Speaking Self into Significance: Male vs. Female Strategies in Les derniers rois mages

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY SPEAKING SELF INTO SIGNIFICANCE: MALE VS. FEMALE STRATEGIES IN LES DERNIERS ROIS MAGES CATHARINE RANDALL Peut-être l’ascendance maternelle est-elle aussi importante que la paternelle? (179) IN 1790, the Census revealed that of 11,500 inhabitants of Guadeloupe, 9,400 were slaves. When slavery was abolished in 1848, the newly-freed men and women received nothing but a family name – the fraught and ironic patronym of their master. Naming is claiming, and such onomastics continued to exert an enslaving control, since any genealogical research before or after the date of manumission was thereby effectively blocked, any other identity that had belonged to the slave now freeman having been effaced by the superscription of the master’s family name. Paul del Perugia has recently described this phenomenon as one of ‘oubli,’ both in reference to the forgotten kings of the Tutsi kingdom, as well as to individuals programmatically deprived by the institution of slavery of sense or significance (del Perugia 1). Nonetheless, in Les derniers rois mages, Maryse Condé invents a technique through fiction to confer pride and identity on a people denied both for far too long. This presentation will examine her deployment of manifold, sometimes opposing, “histories”, offering textual examples of each and demonstrating the ultimate resolution of this kaleidoscope of variants and versions into a new identity. However, it is not enough to work with the issue in a totalizing sense, as others have, averring that les différents personnages qui, dans les romans [de Maryse Condé], tentent d’écrire ou de raturer l’Histoire sont les acteurs d’histoires dont la totalité rassemblée forme, évidemment , l’Histoire d’une collectivité. (Degars 6) YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 207 While other critics have noticed the multiplicity of stories or examined the problem of the obstacle that oubli poses to self-knowing or to ethnic identity, they have not differentiated between the gendered approaches to this problem. This paper will show that male and female approaches to the historical lacuna differ greatly. “History is written by the winners,” runs the aphorism. And that is even more the case when the “losers” have been deliberately placed sous rature, marginalized for generations, denied identity, refused official status. Priska Degras observes that nombre de romans caraïbes francophones sont investis, à des degrés divers, de cette obsession ancienne: le poids de l’Histoire et le gouffre, affolant, de son opacité. Cette Histoire inconnue, niée ou travestie, subie, immanquablement douloureuse, s’est fondée sur une violence première: l’esclavage dont le “souvenir impossible” continue de hanter les consciences. (Degras 1) In Les derniers rois mages, Maryse Condé uses a strategy much like that in Moi, Tituba sorcière:1 she seeks to redress the historical wrong done to a race and a people by substituting the discourse of the “loser” for the discourse of the “winner.” Alterity thereby achieves its own sort of authorship. Just as Tituba managed to get a hearing for her black and female voice despite the loud distortion of Salem ministers and judges, in Les derniers rois mages characters like Djéré struggle through centuries of repressed or forgotten ancestral memory to craft their own life story. In Les derniers rois mages, Condé again asks the question, “How can the history of a person belonging to a race, a country, never before judged worthy of being ‘historiated,’ be written?” Her project is further complicated by the African diaspora: not only are there multiple versions of occulted histories, but there are also manifold sources for those stories, veritable archipelagos of shattered racial syntax: Guadeloupe, Martinique, South Carolina, North Carolina, the Gullah Islands, St. John’s Island, Crocker Island (where the novel begins and ends). In this regard, Mireille Rosello has identified a “metaphorized relationship between geography and identity.” Rosello, however, is specifically speaking of the writer’s construction of identity, something Condé has cobbled together from her own dispersed ‘insularized’ selves (the term is Rosello’s; Rosello 2), while my project here is to discuss how the author’s characters and entire fictive 208 ROMANCE NOTES 1 Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba sorcière. Paris: Mercure de France, 1986. project use strategies of self-construction (and, co-incidentally...