a woman. She attends the event and wants to give me a pitcher of water. There is a rifle pointed at her breasts. The man in charge shouts the order to rape all the women of the countryside; funereal women, chicken women, carcass women. All of that for a woman who tried to put a little bit of water in my mouth. Among the women who are there, there is one who stands out from the rest. She is wearing a dress pale blue in color. Her hair is like a tuft of thistles. Pity, she cries out. She is hardly heard. The commander’s soldiers Are. The woman falls two times. Two times she gets back on her feet.] The dialectical relationship of two kindred spirits implies a recipro¬ cal psychological projection. In Air and Daydreams Gaston Bachelard suggests: L’homme qui aime une femme “projette” sur la femme toutes les valeurs qu’il venere. Et, de meme, la femme “projette” sur I’homme qu’elle aime toutes les valeurs que sa propre psyche voudrait posseder, conquerir.^'* [The man who loves a woman “projects” onto the woman all of the values and qualities he himself venerates. And, in the same way, woman “projects” onto the man she loves all of the values and qualities that her own psyche would like to conquer and possess.] In his delirium and his daydreams, the crucified Black man creates numerous characters and doubles. It is thus m Le Negre crucifie that Etienne creates his “dialogue avec [son] ombre”: Je me fais plusieurs personnages. Chaque personnage fait est une idee pourrie, une pile de contradictions depuis vingt-quatre heures. . . . Un [autre] encore trace sur le ciment de ma cellule la figure de ma mere. (P. 12) [I create for myself several characters. Each character created is a rot¬ ten idea, a heap of contradictions piled up since the last tt\'enty-four hours. One [other] of these characters is still tracing on the cement of my cell the face of my mother.] There is an almost perfect correspondence between the psycho¬ logical and textual functions and mechanisms of the “shadow” and Words Proffered in Pain 259 “double” in Etienne and the discussion of the shadow by Gaston Bachelard: Ces dedoublements serait si Ton “pensait,” un dedoublement de philo- sophe: la question ou suis-je, qui suis-je? De quel reflet d’etre suis-je I’etre? Mais ces questions pensent trop. Un philosophe les renforcerait avec des doutes. En fait la reverie dedouble I’etre plus doucement, plus naturellement. Et avec variete! II y a des reveries ou je suis moins que moi-meme. L’ombre est alors un etre riche. Elle est une psychologue plus penetrante que le psychologue de la vie quotidienne. Elle connait, cette ombre, I’etre qui double par la reverie I’etre du reveur. L’ombre, le double de notre etre, connait en nos reveries la “psychologie des pro- fondeurs.” Et c’est ainsi que I’etre projete par la reverie—car notre moi reveur est un etre projete—est double comme nous-memes.”25 [These deconstructions of the self into doubles would be if one “were thinking” a deconstruction of the philosophical type: the question where am I, who am I? As a being, of what am I the reflection? But these ques¬ tions think too much. A philosopher would reinforce them with doubts. In fact, dreaming and daydreaming deconstruct our being more gently, more naturally. And with such variety. There are reveries in which I am less than myself. The shadow is then a rich being. She is a psychologist more penetrating than the psychologist of everyday life. She knows, the shadow, the being who is the double emerged from a daydream and she knows the dreamer as a being. The shadow, the double of our being, rec¬ ognizes in our reveries the psychology of our innermost depths and most intimate secrets. And it is thus that the self who is projected through day¬ dreaming—for indeed our dreamed-of self is a projection of the self—is the double of ourselves.] In La pacotille, the woman who is a double is named Guilene. She is an Esther figure representing the female liberator. As a beautiful mulatto woman, Guilene is a form of Erzulie, the aforementioned goddess of beauty, love, and the waters in Haitian voodoo. Je me sentais vraiment mal a I’aise en compagnie d’une mulatresse qui presentais des traits physiques identiques a ceux de Gladys. La fille qui m’avait tourne la tete a Camp Perrain pour laquelle j’avals ecrit quelques vers romantiques. Dans sa porcherie, le petit negre. Ainsi en avait decide le pere de Gladys ainsi que la femme du monstre. (P. 190) 26o Counterconfession [I used to feel truly ill at ease in the company of a mulatto woman who had physical features identical to those of Gladys. The girl who had turned my head at Camp Perrain and for whom I had written some romantic verses. There I was, in her pigpen, the little negro boy. So had Gladys’s father decided as well as the wife of the beast.] The mulatto woman inspires awe, fear, lust, idealism, revolutionary courage, and anxiety in the Black peasant youth: J’aurais escamote ma morale de revolutionnaire si j’avais souille le corps de Guilene. Un corps qui appartenait d’abord a son peuple. Dans tout ce qu’U contenait de ferveur, de courage, d’electricite. C’etait qa. Elle allait m’aimer. Pour de vrai. Plus qu’un camarade de combat, je devenais son double. Son complice. (P. 201) [I would have tarnished my revolutionary morality had I sullied the body of Guilene. A body that belonged first of all to her people. With all that it contained of fervor, courage, electricity. That was it. She was going to love me. For real. More than as a comrade in arms, I was becoming her double. Her accomplice.] The emotions and experiences associated with this Etiennian woman is recalled at this point to measure the importance of the character Nounoune in Le Negre crucifie: violence, pain, wandering; thirst, water, rest; dreams, daydreams, close intimacies, expansion of the soul, the grand dream of return—union and reconciliation with the woman—mother, the mother tongue, and the mother country. This network of associations is magisterially orchestrated by Etienne in the scene of the meeting between “a character” and Nounoune, the woman-refuge-mother-sister-chimera-lover figure: II fait pitie. Nounoune le console. II tremble de peur. OuvTe-moi ton ventre. Que j’y entre avec mes bras casses. Donne-moi ton ronflement, ton sourire, tes hanches. Ouvre tes yeux, que j’y voie les fusees du monde. Que je m’assoie sur tes cuisses, pour te dormer un peu de mes souf- frances. Fais ma conquete, Nounoune, sois ma mere. Je te le demande au nom des enfants batards, au nom de ceux que fouette le chef. Je te le de¬ mande, Nounoune, au nom des assassins de nos parents. Nous n’avons pas besoin de calendriers, ni d’espace, ni d’horizons. Nous sommes tout cela a la fois. Nounoune I’enserre. Rentre ses dix doigts dans sa gorge. Words Proffered in Pain 261 Elle lui fait vomir un premier vers, puis un deuxieme, puis un troisieme. II se sent soulage. Reprend du souffle, dit a Nounoune des mots qu’elle ne comprend pas. Ils s’embrassent. Deux anolis prennent leur bain de soleil. (R 48) [One feels sorry for him. Nounoune consoles him. He trembles with fear. Open your belly to me. Let me enter therein w'ith my arms crossed. Give me your breath, your smile, your hips. Open your eyes that I may see the fireworks of the universe. Let me sit on your thighs, so that I can share with you some of my sufferings. Conquer me, Nounoune, be my mother. I beg this of you in the name of all those bastard children, in the name of those beaten by the beast. I ask this of you, Nounoune, in the name of those who murder our relatives. We don’t need any cal¬ endars, space, or horizons. We are all of that at one and the same time. Nounoune wraps her arm around him. Sticks her ten fingers down into his throat. She makes him throw up a first thing, then a second. Then a third thing that is troubling him. He feels relieved. Catches his breath again, says to Nounoune words that she cannot understand. They kiss. Two tiny green lizards sun themselves.] Mon personnage vole. Se retrouve encore avec Nounoune. . . . Nou¬ noune est belle. II veut la prendre. II a envie d’etrangler la fille a cause de sa beaute qui lui fait peur. Je ne peux, dit-il, digerer I’idee d’une beaute avec ma laideur. II faut te sacrifier pour mon malheur et mon bonheur. II prend un couteau. Veut couper la gorge de la fille. Elle lui dit: je ne suis pas ton ennemie, malgre les appar- ences. Je suis le devant-jour, toi la levee de la lune. II se jette sur Nounoune, leche sa peau, mord ses yeux. Pourquoi ne fait-on pas I’amour dans la bouche. Nounoune avant que les nuages t’enveloppent. Nounoune Je dois souffrir pour le salut des paysans Lui et Nounoune s’entrelayent. A cote d’eux, Haiti n’existe pas. (P. 56) [My character takes wing. Einds itself once again with Nounoune. . . . Nounoune is beautiful. He wants to take her. Suddenly he wants to strangle the girl because her beauty frightens him. I can’t, he says to himself, stomach the idea of such beauty next to 262 Counterconfession my ugliness. You have to sacrifice yourself for my unhappiness and my happiness. He takes a knife. Wants to slit the throat of the girl. She says to him: I am not your enemy, despite appearances. I am daybreak, you the rising of the moon. He throws himself upon Nounoune, licks her skin, nibbles her eyes. Why don’t people make love through the mouth. Nounoune before the clouds envelop you. Nounoune I am a sufferer for the salvation of the peasant. He and Nounoune wrap themselves around each other. Next to them, for a moment, Haiti does not exist.] I have described the Etiennian woman as a fleeting body. In this regard, the following is one of the key passages in which the obses¬ sions with the inaccessible woman who appears as a dream, the fear of abandonment, the impossibility of love, and the difficulty of envi¬ sioning the fumre in Haiti all dissolve into one image: II cherche Nounoune, partout dans le ravin, sous la robe des femmes, sous la tonneUe. II la cherche dans les latrines du quartier, partout ou une odeur de femme rappelle la senteur de la fiUe. II cherche cette femme qui le comprend. II vient de la perdre dans un cercueil qui disparait comme on fait disparaitre des hommes. (P. 59) [He is searching for Nounoune, everywhere in the ravine, under the dresses of woman, under the arbor. He searches for her in the neigh¬ borhood latrines, everywhere where the smell of a woman recalls the fragrance of the girl. He searches for this woman who understands him. He has just lost her in a coffin that is disappearing the way they make people disappear in Haiti.] With Nounoune in Le Negre and Guilene in La pacotille, the pris¬ oner-protagonist finds a female double and accomplice with whom he commits the crime of dreaming a future of democracy, social equality, economic prosperity, humanism, and love. The protagonist is not only a political detainee tortured by the state apparatus, but also a pris¬ oner of love tormred by the social, caste, and political impossibilities of love in Haiti. Paradoxically, in that place of horror, in that “tropi¬ cal cemetery,” in the “pigsty” that is Haiti, Le Negre and Nounoune, Words Proffered in Pain 263 La pacotille and Guilene, through their political passion, live out the utopian future of love they imagine. In Etienne’s work there is the expression of a deep feminine within the man that is, it seems to me, a compensatory projection of the deeply regretted, missing maternal bond. There is a feminization of his daydreams and a feminization in language of his ambiguous experi¬ ences in love and his grand love and emotion for Haiti. In Etienne’s work, love, the practice of poetry, the feminization of his dreams and daydreams, exile and his socio-politico-psychological agenda for the liberation of Haiti fuse into a marvelous simultaneity that only the imagination, reverie, and poetic vision can realize. Gerard Etienne’s literary project is multi-purposed: to free Haiti and the Haitian woman from their respective state of zombification; to effect a reconcilia¬ tion between the Haitian woman, her history, and her country; to transform the hidden potential of a Haitian Black woman into explo¬ sive, expansive, expressive structures; to reveal her existential dimen¬ sions; and to steer the imagination of artists and readers toward spaces more open to the liberation of the Haitian woman and her country. Throughout Etienne’s work the prestige of the feminine is profound, and the expanding correspondence between the woman, the mother country, and the Haitian future of hope is explicit. Here is an example from Cri: Deja ma petite fille Michaella court dans le soleil. II se dessine dans ses yeux un sauvage cavalier dresse entre le ciel et nos reves de batis- seurs d’hommes. Deja les troubadours de la grande plaine forment une colonne autour de nos morts prets a lancer dans fair des papillons dans I’attente d’UNE femme revolutionnaire. II songe a I’avenir de son pays qu’il maudit mais qu’il considere comme une femme. On I’aime trop pour la detester. On la deteste trop pour I’aimer. C’est un aller-venir entre I’amour d’un pays et la rage de la hair. On est trop marque, on a trop de blessures pour que tout cela disparaisse en un seul jour. II faut prendre du temps, pense-t-il. Un aller-venir entre I’idee de faire disparaitre Haiti, de la supprimer de la planete et celle de la rendre prospere. (P. 36) [Already my little girl Michaella is running in the sunlight. In her eyes a wild horseman is being sketched standing between the sky and all our 264 Counterconfession dreams of builders of men of the future. Already troubadors of the high plain form a column around our dead ready to release into the air hope¬ ful butterflies while awaiting A revolutionary woman. He is lost in dreams about the future of his country that he curses but that he considers like a woman. You love her too much to hate her. You detest her too much to love her. It is a constant going and coming be¬ tween the love of a country and the rage of hating her. One is too marked, one has too many wounds for it all to disappear in one single day. You have to give yourself time, he thinks. A constant going and coming be¬ tween the idea of making Haiti disappear, of erasing her from the planet and the idea of making her prosper.] And from La pacotille: On viole I’histoire. Ton histoire de negre poupou, de negre de fruits sauvages. Sans racines depuis plus d’un siecle. On reve d’une Esther libe- ratrice issue des matrices de la mer qui volerait par-dessus des masses d’air s’ouvrant aux complaintes des vieillards, qui parfumerait les cases des villes, rien qu’avec sa queue de comete, son souffle puissant, sa beaute etincelante. Cette femme-lumiere, bardee de lumiere a ses flancs, ferait pousser des arbres la oii la fertilite de la terre a ete violee. On la verrait s’elever dans le del, plus haut que chars de feu venus de I’autre monde, baignee de fraiches ondees, de myosotis, de citronnelle. (P. 79) [One violates history. Your history of a wretched Black man, of the Black man of wild fruits. Without roots for more than a century, one dreams of a liberating Esther risen from the matrixes of the sea who would fly above the masses of air opening herself to the pleas of the old, who would perfume the shacks in the city ghettos, with nothing more than the sweep of her comet train, her powerful breath, her sparkling beauty. This woman of light, clad in light at her flanks would make trees grow there where the fertility of the land had been raped. She would be seen rising in the sky, higher than the chariots of fire, from another world, bathed in cool mists, forget-me-nots, and citronella.] Nous Fattendons, depuis cinq siecles, cette femme liberatrice. Plu- tot non. Une maree noire. L’unique signe d’une revolution souterraine, mugissante, bruissant de forces incontrolables. Nous la voulons pour notre delivrance. Pour montrer au monde notre beaute, notre laideur, la Words Proffered in Pain 265 vie qui nous echappe tous les jours, faute d’un arbre qui s’approprierait tout I’oxygene de I’univers afin de proteger nos enfants contre I’etoufFe- ment. (P. 79) [We have been waiting for her, for five centuries, this liberating woman. Rather not. A black tide. The unique sign of an underground revolu¬ tion, roaring, rumbling with uncontrollable forces. We want her for our deliverance. In order to show to the world our beauty, our ugliness, the life that slips through our fingers every day, for want of a tree that would take in all the oxygen of the universe in order to release it to protect our children from that which suffocates them.] One wonders if the 1991 novel La pacotille marks the end for Etienne of the cycle of torture and the aesthetics of pain, as well as the end of the long dark night of sufferings for the Haitian nation. In the mid- nineteen nineties, Etienne chose the essay as his preferred format of expression and published La Question raciale et racisie dans le Roman quebecois,^^ a study of race and racism in the Quebecois novel. In L’Injustice! Desinformation et mepris de la loi (Injustice! Disinformation and Contempt of the Law), 2 '^ he discusses issues such as free speech, freedom of expression, and civil disobedience. The essay La femme noire dans le discours litteraire haitien (The Black Woman in Haitian Literary Discourse) has become a book-length study of the same title,^® in which Etienne develops his original “methode anthropose- miologique,” which combines semiotics, anthropology, and sociologi¬ cal research methods to investigate the literary sign beyond the mar¬ gins of “the self-sufficient text.” Etienne believes that the millennium must signal the blossoming of the decolonization of literary criticism and literary theory in the domain of francophone studies. Conclusion: The Francophone Coming out from under the Sign of Persephone and “the Dark Night of the Postcolonial African World” Nous savons nouer les noeuds de la complicite. [We well know how to tie the knots and tangles of complicity] —Aime Cesaire, Une Saison au Congo As a semantic matrix, the suffix phone in francophone evokes the voice and hearing. The throat and the ear are the channels of voice and hearing that lead to the brain and descend to the “guts,” that is, to the most intimate, secret, and mysterious parts of our being, mental space, intellect, and emotions. “In Quest of the Lost Song of Seif” and “Silence Broken, Solitude Broken” are titles of essays I have written in the past that represent my continuing effort to come to grips with the “psycho-scripto-auricular vocalics” of francophone literary cul- mre. Le cri, the scream, the shout, the primal call, is the voice caught and cut at the threshold between the primal materiality of language and its signifying message. Le cri is the voice as a welling forth, a tor¬ rent of autochthonous sound from the labjTinthine, cavernous depths of the self. This voice, as original sound, is distinct from echo or, in the context of French assimilation, from the rhetoric of “the hideous leprosy of mimicry” that Cesaire lamented in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. As a countervocaUcs, the cry is the voice’s manifes¬ tation of the denunciatory tradition. Conclusion 267 The seemingly disparate signs of ear and voice, the geological de¬ scent and return, the labyrinth, and the floral And their synthesis under the sign of Persephone,' the mythical goddess of the flelds who is condemned to spend the winter in the underworld as wife to Pluto, god of the underworld. All of the disparate signs related to the Perse¬ phone myth were orchestrated transculturally in texts by Aime Cesaire as early as 1939, treated magisterially in the prose poem The Torrent by the Quebecois writer Anne Hebert in 1945, and set forth in 1982 in all of their psychological complexity in The Abandoned Baobab by the Senegalese woman writer Ken Bugul. In Aime Cesaire’s work, for example: Baobab c’est notre arbre^ I’oreille collee au sol j’entends passer demain.^ C’est au cri que Ton reconnait Thomme. Au cri fils aine de la vie, ou plu- tot la vie elle-meme qui sans dimensions, sans renonciations d’un libre et imprevisible mouvement s’incarne, dans I’immediatete de la voix. Et voici crier le poete negre: Nous crions parmi les gratte-ciel Comme nos ancetres Criaient parmi les palmiers d’Afrique Car nous sommes seuls Et nous avons peur . . . Et sur le fond lourd des angoisses, des indignations rentrees des de- sespoirs longtemps tus, voici monter et siffler une colere, et I’Amerique, sur le lit ebranle de ses conformismes, s’inquiete de quelle atroce haine ce cri est la delivrance: I speak in the name of the Black millions.'* [The Baobab is our tree. . . . My ear pressed to the ground, I can hear tomorrow passing by It is by the cry that one recognizes man, by the scream, the eldest son of life or rather life itself without dimension, without renunciations in a free and unforeseeable movement that becomes incarnate in the immediacy of the voice. And here cries out the Black poet: 268 Conclusion We cry out among the skyscrapers As our ancestors used to cry out among the palms of Africa For we are alone And we are afraid . . . And on the heavy base of anguishes, of indignities turned inward, of despairs long held silent, here rises and whistles an anger, and America, on the shaken bed of her conformities, worries about what dreadful hatred this cry is the deliverance: I speak in the name of the Black millions.] In Anne Hebert: Je possede done la certitude que je ne conserve aucune maitrise sur ma voix. (P. 56) J’entrevis son eclat metallique comme celui d’un eclair s’abattant sur moi. Ma mere me frappe plusieurs fois a la tete. . . . Quand je rouvris les yeux, je me trouvais seul. . . . je ressentais une douleur violente a la tete. J’etais devenu sourd. Mais les jours epouvantables ou je ressassais ma revoke, je percevais le torrent si fort a I’interieur de mon crane, contre mon cerveau, que ma mere me frappant avec son trousseau de clefs ne m’avait pas fait plus mal.5 [I know now for sure that I have absolutely no control over my voice. I saw its metallic glimmer like a lightning flash coming down upon me. My mother struck me several times on the head. When I opened my eyes, I found myself alone. I felt a violent pain in my head. I had become deaf. . . . But on those horrible days when I kept turning over and over again my revolt, I could hear the torrent so intensely inside my skull, against my brain, that my mother’s striking me with her key ring had not caused me greater pain.] And, finally, in Ken Bugul: Soudain un cri! Un cri per^ant. Un cri venait briser I’harmonie, sous ce baobab denude, dans ce village desert. L’enfant s’enfonepait de plus en plus profondement, la perle d’ambre dans I’oreille. (P. 25) Conclusion 269 [Suddenly a scream! A piercing scream. A cry from underneath the baobab tree came to shatter the harmony of the deserted village. The child was pushing the amber bead deeper into its ear, deeper and deeper. The cry echoed in a heat of rhythm and dance.] These passages orient us respectively toward certain preoccupa¬ tions: the flowering of virtuality, a geology of desire, an auscultation of the future, the liberation of the voice of protest, and diflFerence and release in the scream. Globally, they highlight an awareness that many francophone communities remain depleted natural resources, impo¬ tent economies, and vast w'astelands of silenced cultural and intel¬ lectual potential. Cesaire’s description of the voiceless, unproductive French West Indies of the 1940s is a disturbingly appropriate descrip¬ tion of far too many nations in the postcolonial era:® Terre muette et sterile. C’est de la notre que je park. Et mon oui mesure par la caraibe I’efffayant silence de I’homme. Europe. Afrique. Asie. J’entends hurler I’acier le tam-tam parmi la brousse, le temple prier parmi les banians. Et je sais que c’est I’homme qui park. Encore et toujours j’ecoute. Mais ici I’atrophiement monstrueux de la voix, le seculaire ac- cabkment, le prodigieux mutisme. Point de ville. Point d’art. Point de poesie. Point de civilisation, la vraie, je veux dire cette projection de I’homme sur le monde; ce modelage du monde par Thomme; cette frappe de I’univers a I’effigie de I’homme. Une mort plus affreuse que la mort, ou derivent des vivants. Et les Sciences ailleurs progressent, et les philosophies ailkurs se renouvellent, et les esthetiques ailleurs se remplacent. Et vraiment sur cette terre notre la main seme des graines. Point de viUe. Point d’art. Point de poesie. Pas un germe. Pas une pousse. Ou bien la kpre hideuse des contrefafons. En verite, terre sterile et muette.' [Land mute and sterile. It is of ours that I speak. And my hearing measures across the Caribbean the frightening silence of man: Europe, Africa, Asia. I hear howling steel, the tom-tom in the jungle, the temple praying among the banyan trees. And I know that it is man who is speak¬ ing. Again and always I listen. But here the monstrous atrophy of the voice, the secular prostration, the prodigious mutism. No city. No art. 270 Conclusion No poetry. No civilization, the true. I mean that projection of the world by man onto the world! This shaping of the world by man. This forging of the universe in the effigy of man. A death more horrible than death where the living drift. And elsewhere the sciences progress; and elsewhere philosophies are renewed and es¬ thetics are replaced. And vainly on this our land the hand sows seeds. No city. No art. No poetry. Not a sprig. Not a sprout. Or else the hideous leprosy of mimicry. Indeed, land sterile and mute. The challenges to francophone literary culture have been to cease being the wife, to overcome the deafness, with its attendant silence, in order to step out from the darkness of political dependency and the mutism of disenfranchisement. As an address, the cry emerges with a subject, like Persephone, like Ramatoulaye in Une si longue let- tre, emerging from the shadows and the realm of the unacknowledged. Counterstorytelling entails coming out from under the sign of Perse¬ phone, the involuntary wife, and like the rebellious deaf son in Anne Hebert’s Quebecois novel Le Torrent, escaping the deafening curse of radically enraged paralyzing consciousness. The scream of a formerly tormred political prisoner is transformed into a shout for justice and a cry for the liberation of his subju¬ gated, accursed compatriots. In the work of the Haitian writer Gerard Etienne, the voice is the instrument that mediates the articulation of rage, outrage, memory, witnessing, testament, revelation, and the integration of a shattered consciousness. It is the voice of the counter¬ confession. If the nineteenth century was the cenmry of colonization, the twen¬ tieth century has been the century of decolonization. The end of the twentieth century is a solemn, critical moment in the history of colo- nialized peoples. Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) and The Declara¬ tion of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) informed the utopian vision of Toussaint-Louvermre and the ideals of the Haitian Revolu¬ tion. The counterhumanism of Aime Cesaire sought to extend these humanistic principles and the 1948 Human Rights Act to include the excluded colonialized masses. The abuse of human rights and the eco¬ nomic pillaging by monocratic regimes in Africa and the Caribbean have left imperfectly decolonized and independent nations in a new state of postcolonial mutism and sterility in which former victims and Conclusion 271 revolutionaries have become victimizers and the ideals of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the decolonizing optimistic goals of the 1960s remain unrealized. As Bernard Zadi Zaourou of the Ivory Coast states, “Le second pillage du continent africain n’est pas un pillage venu d’etranger. Le second pillage est un pillage de negres par les negres. La est le drame”® [“The second pillaging of the African continent is not a pillaging come from abroad. The second pillaging is a pillaging of Blacks by Blacks. Therein lies the tragedy.”] The tragedy to which Zaourou refers is foreseen in Cesaire’s 1967 drama Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo). As one ponders the postindependence monocratic regimes in Africa and the Carib¬ bean, the words of the nameless archetypal international banker in A Season are contemptuously cynical and painfully prophetic, for they envision the slipknot of relations and complicity between the former colonizer and the new African elite in which the masses will be caught. Quatrieme Banquier: Pour rendre traitable le Sauvage, il n’est que deux pratiques: La trique, mon cher, ou bien le matabich! Premier Banquier: Eh bien? Quatrieme Banquier: Eh bien, je vous croyais plus vifs. Suivez I’idee. Que veulent-ils? Des postes, des titres. Presidents, deputes, senateurs, ministres! Enfin le matabich! Bon! Auto, compte en banque Villas, gros traitements, je ne lesine point. Axiome, et c’est la I’important; qu’on les gave! Resultats: leur coeur s’attendrit, leur humeur devient suave. Vous voyez peu a peu ou le systeme nous porte Entre leur peuple et nous, se dresse leur cohorte Si du moins avec eux, a defaut d’amitie En ce siecle ingrat sentiment perime Nous savons nouer les noeuds de la complicite. Premier Banquier: II suffit; bravo collegue! Accord sans reticence! Choeur des Banquiers: Hurrah! Hurrah! vive I’independance! [Fifth (sic) Banker: To handle savages, there are two ways: One is the club, but that’s seen better days. The other is the purse. 272 Conclusion Second Banker: Go on Fifth Banker: All right, I’ll spell it out. Just pay attention. What do their leaders want? They want to be Presidents, ministers, living in luxury. In short, the purse! High-powered cars. Villas, high wages, cushy bank accounts. Spare no expense. Just grease their palms and stuff Them. The investment wiU pay off. You’ll see, their hearts will melt. And presently Those smirking, smiling politicians will be A special class between us and their people. They’ll hold the people down provided we Tie them with bonds—well, maybe not of friendship. That’s out of date in this sad century— But knots and tangles of complicity. First Banker: Bravo! Good man! We’re with you. Chorus of Bankers: Hurrah! Hurrah! Three cheers for independence] {Season, Act I, sc 4) ^ Later in the action of the play, Lumumba laments not having fore¬ seen and forestalled the emergence of this new caste of African op¬ pressors. . . . quand j’ai nomme les premiers officiers noirs, le premier general, le premier colonel noir, je ne pensais pas que plus vite que ne pousse la lave du volcan, une caste serait ne, de chiens voraces et insatiables, la caste des colonels et des nouveaux messieurs, et c’est cette caste qui a confis- que a son profit, a son seul profit, les avantages que vous etiez en droit d’attendre de notre revolution congolaise! (Une Saison, Acte III, sc. i) [When I appointed the first Black officers, how could I imagine that quicker than lava spurts from a volcano, a new caste would be born, the caste of colonels and new masters, and that those voracious, insatiable dogs would monopolize all the benefits of Congolese freedom.] {Season, Act III, sc. i) Aime Cesaire’s decolonizing discourse remains a valid critique of postcolonial realities in which the bright sun of independence has Conclusion 273 become the midnight sun of state-sponsored terrorism and torture; where the promised future of liberalization and democratic renew'al has become the present immiserization of the masses by the kleptoc- racy of the one-party state. Cesaire’s discourse remains valid for this postcolonialism in which the democratic fulfillment of human poten¬ tial has been betrayed by the forced ecological, economic, and human desertification of African and Caribbean nations. Maryse Conde pon¬ dered the difficulties involved in the construction of a new state and summarized the people’s deferred postcolonial dreams in her novel’s title, Heremakhonon, which in Malinke means “wait for happiness.” The exodus, forced exile, and brain drain of North African, Black African, and Caribbean intellectuals, writers, dissidents, professionals, and skilled technicians from nations with repressive regimes contrib¬ ute to the nomadism of great numbers of formerly colonialized sub¬ jects. For many of them, such as Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian historian residing in the United States, this end of the tw'entieth cen¬ tury is “the dark night of the postcolonial African world.” Nous void done en cette fin de siede, accules, dans un face a face avec la terrible fermeture postcoloniale et son etourdissante affirmation d’impuissance, et ses pulsions et ses dechamements demesures, et ses ef- frois irraisonnes, et sa force psychotique, grotesque, bouffonne, qui ne respecte plus rien, ni les choses, ni les femmes, ni les hommes, ni les vieux, ni les gamins et les gamines, qui insulte, frappe, meprise, se gave de vin et de nourriture, crache, vomit, s’etrangle d’indigestion, cette de- mence et cette venalite, la bestialite, ce qui est vraiment inquietant, est le pouvoir d’accomplir le mal, juste comme ya, le pouvoir d’infliger le supplice et la mort a midi, I’impunite, mon Dieu, surtout I’impunite au “Togo,” au “Zaire,” au “Kenya,” au “Cameroun.” . . . I’Etat-cannibale qui devore, se repair du corps de ses gens, les suicide a petit feu, ceue part demoniaque du pouvoir et du commandement, et cette orgie de I’aneantissement qui viennent contredire, chaque soir, chaque midi et chaque matin, le desir qu’a chacun de nous de durer, nous empechant, tous, de comprendre la nuit du monde africain, et de porter un soud consequent a notre propre existence. Avoir vecu et continuer de vivre cette corruption et ce trepas au quotidien ne justifie peut-etre pas nos pau\Tes vies de Negres, Que sont-elles, de routes les fayons, puisque, nes au lever du soleil ou a la tombee du jour, combien d’entre nous meurent 274 Conclusion avant I’aube, dans un lancinant craquement de machoires, la course pre- maturement achevee, le cri strident et inexauce.'o [And so here we are at the end of the century, cornered, in an encounter with the dreadful postcolonial closure, its stunning affirmation of impo¬ tence, its irrational fears, and its absurd, grotesque, psychotic strength that no longer respects anyffiting, neither things, nor women, nor men, nor old people, nor little boys, nor little girls, that insults, hits, is con¬ temptuous, gorges itself on food and drink, spits, vomits, chokes from indigestion, this madness and this venality, the bestiality, and what is truly upsetting is the capacity to carry out evil, just like that, the power to inflict torture and death at noon, the impunity, my God, especially the impunity in “Togo,” in “Zaire,” in “Kenya,” in “Cameroon.” . . . The cannibalistic state that devours, feeds on the people’s body, driving them to commit suicide slowly, this diabolical part of power and com¬ mand, and this orgy of annihilation of the rights of the individual that comes every evening, every noon, and every morning to crush the desire that each one of us has to hang on, to prevent us all from understanding the dark night of the postcolonial African world, and from bringing to bear any consequential concern of ours about our very own existences. Having lived and continuing to live this day-to-day demise perhaps in no way justifles our miserable Black lives, what are they, at any rate, since born at the rise of the sun or at the falling of night, the race untimely run, how many among us, die before dawn, in a throbbing crunching of jaws, with a strident and unanswered scream.] In delineating the responsibilities of the man of culture during the anticolonialist period of 1959, Cesaire, at the risk of displeasing some of his more optimistic comrades, warned of the conditions that would plunge liberated nations into a “dark night of the postcolonial Afri¬ can world.”'' He feared that certain colonial and colonialist strucmres would too easily be reconstituted in the very heart of what he caUed those “imperfectly decolonized nations” where a group or a class of individuals, epigones of colonialism, would develop a hierarchical society with a de facto colonial eflfect, establish internal colonization of certain ethnic groups, and perpemate a colonialist exploitation of the masses through the use of instruments of repression identical to those used by European colonial regimes. Cesaire notes in Notebook, Conclusion 275 “II n’est point vrai que I’oeuvre de Thomme est finie” [It is not true that the work of man is done]. In Cesaire’s essay “Culture et colonisation” (Culture and coloniza¬ tion) ,’3 he analyzes the dynamics and psychology of colonialist prac¬ tices and their effect on the exchange, survival, destruction, and pro¬ duction of culture. The essay refines and expands on the idea of the quality’ of contact between civilizations, so forcefully presented in the “Discourse on Colonialism.” In the period of the cultural chaos of 1956, Cesaire called on “colonial, semi-colonial and para-colonial, societies to organize the cultural chaos into a new synthesis worthy of the name culture that would function as a reconciliation and tran¬ scendence of the old and the new. One of the continuing challenges in francophone culture is to overcome the cultural and psychologi¬ cal alienation that is the legacy of the colonial experience. Cesairian Negritude is above all a culmral affirmation, a reconcilation and tran¬ scendence of the old and the new, and a performative process of iden¬ tity and disalienation. For some, along with the postmodern and the postcolonial, w’e are in a post-Negritude era. Cesaire responds. People ask: “Is there still something relevant in Negritude? Isn’t it inter¬ esting only at a purely historical level?” This is not true at all. I think that as long as you will have Negroes a little bit everywhere, Negritude will be there as a matter of course. The Martinican grievance that we wanted to voice out forcefully is not so much physical misery, economic exploi¬ tation, even if this was really the case, as the alienation which as policy has made the Martinican conscience founder. And believe me this fight against alienation is never totally over.’** As for the sociodiagnostic of the “dark night of the postcolonial African world,” the imperative, according to Cesaire, is to act and to transfigure it. Just as in 1959 Cesaire called upon his fellow intellec- mals and artists to be “propagators, multipliers and inventors of new souls,” in the restructuring of society today Cesaire has launched a call to action against stagnation and negation: un afro-pessimisme, et meme un afro-denigrement; une insistance sur la part maudite de I’Africain. Une sorte d’hesitation parmi les noirs de la diaspora—les descendants africains. Certains par toute sorte de con- 276 Conclusion torsions prennent leur distance de I’Afrique. En Afrique il y a certes la misere, la guerre, la famine, la maladie. Mais il y a autre chose. II faut une mobilisation, une remobilisation de toutes les energies—artistes, sa¬ vants, femmes africains. . . . Il faut continuer et non pas s’endormir dans une sorte d’acceptation et de resignation.” [An afro-pessimism, and even an afro-denigration, an insistence upon the accursed part of the African fate. [There is] a kind of hesitation among Blacks of the diaspora—African descendants. Some, by means of aU kinds of contortions, are distancing themselves from Africa. In Africa there are, most certainly, problems of poverty, war, famine, sickness. But there are also other things. What is needed is a mobilization, a remobi¬ lization of all energies—African artists, scholars, women. . . . We must continue and not slip into a kind of acceptance and resignation.] Artists, scholars, men and women, must envision new postcolonial societies in all of their complexity and seeming banality: Le poete a toujours parcouru sa ville. Le poete, c’est d’abord celui qui cree. C’est la creation. C’est la vie continuee. Mais par consequent ?a me parait tout a fait normal qu’un poeme debouche sur la creation d’une societe, d’une ecole, ou d’une creche. C’est de la poesie.'^ [The poet has always roamed his city. The poet is first and foremost the one who creates. The poet is creation. The continuation of life. And so, consequently, it seems quite natural to me that a poem gives rise to the creation of a society, of a school, of a day-care center. All of it is poetry.] The writers considered in this study understand quite well Mariama Ba’s insight to the effect that what society, fate, tyranny, hatred, fear, and history deny their people, art has the responsibility to imagine and sustain in them: the ravishing dream of equality, justice, and dig¬ nity in a humanistic, all-inclusive, economically democratic society. Notes Introduction 1 Jack Andrew Yeager, The Vietnamese Novel: A Literary Response to Colo¬ nialism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987). 2 Mildred Mortimer, Journeys through the French African Novel (Ports¬ mouth, N.H.; Heinemann Educational Books, 1990); Eileen Julien,/i/n'- can Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 3 Mary Jean Green et al.. Beyond the Hexagon: Francophone Women Writ¬ ers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 4 Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” in Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. ii. 5 Valerie Smith, “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other,’ ” in Changing Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Bruns¬ wick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 47. See Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View’,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Hiatt and Rex Nettleford (Wash¬ ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), pp. 5-57. 6 This excerpt is from a paper presented by Mariama Ba at the con¬ ference on the Function of the Modern Literatures of Black Africa, Frankfurt, October 1980. The essay appears in Ecriture franfaise dans le monde 3, no. 5 (1981): 3-7 and is cited by Irene D’AImeida, Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (Gainesv’ille: University' Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 28-29. 7 Lionnet, “Metissage, Emancipation, and Female Textuality in Two Francophone Writers,” in Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer¬ sity Press, 1988), pp. 260-78. 8 See Graziella Parati, Public History, Private Lives: Italian Women’s Auto¬ biography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. to¬ il. 9 Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, Eloge de la 278 Notes to Introduction Creolitejln Praise of Creoleness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 10 The Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat (in Krik? Krak! [New York: Vintage Books, 1996], p. 220) offers a compelling counterbraid¬ ing discourse that introduces more of the heterogeneity, “unruliness,” tentativeness, and diasporic unpredictability of form, traditions, tem¬ poralities, memory, and relationships in francophone texts: When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose smiles and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers. 11 “The great autobiographers are great precisely because they ceased in their ‘affectionate seeking after truth,’ so have never ceased coming into being, so have never ceased to realize truth” (Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972], p. 325). 12 Ken Bugul, Le Baobab fou (Dakar: Les NouveUes Editions Africaines, 1984), p. 22; Bugul, The Abandoned Baobab (Chicago: Lawrence Hfil Books, 1991), p. 15. 13 Aime Cesaire, Tropiques, reedition, i, no. 3 (1978): 7. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 14 Bemabe, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, “Eloge de la Creolite,” pp. 80-81. 15 Ibid., p. 95. 16 Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Further citations of this work wiU appear in the text. 17 See Aime Cesaire, “L’Homme de culture et ses responsabilites,” Pre¬ sence africaine 24-25 (1959): 66. 18 See Aime Cesaire’s Address to the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), Miami, 1989. 19 Cesaire, “L’Homme de culture et ses responsabilites”: 66. 20 Aime Cesaire, Moi laminaire (Paris: Seuil 1982). 21 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Press Review, 1972), p. 31. 22 The most far-reaching study of the works of Damas is contained in “Leon Gontran Damas,” papers presented in Paris in 1988 and pub¬ lished in Actes du colloque Leon Gontran Damas, ed. Jacqueline Leiner (Paris: Editions Presence africaine), 1989. 23 Germaine Bree, “Preface,” in Life Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiogra- Notes to Chapter One 279 phy, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. ix. 1 The Game of Slipknot The aptness of Manama Ba’s formulation that “Books knit genera¬ tions” reasserts itself as one takes up the pen to write about franco¬ phone literamre and recalls foundational texts and their filiations with one’s own work. Lilyan Kesteloot’s work has inspired successive gen¬ erations of students of francophone studies, including myself. Kesteloot begins her study with Rene Maran and establishes the facts surround¬ ing the Goncourt Prize, the reception of the novel, and the contro¬ versy surrounding the preface to Batouala. I do the same, very briefiy, with the knowledge that to many specialists it could appear repetitive. I remain concerned that the beginnings of francophone literamre are in¬ creasingly given less attention in curricula and that many smdents are unaware of this extraordinary inauguration of francophone literamre. I begin with Maran not simply because Batouala is of inaugural impor¬ tance, but especially because Maran and his work are instructive lenses through which to foresee many of the fundamental preoccupations of francophone literary culmre and of this smdy. Claude Wauthier’s smdy, a monumental description and exhaustive panorama of early African and Caribbean francophone literamre with lengthy illustrative excerpts, is an indispensable reference. The English translations are most useful, some of which will be used in this smdy. See Lilyan Kesteloot, Les ecrivains noirs de langue franfaise (Bruxelles: Instimt de Sociologie, Uni- versite Libre de Bruxelles, 1963); Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Wash¬ ington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991); and Claude Wauthier, L’Afrique des Africains (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964); Wauthier, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa, 2d ed. (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978). Certain original French texts will not be cited when an established English translation exists, as in the case of Batouala, translated by Alex¬ andre Mboukou; the bilingual edition of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated by Cla>ton Eshleman and Annette Smith; Dis¬ course on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham; and the works of Frantz Fanon. 1 Rene Maran, Batouala, veritable roman negre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921). 2 Tahar ben Jelloun, La Nuit sacree (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987); Jel- loun, L’Enfant de sable (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985); Jelloun, The 28o Notes to Chapter One Sand Child, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Ballantine Books, Har- court, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987). 3 Antenor Firmin, De I’egalite des races humaines (Port-au-Prince: Edi¬ tions Esteve, 1885). Further citations of this work are in the text. 4 Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, L’Essai sur I’inegalite des races hu¬ maines (Paris: Belfond, 1967). 5 Ernest Renan, Philosophical Dialogues, quoted in Firmin, De I’egalite des races humaines, p. 480. 6 Caryl Phillips, “The Legacy of Othello,” in Frontiers of Caribbean Lit¬ erature in English, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 7 This dilemma of identity is more elaborately pondered by Rene Maran in a novel variously titled Roman d’un negre, Jean Veneuse, and, finally, Un homme pared aux autres (Paris: Editions Arc-en-ciel, 1947). 8 Rene Maran, Batouala, An African Love Story, trans. Alexandre Mbou- kou (Washington, D.C.: Black Orpheus Press, 1972). 9 In the chapter “Faith and Exile: Cheik Hamidou Kane and the Theme of Alienation,” Abiola Irele analyzes the predicament of the protago¬ nist Samba Diallo in terms that mirror the situation of Rene Maran: “a conflict between two sets of impulses: on the one hand ... an instinc¬ tive allegiance to a way of life that has shaped his very being ... on the other . . . respect and admiration for the metaphysical courage in¬ volved in the European position and his horror at the historical result it has engendered” (Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology [London: Heinemann, 1981], p. 171). In particular for Maran, one should emphasize not only the “histori¬ cal result” but especially his horror before the spectacle of the human result. Also, while Irele does not refer to DuBois, his analysis reflects the kind of dynamic and “tensions” that emerge from the DuBoisian double-consciousness paradigm. The work of Irele that is most pertinent to the issues in this study and to which I refer in several places is his 1992 essay entitled “In Praise of Alienation.” See my remarks, in particular p. 289, note 2. Irele’s essay articulates the mechanisms of alienation and ambiguity in broader terms that have implications for the analysis of African women’s writ¬ ing, Caribbean writing, and African American literature. 10 See Tahar ben Jelloun, La Nuit sacree; Kourouma, Les Soleils des Inde¬ pendences (Paris: 1970); and Diabate, Comme unepiqure deguepe (Paris, 1980). 11 Rene Maran, LJn homme pared aux autres (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1947 ). 12 Joseph Zobel, La Rue Cases-Negres (Paris: Editions Jean Froissart, 1950). Notes to Chapter One 281 13 Unless otherwise stated, excerpts from the works of Aime Cesaire are quoted from the three-volume CEuvres completes, the first of which is titled Poemes, the second Theatre, and the third CEuvres historiques et politiques: Discours et communications (Fort-de-France, iMartinique: Edi¬ tions Desormeaux, 1976). 14 For a succinct overview of the development of francophone literature see Christopher Miller, “Francophonie and Independence,” in A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Aiass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1028-34. See also Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 15 Cheik Hamidou Kane, LAventure ambigiie (Paris: JuUiard, 1961), p. 137. 16 On suspicion, see “I’ere du soupqon linguistique” (the age of linguistic suspicion), as used by Jacqueline Leiner in Imaginaire-Langage-Identite culturelle (Tubingen: G. Narr, 1980), p. 4. 17 The relevance of the experiences of status inconsistency, role conflict, and consciousness to francophone literary culture in general will be dis¬ cussed at the end of this section, and their particular relevance to the work of Tahar ben Jelloun will be discussed in chapter 3. 18 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 224. Homi Bhabha cites “culture abhors simplification” in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 303. 19 Kai Erikson, Everything in Its Path (New' York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). 20 See Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the phrase “zone of occult stability” in Nation and Narration, p. 303. 21 Charles Baudelaire, CEuvres completes (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1975-76), p. 81. 22 Aime Cesaire, ed. Lilyan Kesteloot (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1962), p. 181. 23 Aime Cesaire, “Lettre a Maurice Thorez,” CEuvres completes, 3:472. 24 Cesaire, Tropiques i, no. 3 (1978): 7. 25 See Michael Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and especially Riffaterre’s discussion of the function of syllepsis in Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni¬ versity Press, 1990), pp. 77-83, 103-10, 131. 26 Leon Gontran Damas, Pigments: Nevralgies (Paris: Editions Presence Africaine, 19^2), p. 43. 27 Ellen Conroy Kennedy, The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Transla¬ tions from the French (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 52. 28 W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), pp. 384-85. 29 Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Foundation of Language 282 Notes to Chapter One in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968). 30 Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” pp. 37-38. 31 The title of a slender volume published in June 1932, Legitime defense, was an intellectually radical manifesto written by a group of Black stu¬ dents in Paris featuring a notice concerning scholarships and financial aid entitled “Noeud coulant” (Slipknot). See Legitime defense (rpt.; Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979), p. 15. 32 See Wauthier, p. 145: “Francesco Nditsouna expressed this militant concern in one sentence: ‘I am not a poet, I want to be a fighter,’ he said at the beginning of his collection, Fleur de lateriteC 33 Leon Gontran Damas, Pohes d’expression frangaise (Paris: Seuil, 1947), p. 13. 34 Wauthier, p. 145. 35 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 47. 36 Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 23. 37 My analysis converges with that of Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva on exile, Homi Bhabha on cultural hybridity, Edward Said on writing and world¬ liness, Michael Seidel on exile and narrative, Leopold Sedar Senghor on metissage culturel, and especially Aime Cesaire in his writings on the nature of language and the act of writing for the linguistically colonized. 38 Leon Laleau, Musique Negre (Editions Parville, 1931). 39 Kennedy, pp. 50-51. 40 Jelloun, “Letter from Europe,” New Yorker, 22 February 1988, p. 92. 41 Louis Morpeau, Anthologie d’un siecle de poesie haitienne 181J-1925 (Paris: Editions Bossard, 1924), p. 218. 42 Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” pp. 17-18. 43 In Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes, Henry Louis Gates Jr. cites the example of Laforest and the trap of language to which he suc¬ cumbed {CriticalInquiry 12 [autumn 1985]: 13). 44 Cesaire, “De Forlonge,” in Corps perdu, CEuvres completes, 1:276. 45 Cesaire, “Le cristal automatique,” in Les Armes miraculeuses, CEuvres completes, i:iio. 46 Cesaire, “Entretien avec Aime Cesaire,” interview by Jacquehne Sieger, Afrique 5 (October 1961): 66. 47 Cesaire, interview with author, November 1982. 48 Hector Bianciotti, Sans la misericorde du Christ (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 42. 49 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Har- court Brace Jovanovich, 1930). Erom “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets (11. 118-20), p. 141. 50 Ibid., The Waste Land ( 11 . 20-24), p. 38. 51 Ibid., The Waste Land ( 11 . 141), p. 50. Notes to Chapter Two 283 52 Cesaire, cited by Georges Ngal, in “Le Theatre d’Aime Cesaire: Une dramaturgie de la decolonisation,” Revue des sciences humaines 35 (1970): 619. 53 Cesaire, Et les chiens se taisaient, in CEuvres completes, 2:71. 54 Cesaire, “Les pur-sang,” in Les Armes miraculeuses, CEuvres completes, 1:90. 55 Cesaire, Et les chiens se taisaient, in CEuvres completes, 2: 60. 56 Cesaire, interview by Rene Depestre, 1967 Cultural Congress of Ha¬ vana, in Poesias (Casa de las Americas, n.d.)- Reprinted in Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 66. S'" Suzanne Cesaire, “Alisere d’une poesie,” Tropiques 4 (January 1942): 50. 58 Cesaire, “L’Homme de culture,” p. 117. 59 Cesaire, Notebook, p. 47. 60 Aime Cesaire, A Tempest, trans. Richard Aliller (New York: LTu Reper¬ tory Theater Publications, 1992). 61 Alarianne Wichmann Bailey, The Ritual Theater of Aime Cesaire (Tubin¬ gen: G. Narr, 1992), p. 35 - 62 Cesaire, cited by Rob Nixon, in “Caribbean and African Appropria¬ tions of the Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 5 (spring 1987): 557-78. 63 For a mapping of the polemics involved in the discussion of Negri- mde, see Abiola Irele, “In Praise of Alienation,” in V. Y. Aludimbe, The Surreptitious Speech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 206, nn. 4, 5. 64 Franfoise Pfaff, Conversations with Maryse Conde (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 114. 65 Cesaire, “Et les chiens se taisaient,” CEuvres completes, 2: p. 59. 66 Cesaire, cited by Francois Beloux in “Un poete-politique, Aime Ce¬ saire,” Magazine litteraire 31 (August 1969): 32. 6'? Cesaire, Notebook, pp. 43, 57. 68 Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 68. 69 Cesaire, “L’Homme de culture,” p. 66. 70 Cesaire, Notebook, p. 69. 2 Toward a Sociology of Humor Leon Gontran Damas and Body Talk 1 Kennedy, pp. 39-60. Kennedy has translated sixteen Damas poems from the most well-known volume. Pigments. WTiere possible I have used her translations; such translations hereafter will be cited to Ken¬ nedy. All other translations of Damas are my owti. Kennedy’s excellent volume on the Negritude poets is out of print. 284 Notes to Chapter Three 2 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 43. 3 Leon Gontxan Damas, Veillees mires (Paris: Stock, 1943), p. 13. 4 Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne: Le Dandy, in CEvres completes, pp. 1177-80. 5 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Poet, in The Collected Poetry (Charlottes¬ ville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 191. 6 Dunbar, We Wear the Mask, in The Collected Poetry, p. 71. 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), fragment 5.6, p. 149. 8 Aime Cesaire, Une Tempete, Act 3, sc. 5. 9 Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 802. 10 Langston Hughes, The Book of Negro Humor (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966), p. vii. 11 Leon Gontran Damas, Black-Label (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), pp. 9, 61. 12 Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, p. 803. 13 Cesaire, “Isidore Ducasse comte de Lautreamont,” Tropiques, 6-7 (Feb¬ ruary 1943): 13. 14 Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 720-21. 15 Rimbaud, Lettre du 13 mai i8ji, in CEuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 268. 3 Counterexertions Theorizing the Francophone Condition 1 Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” p. 21. 2 On this subject of the racially mixed woman it is interesting to compare two francophone novels: La Negresse blanche (1950), by the Martinican female writer Mayotte Capecia, and Metisse blanche (1989), by the Viet¬ namese mixed-blood female writer Kim Lefevre. 3 For a discussion of Rimbaud’s phrase and his use of the “modem,” see Henri Meschonnic, Modernite Modernite, “11 faut etre absolument mo¬ derne”: Un slogan en moins pour la modernite (Paris: Editions Verdier, 1988), pp. 123-27. 4 Aime Cesaire, “Naissances,” in CEuvres completes, 1:283. 5 Aime Cesaire, “Chevelure,” in CEuvres completes, 1:232. 6 Aime Cesaire, “Au-dela,” in CEuvres completes, i: 102. 7 Aime Cesaire, interview with Keith Walker, Fort-de-France, Marti¬ nique, June 1976. Notes to Chapter Four 285 4 Colonialism, Literary Tradition, and Counter story telling 1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 236. 2 For an extended discussion of the etymology of the terms colonialism, decolonialization, and decolonization, see the following texts, which have provided the historical documentation upon which Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture is based: Raoul Girardet, L’idee colo- niale en France 1871-1962 (Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde, 1972); Guy Perville, De Vempire franfais d la Decolonisation. (Paris: Hachette, 1991); Charles-Robert Ageron, La Decolonisation frangaise (Paris: Ar- mand Colin, 1991). 3 Wauthier, p. 131; Perville, p. 9. 4 Ageron, p. 133-34. 5 Ibid., p. 136. 6 Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 137. 8 Ibid., p. 147. 9 Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Priere de Paix,” in Hosties noires (Paris: Seuil, 1948). 10 Wauthier, p. 156. 11 My approach is directly influenced, informed, and shaped by Edward Said’s thinking on colonialism as articulated in his lectures on culture and imperialism at Dartmouth College and his instruction in a seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory. 12 Abiola Irele, “In Praise of Alienation,” in The Surreptitious Speech, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 201-224. 13 Rene Maran, Batouala: An African Love Story, trans. Alexandre Mbou- kou (Maryland: New Perspectives, 1973), p. 12. 14 Jean VaiUant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Leopold Sedar Senghor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 37. 15 Leopold Sedar Senghor, Liberte: Nigritude et hurnanisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 1964), p. 98. 16 Leon-Franfois Hoffmann, Le Negre romantique: Personnage litteraire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot, 1973). The translation of these docu¬ ments is my own. 17 Gobineau, Essai sur I’inegalite des races humaines, pp. 205-6. Also cited in Hoffmann, Le Negre romantique, p. 184. 18 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mamma’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (summer 1987): 68-69. 19 Spillers, pp. xx. 20 Edouard Corbiere, Precis sur la trade des negres, cited in Hoffmann, Le Negre romantique, p. 189. 286 Notes to Chapter Five 21 Cited by the chancellor E. D. Pasquier in his His wire de mon temps, vol. 6 (n.p., 1895), P- 42. Also cited by Hoffmann, Le iVe^re romantique, p. 161. 22 Cesaire, Notebook, p. 47. 23 M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description ... de la partie franfaise de risk Saint-Dominigue (n.p., 1797; reprint, 1958), p. 59. Also cited in Hoffmann, Le Negre romantique, p. 191. 24 G. d’Eichtal and I. Urbain, Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (Pau¬ lin, 1839), pp. 22-23. Also cited in Hoffmann, Le Negre romantique, pp. 203-4. 25 The functioning of this “contrasexuality” in a francophone novel is the focus of my analysis of Tahar ben Jelloun’s Sand Child in chapter 6. 26 Aime Cesaire, La tragedie du Roi Christophe, in CEuvres computes 2, Act II, sc. 2, pp. 154-55. 27 Interview of South African leader E W. de Klerk by Ted Koppel, Feb¬ ruary 14, 1991, which also included this interview. 28 See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993 )- 29 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 38-41. 30 Maran, Batouala: An African Love Story, p. 11. 31 Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, pp. 19-20. 32 Cesaire, La Tragedie du roi Christophe. 33 Mariana Ba, So Long a Letter, trans. Modupe Bode-Thomas (Ports¬ mouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1989), p. 32 (emphasis added). 34 See “Legal Storytelling” (symposium), Michigan Law Review, vol. 87 (1989), 2073. 5 Postscripts Mariama Ba, Menopause, Epistolarity, and Postcolonialism 1 Mariama Ba, Une si longue lettre (Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Afri- caines, 1980), p. 40. 2 Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter, trans. Modupe Bode-Thomas (Ports¬ mouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1989), p. 25. 3 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 46. 4 Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 298. 5 Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduc¬ tion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). While this is not the place for a clini¬ cal discussion of menopause, I feel it proper to present data that support my descriptions of the menopausal woman. Among the many possible sources, I find this text to be the most direct and comprehensive. 6 Martin, Woman in the Body, p. 42. Notes to Chapter Five 287 - Ibid., p. 43. 8 Ibid., p. 51. 9 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 43. 10 Ibid., p. 97. 11 The dangerous “follies” of independence are reinforced in So Long a Letter through a secondary character, Jacqueline, an Ivorian who, against the wishes of her Protestant parents, married a Senegalese and returned with him to Senegal, where she faces ostracism in a largely Catholic and Muslim society'. The rejection pushes her into depression and brings on psychosomatic disorders, fears of insanity, and thoughts of suicide (pp. 41-45). Her case also addresses the demassification of difference among Africans spoken of earlier. The text addresses it di- recdy: coming to Senegal, she found herself in a new world, a world with different reactions, temperament, and mentality from those in which she had grown up. In addition, her husband’s relatives—always the rela¬ tives—were cool tow'ard her because she refused to adopt the Muslim religion and went instead to the Protestant church every Sunday. A Black African, she would have been able to fit without difficulty into a Black African society', Senegal and the Ivory Coast both having experienced the same colonial power. But Africa is diverse and divided. The same country can change its character and outlook several times over from north to south or from east to west (p. 42). 12 Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge; Harvard University' Press, 1983), p. 39. 13 See Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Javano- vich, 1982). 14 The term polygamy is traditionally applied to tribal societies, but in my view the issue of polygamy is of great pertinence in urban and rural America, w'here men have multiple relationships and father children with many partners. 15 Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). 16 Carol Gilligan, “Concepts of Self and xMorality',” in In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 74. 17 With regard to traditional Muslim societies, see Tahar ben Jelloun, La plus haute des solitudes: Misere sexuelle et affective des emigres nord-afri- cains (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977). 18 Gilligan, In a Different Voice, pp. 24-63. 19 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University' Press, 1982). 20 Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Her chapter “Visions of iMaturity'” (pp. 151-74), in particular, addresses the issues in Ba’s text. 21 See Michael Riffaterre, Text Production (New' York: Columbia Univer¬ sity' Press, 1983), p. 12. 288 Notes to Chapter Seven 22 See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer¬ sity Press, 1982), p. 141. 23 See Gilligan, In a Dijferent Voice, pp. 16-17. 24 Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (London: Published for the African Institute by the Ox¬ ford University Press, 1965), p. 642. 6 Moroccan Independence Status Inconsistency, Role Conflict, and Consciousness in Tahar ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child 1 Tahar ben Jelloun, L’Enfant de sable (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), pp. 30-31. The page numbers cited in the text are from this edition. 2 Tahar ben Jelloun, The Sand Child, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: BaUantine Books, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987). The page num¬ bers cited in the text are from this edition. 3 See M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 4 Ibid., p. 290. 5 Ibid., pp. 275-76. 6 Ibid., p. 300. 7 Ibid., pp. 242, 243, 241. 8 Ibid., pp. 300, 304. 9 For an excellent smdy of narrative in The Sand Child that complements my reading, see John D. Erickson, “Veiled Woman and Veiled Narra¬ tive,” Boundary 2 20, no. i (spring 1993): 47-64. 10 For a discussion of “latency” of signification, see Riffaterre, Text Pro¬ duction, p. I2i and for a discussion of a text’s “worldliness,” see Said, The World. 11 Andre Breton, “Notes sur la Poesie,” in La Revolution Surrealiste, No. 12, 15 December 1929. 12 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 190. 13 JeOoun, La plus haute des solitudes, p. 57. 14 Said, Orientalism, p. 25. 1 5 Jelloun, La plus haute des solitudes. 7 The Blossoming of the Undefined Self Ken Bugul and Le Baobab fou 1 Ken Bugul, Le Baobab fou (Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1984). The page numbers in the text for the French quotations refer Notes to Chapter Seven 289 to this edition. Ken Bugul, The Abandoned Baobab, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991). The page numbers cited for the English text are from this edition. 2 See Irele, “In Praise of Alienation,” pp. 201-24. VCTiile Irele does speak of “the pathology of alienation” (pp. 202 and 203), he presents a heroic cultural analysis of alienation. In Irele’s terms Ken could be described as “the archetype of the divided consciousness, of the African who suffers in his mind the effects of cultural dispossession . . . marked by a cleav¬ age rather than an integration of its two frames of reference” (p. 203). This essay has preoccupied and indeed inspired me as I meditated upon the protagonist Ken Bugul and the notion of cultural schizophrenia. In particular, the following insights by Irele on alienation are useful in understanding Ken Bugul’s condition: . . . the notion of alienation as the principle of all becoming or, more simply, as the moHng power of the historical process. In cultural terms, it implies a willed movement out of the self and a purposive quest for new horizons of life and of experience. (P. 215) We need a new determination, a new spirit of adventure fired by a modern imagination: a new state of mind that will enable us to come to terms with our state of alienation and to transform it from a pas¬ sive condition we confusedly endure into an active collective existential project. VC'e need to take charge of our objective alienation by assuming it as an intention so as to endow it with a positive significance. (P. 214) Our historical alienation in the light of these observations: the strik¬ ing thing about our present simation is the discrepancy between the idea of tradition still current among us and the emerging strucmre of reality in which the formnes of our cultural and moral values are now engaged. (Pp. 209-10) Strangers in our own world. It is an illusion to imagine that the prob¬ lem of alienation concerns only intellectuals and the Westernized elite; it is, in fact, a global phenomenon, affecting every single indixidual— in varying degrees it is true, depending upon the particular circum¬ stance of each, but every individual nonetheless. (P. 207) 3 Cesaire, “L’homme de culture,” p. 117. 4 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 54, 77. 5 National Institute of Aiental Health, A National Plan for Schizophrenia Research: Panel Recommendations (Rockville, Aid.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1989), p. 7. 6 Ibid. 7 National Institute of Alental Health, Schizophrenia: Is There an Answer? (Rock\'ille, Aid.: National Institute of xMental Health, Center for Studies of Schizophrenia, 1981), p. 6. 290 Notes to Chapter Eight 8 National Institute of Mental Health, A National Plan, p. 82. 9 See Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” p. 45. 10 National Institute of Mental Health, Schizophrenia: Is There an Answer? p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 9. 12 National Institute of Mental Health, A National Plan, p. 7. 13 Ibid., p. 84. 14 Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” p. 45. 15 Ibid., p. 47. 16 Bianciotti, Sans la misericorde, p. 42. 17 Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit (Paris: Francois Bourin, 1991), p. 28. 8 Words Proffered in Pain Gerard Etienne, Shame, and the Counterconfession 1 Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writ¬ ings ed. by Michael Meyer (New York: Modern Library, 1984), p. 158; emphasis added. 2 Ibid., p. 265. 3 Gerard Etienne, Le Negre crucifie, recit (Montreal: Editions franco¬ phones du Canada, 1974). This book will be cited as Negre in the text. All page numbers cited will refer to this edition. Translations are my own. 4 Gerard Etienne, La Pacotille (Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1991). All page numbers cited will refer to this edition. Translations are my own. 5 My understanding of torture and the way it functions under repres¬ sive regimes is derived primarily from the works of Gerard Etienne. I have found further confirmation in Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 280-89; in “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders: Series C, Affective Intellectual Modifications and Mental Disorders after Torture,” Gilles Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch: Le froid et le cruel {Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty) (New York: G. Braziller, 1971); in Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Mak¬ ing and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 6 Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Press Review, 1972), p. 53. AH further page number ref¬ erences to this text will be cited parentheticaUy after quoted material. 7 Gerard Etienne, Cri pour ne pas crever de honte (Montreal: Poesie/Nou- velle Optique, 1982), hereafter referred to as Cri. 8 See Henry Campbell Black, Black’s Law Dictionary: Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Notes to Chapter Eight 291 Modern, 6th ed. (St. Paul, \linn.; West Publishing Co., 1990). Testa¬ ment: p. 1027; parole: p. 771. 9 Joseph L. White, The Psychology of Blacks: An Afro-American Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice HaU, 1984), p. 189. 10 It would be interesting to trace the fate of this word in Afro-American literary culmre, but uvo examples will suffice. First, one learns in “The fact of Being Black in the Americas” by James W. K'y' {Presence africaine 24-25 [1959]) that in the Americas la pacotille as a term can have a racial meaning as well as an existential dimension concerning precisely the question of identity and, in effect, the fact of being Black: Le celebre ecrivain abolitionniste bresihen Luiz Gama, un muldtre lui-meme, joue habilement sur cette croyance dans ses vers satiriques ou il attaque les sang-meles qui renient leurs origines negres. Dans un sonnet qui ridiculise les pretentions aristocratiques d’un mulatre clair, Gama dit que ce dernier ne peut nier ses origines a cause de son “horrible puanteur” — une vile odeur nauseabonde. Dans un autre poeme, Pacotilha (pacotille), Gama montre a un autre mulatre clair qu’il n’est ni blanc ni noble, en depit de son cou semblable a celui d’un chien a pedigree, car il ne peut pas “se debarrasser de son odeur” — nao perde a catinga. Le plus celebre poeme de Gama, qui fut d’abord intitule Quern Sou Eu? (“Qui suis-je?”) fut bientot communement ap- pele Bodarrada, foule de metis, en raison de la critique mordante qu’il contient a I’adresse des mulatres de teint clair qui cherchent hy-pocrite- ment a prouver qu’Us sont blancs. [The famous Brazilian abolitionist wxiter Luiz Gama, a mulatto him¬ self, in his satirical verses attacks mixed bloods who deny their Black origins. In a sonnet which mocks the aristocratic pretensions of a fair¬ skinned mulano, Gama says that the latter cannot deny his origins be¬ cause of his “horrible smell”—a vile and nauseating odor. In another poem, “Pacotilha” {pacotille), Gama shows another fair-skinned mu¬ latto that he is neither white nor noble in spite of his neck, which is similar to that of a pedigree dog, for he cannot “rid himself of his smell” — nao perde a catinga. The most famous poem by Gama, which was first entitled Quern Sou Eu (WTo Am I?), was commonly called Bodarrada, a crowd of mulattoes, because of the biting criticism it con¬ tained concerning fair-skinned mulattoes who hj-pocritically sought to prove that they were white.] 11 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971)5 P- Ixxxix. 12 Todorov Ducrot, Le Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences du langage (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). See “recit” in Michel Arrive, Franqoise 292 Notes to Chapter Eight Gadet, and Michel Glamiche, La grammaire d’aujourd’hui. (Paris: Li- brairie Flammarion, 1986). 13 Michael Riffaterre, La production du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), PP- 236-48. 14 See Julia Kristeva, Strangers a nous-memes (Paris: Fayard, 1988); and Gerard Miller, Lacan (Paris: Bordas, 1987), chap. 2, “Get autre auquel je suis plus attache qu’a moi.” 15 Eileen Julien,/ 1 /ncan TVotieZs, p. 10. 16 Claude Roy, cover notes for Gerard Etienne, Le Negre crucifie, recit (Montreal: Nouvelle Optique 1974). 17 Leon-Franqois Hoffman, Le Roman Haitien: Ideologic et Structure (Sher¬ brooke, Quebec: Editions Namaan, 1982). 18 On exile see Isabelle Cielens, Trois fonctions de I’exil dans les oeuvres de fiction d’Alhert Camus: Initiation, revolte, confiit d’idenite (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1985). See also Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer¬ sity Press, 1986). 19 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomeno¬ logical Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). By the mere appearance of the Other, I am in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object for it is as an object that I appear to the Other. Yet the object which has appeared to the Other is not an empty image in the mind of another. Such an image, in fact, would be imputable wholly to the Other and so could not “touch” me. I could feel irritation or anger before it as before a bad portrait of myself which gives to my expression an ugliness or baseness which I do not have, but I could not be touched to the quick. Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that lam as the Other sees me. (P. 222) Now, shame ... is shame of self; it is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that ob¬ ject which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object. (Sartre, Being and Nothingess, p. 260) 20 Gerard Etienne, Dialogue avec mon ombre (Montreal: Editions franco¬ phones du Canada, 1972), p. 122. 21 Quoted in Jean Jonassaint, ed., Le Pouvoir des mots, les maux du pouvoir (Montreal: Les Presses de I’Universite de Montreal, 1986), p. 70. 22 See Gerard Etienne, “La Femme noire dans le discours litteraire hai- xim. Presence francophone 18 (spring 1979): 109-26. 23 Gerard Etienne, Gladys (Port-au-Prince: Editions Panorama, 1963). 24 Gaston Bachelard, LAir et les Songes, Essai sur I’imagination du mouve- ment (Paris: Jose Corti, 1965), p. 64. Notes to Conclusion 293 25 Gaston Bachelard, La Poetique de la reverie (Paris: PUF, 1965), p. 69. 26 Gerard Etienne, La Question raciale et raciste dans le Roman quebecois (Paris-Montreal: Balzac-Le Griot, 1995). 2 ~ Gerard Etienne, UInjustice! Disinformation et mepris de la loi (Quebec: Humanitas Circonstances, 1998). 28 Gerard Etienne, La femme noire dans le discours litteraire haitien (Paris- Montreal: Balzac-Le Griot, 1998). Conclusion 1 See Michael Leiris, “Persephone,” in La Regie dti jeu I: Biffures (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1948), pp. 72-127. 2 Cesaire, “Chevelure,” in CEuvres completes, 1:232. 3 Cesaire, “Les Pur-sang,” in CEuvres completes, 1:85. 4 Cesaire, “Re\'ue culturelle. Introduction, Poetes Negres Americains,” Tropiques 2 Quly 1941): p. 37. 5 Anne Hebert, Le Torrent: Nouvelles (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), 26- 27, 28. 6 For a discussion comparing current standards of liGng in independent French West Africa uith those of Martinique, a French department where Cesaire has been mayor of Fort-de-France since the late forties, see Lilyan Kesteloot, “En suivant un roi dans son Oe,” Presence africaine 151-52 (1995): 17- ~ Cesaire, “Presentation,” Tropiques i (April 1941): p. 5. 8 Cited in Aime Cesaire: Une voix pour Vhistoire, prod, and dir. Euzhan Palcy, California Newsreel, 1994, videocassette. 9 Aime Cesaire, Une Saison au Congo (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967); translation by Ralph Manheim, A Season in the Congo (New York: Grove Press, 1969). 10 Achille Mbembe, “Ecrire I’Afrique a partir d’une faille,” Politique Afri¬ caine 51 (October 1993): 86-87. 11 Cesaire, “L’Homme de culture et ses responsabilites,” p. 119. 12 Cesaire, “L’Homme de culture,” p. 118. 13 Aime Cesaire, “Culture et Colonisation,” CEuvres completes 3:435. 14 “InterHew with Aime Cesaire,” Charles Rowell, Callaloo 12, no. i (win¬ ter 1989): 55. 15 See Cesaire, Une voix pour Vhistoire. 16 Ibid. Index The Abandoned Baobab, 5, 173-209; continuity-survival theme, 178- 79; and creative contestation, 5-6; and cultural schizophrenia, 174, 176, 190-92; and exile, 175; exotification-commodification, 198-200; and feminist con¬ sciousness, 196-98; and mad¬ ness, 181-90, 196; and Perse¬ phone m>th, 180, 267-69; and schizophrenia, 174, 190-91; vegetal imagery, 174-75 The Ambiguous Adventure, 27 Arnold, James, 4, 6 Ba, Mariama, 1,3, 13-14, 126, 128; and dynamics of counter¬ storytelling, 124 Le Baobab fou. See The Abandoned Baobab Baobab tree, 29, 96, 267; in The Abandoned Baobab, 173-209; hermeneutics of, 99; mythology of, 96-97; as paradigm of colo¬ nial aggression, 168; as paradigm of colonial revolt, 170-71; as symbol of postcolonial franco¬ phone culture, 97-99 Batouala, 3, 19, 25-26, 123 Battle of Algiers: and torture, 216- 17 Baudelaire, Charles, 2; and the Dandy figure, 73-74; and I’Heautontimoroumenos, 247; and modernist poetic vision, 31-33 ben Jelloun, Tahar, i, 13, 20, 149; and migrant guest workers, 167 Bhabha, Homi: hybridization and alterity, 206 Bianciotti, Hector: and linguistic exile, 52-53, 248 Black Label, 73, 91-92 Black SkinlWhite Masks, 22 “Blues”: and dislocation, 37-38; and liminality resulting from assimilation, 39-40 Body: as organizing principle, 13; as text, 138-42 Borges, Jorge Luis: and intertext in The Sand Child, 159 Bree, Germaine: and lifelines motif, 14 Breton, Andre, 157 Bugul, Ken, 1,13, 173-209 Cesaire, Aime, i, 6-12, 19, 21, 24, 28, 31, 45, 50, 121-22, 276; and African nationalism, 105-6; and alienation, 275; artistic agenda, 9, 56-58, 61-62, 181, 274-76; and the baobab tree, 97-99, 267; and colonialist violence, 123-24, 215-16; and counterhumanism, 270; and countermodernism, i- 2, 10-12; and countermodernist poetic vision, 33-37, 65-66; and dehumanizing effect of colonial¬ ism, 217; and expropriation of French language, 51-52; and Haitian independence, 114; and 296 Index Cesaire, Aime (continued) humor, 90; and madness, 182- 85; and Persephone myth, 267- 70; and postcolonial mutism, 269-70; and postindependence oppressors, 218, 222, 270-72; and rebirth through reinvention of language, 54-57; and social transformation through lan¬ guage, 54-56; and torture, 215- 16; and universal humanism, 10, 64-65 Colonialism: colonial pact, 104- 5; and contrasexuahty, 165-66; dehumanizing elfects, 217; and francophone literature, 103- 25; and French expansionism, 109, history of, 103-8; history of in Morocco, 149; and rhetoric, 109-10, 115-24 Community: as organizing prin¬ ciple, 13 Conde, Maryse: and Heremak- honon, 273; and Negritude, 62 Consciousness: defined, 49, 164; exile and language as producing, 37~495 52-53; and torture, 224- 27. See also Status inconsistency Contrasexuahty: as result of colo¬ nialism, 165-66; in The Sand Child, 151-55; and status incon¬ sistency, 152-55; and transvest¬ ism, 152 Counterconfession, 12, 213-65; and automatic writing, 228-29; defined, 219; hnguistic produc¬ tivity as act of survival, 215, 229-30, 240-42; and narrative, 227-34; and Persephone myth, 270; and testimony, 218-19 Counterhumanism, 270 Countermodernism, 17; and de¬ nunciatory tradition, 12; as mod¬ ulation of modernism, 6, 36-37; and myth, 96-99; relation to francophone literature, 6-7, 12-13, 94-991 source of term, 5 Counterstorytelhng, 12-13, 95 “ 96; and colonialism, 103-25; and counterconfession, 219; defined, 103; dynamics of, 124-25; and Persephone myth, 270 Creoleness: relation to Negrimde, 6-7 Cri pour ne pas crever de honte. See Scream to Keep from Dying of Shame The Crucified Black, Narrative, 214- 15; and counterconfession, 215, 228-29; and death of Christ, 215- 16; and exile, 234-45; and mother figure, 239-42, 247; and shame, 245-48; and torture, 224-27 Cultural braiding, 4, 206; and counterbraiding, 5, 277 n.io Damas, Leon Gontran, i, 6, 13-14, 23, 28, 50; and the Dandy figure, 73-76; and dislocation, 37-40; and the game of slipknot, 67-69; and masks in poetry, 73-76; and poetic method, 76-77; on poli¬ tics and hterature, 43-44; and rejection of French assimilation, 70-73, 77-78 Decolonization, 106-8; madness as, 181-85; and menopause, 128-31; rhetoric of, 128-31 Denunciatory tradition, 2, 12, 19- 24, 26-27; Aime Cesaire and, 3, 21-22; Antenor Firmin and, 19-24; Frederick Douglass and, 213-14; Gerard Etienne and, 4, 213-14; Ken Bugul and, 3-4, Leon Gontran Damas and, 3, 23; Manama Ba and, 2-4; Rene Maran and, 19-20, 26-27; Tahar ben Jelloun and, 4 Discourse on Colonialism, 9, 11-12, 21-22, 27, 215-17, 222 Double-consciousness, 25-27, 40- 41; in The Abandoned Baobab, Index 297 186; and madness, 186; in The Sand Child, 111-72. Douglass, Frederick: and the de¬ nunciatory tradition, 214-15 DuBois, W. E. B.: and double¬ consciousness, 25,40-41 Dunbar, Paul Laurence: masks in poetry, 74 De I’egalite des races humaines. See On the Equality of the Human Races Eliot, T. S., 54 L’Enfant de sable. See The Sand Child On the Equality of the Human Races, 6, 20-21, 24, 115 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 20 L’Essai sur I’inegalite des races hu¬ maines. See Essay on the In¬ equality of the Human Races Edenne, Gerard, i, 13, 19; and counterconfession, 243; and counterstor>telling, 233-34; and denunciatory tradition, 214- 15; and the Etiennian Woman, 248-65; and exile, 234-48; and Mistress Erzulie, 249-51; and shame, 218; writing style, 231-34 Etiennian Woman, 248-65; char¬ acter of, 254; crucified, 257-58; as double, 248, 250, 258-60, 262; as embodiment of utopian society, 255-57; in The Crucified Black, Narrative, 257-58, 260- 62; in Gladys, 254-57; as literary project of liberation, 263-65; and Mistress Erzulie, 249-51, 259; in La pacotille, 259-60, 262; and skin color, 251 Exile: in The Abandoned Baobab, 175; in The Crucified Black, Nar¬ rative, 234-45; language and consciousness, 37-49, 52-53; as organizing principle, 13; and poetic creativity', 238-39; and return trope, 45-47; in The Sand Child, 170; theology of, 234-45 Fanon, Frantz, 22, 156; analy¬ sis of decolonization, 44-45, 127; and colonialist violence, 121-22; and francophone cul- mre, 2, 30-31; and language as alienation, 42-43; and mastery of language as assumption of culture and power, 50-51; and rhetoric of decolonization, 129- 30; sociodiagnostic and cultural schizophrenia, 195 Une Femme muette: and the Etien¬ nian Woman, 248-50 Firmin, Antenor, 6, 115; and antici¬ pation of Negritude, 24; and anticipation of sociodiagnostic, 22; and denunciation of pseudo¬ science, 19-23; and literary criticism, 23-24 Francophone culture: defined, 2 Francophone literary culture: and colonialist racial hierarchies, 110-12, 115-24; and colonialist rhetoric, 109-10; and colonialist violence, 121-24; ^nd denuncia¬ tory tradition, 12, 19; and dis- alienation, 30; early phases, 126- 27; and French language/value system, 29-30; and Haitian independence, 114, 218; and liminality’, 37-40, 46-47, 52; and linguistic expropriation, 29-30; Martinican Narcissus as image of, 6-7; and Persephone myth, 180, 266-76; and the political prisoner, 218-20; relation to colonialism, 108-25; relation to countermodernism, 6-7 12-13, 94-99; relation to modernism, 6-7, 12-13, 93-94; and self- discovery and transformation, 28-29; arid shame, 118-21; and the slave trade, 112-14; and tes¬ tifying, testimony, and moral 298 Index Francophone literary culture {cont.) Kane, Cheik Hamidou, 28 testament as narrative principles, Kristeva, Julia: and demassification 218-20 of difference, 127; and linguistic Francophone literature: approaches productivity, 229; and stranger to, i; and signification, 31 within, 155 The Game of Slipknot, 19, 49- 66; and consciousness, 49; de¬ scribed, 14-15 Garvey, Marcus, 105 de Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur (Count), 20; and pseudoscien¬ tific racial classification, no-12 Goncourt Prize, 19, 20 Hebert, Anne: The Torrent: Nou- velles and the Persephone myth, 267-68 Hoffman, Leon-Frangois: and coloniahst hierarchies, no; on The Crucified Black, Narrative, 234-35 Un Homme pared aux autres. See A Man Like Any Other Man Hughes, Langston: and humor 78-79 Humor; as affirmation of black¬ ness, 91-92; and altering con¬ sciousness, 84-85; and alterity, 90-91; as counterdiscourse, 87-89; dark, 80-82; and double¬ consciousness, 79, 82-84; and indigestion, 69, 79; and laugh¬ ter, 79-83, 86-87; as mockery of Western values, 69, 73, 87; and psychoanalysis, 77-79, 83- 84, 89-91; as self-criticism, 84; as social critique, 69-70; soci¬ ology of, 67-92; as weapon, 80-82, 86. See also Damas, Leon Gontran: and the Dandy figure; and masks in poetry; and rejec¬ tion of French assimilation Insanity. See Madness Irele, Abiola, 109 Lacanian analysis: and significa¬ tion, 41-42 LaForest, Edmond; suicide as sym¬ bol of stranglehold of French language, 49-51 Laleau, Leon, 46-47, 257 Language: exile and conscious¬ ness, 37-49, 52-53; as form of domination, 49-50; redemptive power of, 54; as shared experi¬ ence of colonized peoples, 58; as tool of empowerment, 54- 55; and transformation as social transformation, 57-58, 127 Letter: as art form, 134-35; as feminist art form, 131-35; as symbol of transition, 127 Letter to Maurice Thorez, 19, 105-6 Lifelines: Theorizing Women's Auto¬ biography, 14 Ligue Anti-imperialiste, 105 Ligue de Defense de la Race Negre, 105 Lionnet, Franfoise: and cultural braiding, 4-5 Madness: as aftereffect of colo¬ nialism, 181; in The Abandoned Baobab, 181-90, 196, 209; as cultural bridge, 182-83; as de¬ colonization of the mind, 184, 209; and double-consciousness, 186; as therapy, 183-84 A Man Like Any Other Man, 27 Maran, Rene, 3; and colonial ex¬ pansionism, 109; and colonialist violence, 122-23; double¬ consciousness, 25-27 Marietou, Mariam. See Bugul, Ken Martin, Emily: and rhetoric of menopause, 128-29 Index 299 Martinican Narcissus, 6-7; Echo and cultural schizophrenia, 208-9; 3S signifier of difference, 36-37 Mbembe, Achille: and postcolonial Africa, 273-74 Menopause: and decolonization, 128-31; rhetoric of, 128-31 Michelet, Jules: and colonialist rhetoric, 109-10 iMorocco: history of, 149 Musique negre, 46 National Association for the Ad¬ vancement of Colored People, 105 Nationalism, African, 103, 105 Le Negre crucifie, recit. See The Crucified Black, Narrative Le Negre romantique, 10 Negritude, Cesarian, 6, 24, 58, 24; as affirmation of Blackness, 62-63; as American concept, 9; definition of 9-10; and Haitian independence, 114; as psycho- ana^tic process, 64-65; and social transformation, 63-64 Notebook of a Return to Aly Native Land, 9, 21, 24, 28, 65-66, 184, 193,266 La Nuit sacree, 20 Olney, James: and counterbraid¬ ing, 5 Ourika, 117-20 Ourika (novel), 117-18 Lapacotille, 214, 219-31, 251-52, 259-60, 262-65; and the beast, 221-23; and counterconfession, 229-30; and liberation of Haiti and Haitian woman, 264-65; narrative strategies, 220; paco- tille defined, 220-21; pacotille as used in the Americas, 291 n.io; and postindependence dictators, 221-23; and torture, 224-27 Patriarchy, 165, 168-70 Persephone: and francophone lit¬ erary culture, 266-76; mj-th of, 180 Phillips, Caryl: and double¬ consciousness, 25 Philosophical Dialogues, 20 Pigments, 28, 73, 77-78 Polygamy, 135-38, 287 n.14; and counterpolygamy, 136-42 Por toi et moi, 14, 19, 67-69, 77 Prisoners, political, 214, 218-20; in The Crucified Black, Narrative, 214; in L<3 pacotille, 219-20; and poetic creativity, 238-39 RabearivHo, Jean-Joseph, 28; sui¬ cide as symbol of linguistic dom¬ ination, 50 Renan, Ernest, 20 Riffaterre, Michael, 158; and auto¬ matic writing, 228-29 Role conflict. See Status inconsis¬ tency Roy, Claude: on The Crucified Black, Narrative, 234 La Rue Cases-Negres. See Sugar Cane Alley Said, Edward, 121-22, 130, 156-59 Une Saison au Congo. See A Season in the Congo The Sand Child, 20, 149-72; as analysis of patriarchy, 159-61; autoeroticism and the Other, 154-55; coin motif, 150; and contrasexuality, 151-55, 165- 66; and cultural schizophrenia, 207; double-consciousness in, 171-72; exile in, 170; and guest workers, 162-68; impotence as metaphor for postcolonial Mah- grebi society, 161 -62; intertext, 158-59; and latent textuality, 157-61; and liminality, 156; nar¬ rative strategies, 149, 155-57; and nature of truth, 149-50; and 300 Index The Sand Child {continued) patriarchy, 165, 168-70; and relation to Orientalism, 156- 57; and ritual, 150-52; social text, 165, 168; and status incon¬ sistency, 152-55, 162-65; and transvestism, 152, 156 Schizophrenia, 174: in The Aban¬ doned Baobab, 190-96, 202-5, 208; etiology of, 192-94; ety¬ mology of, 193; reactive, 205; and suicide-rebirth, 202-5, 208. See also Schizophrenia, cultural Schizophrenia, cultural, 167: and The Abandoned Baobab, 194- 96, 202-9; constructive, 208; destructive, 209; and exile, 202- 4; and migrancy, 206-8, 287 n.i i; as result of assimilation and alienation, 190-92, 289 n.2; as result of colonialism, 174, 176; and sociodiagnostic, 195; in So Long a Letter, 287 n.i i Scream to Keep from Dying of Shame, 19, 229, 245; exile and alientation, 242-45; and Hai¬ tian postindependence, 218; and liberation of Haiti and Haitian woman, 263-64; and power of the word, 235-36 A Season in the Congo, 218, 266, 271-72 Sembene, Ousmane, 105 Senghor, Leopold Sedar, 50; and ambivalent colonized subject, 107-8; and colonialist rhetoric, 109-10 Serres, Michel; and metissage culturel, 5, 206-7 Shame, 29, 196; and counter¬ confession, 213, 245-48; and Haitian postindependence, 218; and the Other, 292 n.19 Une si longue lettre. See So Long a Letter Slipknot, 2, I 4 -I 5 > 19 , 26, 34-355 49-51, 67-69, 94, 173, 198, 209, 271, 282 n.31 Smith, Valerie: and balance of cultural variables, 2 Societe des Nations, 103, 105 So Long a Letter, 124, 126, 128, 130- 31; and body as text, 138- 142; as counter to polygamy, 136-42; and epistolary form, 131- 35; and polygamy, 135-38; and Riffaterrian depth of surface, 142- 43; and self-determination, 143- 45 5 . O. S'., 81-82 Spillers, Hortense: and the slave trade legacy, 112 Status inconsistency, 152-55, 162- 65; and cultural schizophrenia, 207; defined, 165 Sugar Cane Alley, 27 A Tempest, 19, 58-62, 77 Torture: mental defenses, 226- 27; purposes and goals, 224-26; scream as symbol, 224 The Tragedy of King Christophe, 109; and expropriation of Ourika figure, 118-20; and postindepen- dence dictators, 218 Transvestism, cultural: and assimi¬ lation, 47-49; in The Sand Child, 152 Union des Travailleurs Negres, 105 Whitewashed, 84-85 The Wretched of the Earth, 30-31 Wynter, Sylvia: sociodiagnostic and cultural schizophrenia, 195; and unified theory of culture, 2 Xala, 105, 128; and polygamy, 135-36 Zaourou, Bernard Zadi, 271 Zobel, Joseph, 27 Keith L. Walker is Associate Professor of French and Italian, and Chair of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth CoOege. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker, Keith. Countermodernism and francophone literary culture: the game of slipknot / Keith L. Walker, p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8223-2110-6 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8223-2143-2 (pkb. : alk. paper) I. French literamre—French-speaking countries — History and criticism. 2. xModernism (Literature) 3. Blacks in Literature. I. Title. pQ3897.\V35 1999 840.9'! 12 —dc2i 98-49702