Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel (review)

Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel, by H. Adlai Murdoch. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001. xi + 290 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1835-8

The history of departmentalization, which is the constitutionally sanctioned process by which the former French colonies in the Caribbean became administrative divisions or "departments" of France in 1946, shapes H. Adlai Murdoch's discussion of creole identity in the French Caribbean novel. This process resulted in the granting of French citizenship to the people of Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, and Réunion. The author, focusing on the cultural, political, and historical repercussions of departmentalization, carefully explores the paradox and ambiguities that emerge from this double positionality in important novels of the French Caribbean canon. Drawing from the complex historical relationship between France and the Caribbean, Murdoch succeeds in analyzing the cultural, political, and theoretical threads of influential literary developments in twentieth-century Caribbean intellectual history. This starting point of double positionality is extremely useful because it facilitates a nuanced reading and interpretation that this body of literature demands and deserves.

Murdoch's apt evocation of the differing contextualizations of terms such as "métissage," "creole," "antillanité," and "créolité" enables the reader to understand the meanings of these concepts and to make sense of their racial, cultural, and historical shifting. For instance, to explain the definitions of creole and "the play of difference that the term implies," he writes: "[A] creole subject or culture may be black or white, African, Caucasian, or East Asian, colonial or metropolitan, or, for that matter, the product of myriad ethnic and linguistic influences and origins" (4). The multiplicity of the term creole reflects the various literary movements, theoretical approaches, and historical periods that inform its definitions; this plurality of meanings underlies the author's close textual analysis of La lézarde by Edouard Glissant, En attendant le bonheur (Hérémakhonon) by Maryse Condé, L'autre qui danse by Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie, L'isolé soleil and Soufrières by Daniel Maximin, and Solibo Magnifique by Patrick Chamoiseau.

Weaving these six individual narratives into the larger project of examining the conceptualization of creole identity, the author delicately balances the specificity of each novel with the universality of his theoretical claims. Each text explores the dynamics of colonialism, gender, race, and creole identity within its own narrative vision and places its distinctive emphasis on these dynamics. This fine, thoughtful analysis of the French Caribbean novel invites the reader to understand French-Caribbean history as one framed by intermediacy and contradiction and to situate questions of identity evoked in this body of literature in the interstitial spaces between varied and shifting positions, that is, the semantic, cultural, and political boundaries between slave and subject, between a colonized subject and a citizen, and between Caribbean and French.

In addition to the few typographical errors, Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel contains five chapters wherein six novels are analyzed, not five as the Introduction states. Moreover, while Clarisse Zimra wrote the introduction to the English translation of Daniel Maximin's Isolé soleil, Nidra Poller translated the novel.