Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean, and: La poétique du renversement chez Maryse Condé, Massa Maka Diabate and Edouard Glissant (review)

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

Mary Gallagher has lucidly treated the prevalence of autobiography in French Caribbean literature in her wide-ranging study Soundings in French Caribbean Writing since 1950, to which there is, surprisingly, no reference in Larrier’s study. In approaching autobiography through the place of memory in French Caribbean Writing, she demonstrates the importance of witnessing in establishing a collective past in French Caribbean Departments, where the uniqueness of their plantation past is always threatened by the official French policy of forgetting. Driven by a “devoir de mémoire,” autobiography becomes a way of resisting the realities of power and authority in the French Departments. The preference among writers as diverse as Joseph Zobel, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Gisèle Pineau for the novel of childhood in particular reveals the extent to which a preoccupation with questions of belonging, origins, and voicing erased subjectivities is crucial to French Caribbean identity politics.

The title of Larrier’s study of autobiography, Autofiction and Advocacy in Francophone Caribbean, immediately points to the crucial link between textuality and politics. Autobiography is a site of resistance that interrogates, unmasks, and dismantles those discourses that are complicit in the colonialist enterprise. The title would also suggest that Larrier is aware of the problematic nature of the genre of autobiography by using the term “autofiction,” which suggests the hybrid nature of the medium. However, Larrier is not concerned with definitions or postcolonial readings of autofiction. She is concerned with the performative dimension of autobiography, or rather the extent to which the text is akin to performance, in this case the mock combat ritual of danmié or laghia, in which one “fights without landing blows.” Her task, she explains, “is to apply the combat dance’s principles of narration, initiation, challenge, confrontation etc.” to the works of four novelists: Joseph Zobel, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Gisèle Pineau. One is never sure exactly what makes the principles of mock combat particularly suited to francophone Caribbean writing as opposed to any other. In any case, we never get a thorough application of the principles of danmié to any of the author studies. There is no more than the occasional sentence that claims but does not demonstrate that a particular writer is practicing a form of indirect literary combat. In any case, is it not a truism to claim that the language of literature is invariably indirect in situations where political options are few and explicitness becomes a futile exercise in rhetoric?

It, of course, can be useful to use Caribbean ritual to explain certain literary projects. For instance, Zobel surely suggests in La rue cases nègres that the grieving José at the end of the novel uses...