The Disengaged Immigrant: Mapping the Francophone Caribbean Metropolis

As an exemplary locus of crosscultural contact, the city offers fertile ground for theories of hybridity, transnationalism, and globalization. Today's metropolis signals the transformative and transforming identifications, the new axes of belonging and exclusion, and the reconfiguring of national and regional borders occurring across the globe, while at the same time occupying a privileged role as the quintessential space of transnationalism. Recent work on postcolonial urban spaces has foregrounded the incidence of the immigrant in these transformations: emblem of the era's mass migrations, this cultural outsider is paradoxically of the new global city, fundamentally changing the fabric of the metropolis through the crosscultural exchange his or her inscription in urban daily life embodies.¹ The productive encounters generated by these intersections thus reveal a dependence on the figure of the immigrant, a need for both the presence and the dialogical engagement of the exogenous city dweller in the construction of a transnational metropolitanism. This essay seeks to examine the particular terms of this engagement through a consideration of two recent novels of Francophone Caribbean migration: Marie-Célie Agnant's La Dot de Sara (1995) and Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia (1996).

As contributions to the growing canon on Francophone Caribbean exile in Western metropolitan settings, these novels recall inaugural voices such as Césaire's and Fanon's as well as later works by Michèle Lacrosil, André and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, and Joseph Zobel.² While Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia reflects a recurrent preoccupation with the autobiographically inflected subject of French metropolitan exile, La Dot de Sara is Agnant's first novel and effects a Haitian-Canadian displacement of this Parisian setting in the tradition of Dany Laferrière and Emile Ollivier.³ Amongst these myriad evocations of the exiled outsider, La Dot de Sara and L'Exil selon Julia offer a uniquely sustained focus on the figure of the Caribbean grandmother: each novel narrates immigration as the experience of a reluctantly displaced ancestor. Agnant's Marianna, responding to an urgent summons from her daughter, moves from Haiti to Montreal to help care for her newly born granddaughter, while the eponymous Julia of Pineau's narrative is forcefully removed from her native Guadeloupe by her military son who believes he is rescuing her from an abusive husband by taking her with his own family to live in Paris.

By anchoring the primary account of exile to the highly connotative figure of the Caribbean grandmother, Agnant and Pineau thus present the moment of crosscultural contact not only as a confrontation between differing racial, linguistic, and national affiliations but also as a juxtaposition of urban and rural sensibilities. Indeed, each author mines the space between urban and rural established by these settings to explore the critical role played by the immigrant not only in generating the transnational city but also in endorsing a reading of it as such. Michel de Certeau's reflections on metropolitan textual models provide a way of delineating the particular urban practices of these Caribbean grandmothers as strategies that transform both the city space and its attendant metaphors of reading and writing, bringing attention to the immigrant's own vision of the city as a crucial but overlooked factor in new configurations of urban space. The recalcitrant Julia of Pineau's novel in particular raises the possibility of resistance to the city's designated role by refusing to engage physically or ideologically in the project of crosscultural production. Ultimately this critical stance underlines the disavowed limits of the transnational urban vision while at the same time it offers a comparative and more ideologically pertinent assessment of the urban landscape, a reading of urban space whose scope is as global as the city itself.

I. Urban Practices

Michel de Certeau's L'Invention du quotidien has garnered attention in postcolonial criticism thanks primarily to its salient distinction between the "strategies" employed by institutional and structural powers and the "tactics" of individuals who negotiate their own unsanctioned trajectories through these structures. While de Certeau's particular inscription of this analysis in an assessment of the...