Creoles Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora by Bénédicte Boisseron (review)

Bénédicte Boisseron’s Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora is an engaging, masterful, and multi-layered analysis of writers whose relationship to a Caribbean identity remains ambivalent despite—or because—of their literary acclaim. Six primary figures anchor Boisseron’s study: Anatole Broyard, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, Jamaica Kincaid, and V. S. Naipaul. Boisseron calls these authors “Creole renegades” because they “have ceased to write either from or to the metropolitan center; they have also ceased to write at home in the restricted sense of ‘home’ as a native place; and they have even ceased to write within the collective consciousness of the external frontier of the Caribbean” (8). In other words, these authors situate themselves within a Pan-American context, and strive to produce an individual sense of self rather than to articulate a collective Caribbean identity. Boisseron’s book traces how and why this defection takes place in their writing, what it means for how Caribbean literature defines itself, and what it can offer to diaspora studies.

The introduction assembles Boisseron’s theoretical framework, notably her deployment of C.L.R. James’s term renegade to designate a figure acting from a place of simultaneously imposed and chosen isolation. She notes the Caribbean diaspora’s increasingly fractal and transient nature, arguing that the underlying possibility of return not taken is what foments the diasporic subject’s ambivalent relationship towards “home.” In the subsequent chapters, Boisseron proposes many ways in which her six authors embody Creole renegade writing; what links them all as renegades, however, are narrative gestures of passing and of positioning. And this is one of the more subtle threads in Boisseron’s complex (mé)tissage of arguments—that the renegade’s defection is embedded in the narrative context of the act.

The first chapter pivots around Anatole Broyard, an acclaimed literary critic from a Louisiana Creole family who passed as white during his adult life. Boisseron explores not the act of passing but its representation, perception, and telling—its narratization—through Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Bliss Broyard’s textual “outings” of Anatole Broyard. By weaving in a detailed semantic history of the word “Creole,” Boisseron furthermore links passing to Creoleness itself, arguing that “Creole is that which will adjust and adapt to circumstances and, like a chameleon, will pass in a chosen environment” (35). Thus, it is not a relationship to race as much as a particular relationship to place—a relationship of noncommittal and opportunistic acclimatization—that will define one mode of Creole renegade authorship.

Chapter Two delves into Maryse Condé’s oeuvre, particularly Histoire de la femme cannibale’s heteroglossic narration—“intrusive, gossipy, and overbearing, so much so that it cannibalizes the voice of its creator”—along with the atmosphere of autobiographical speculation that Condé invites into the interpretation of her texts (83). Condé, Boisseron argues, inextricably links coming out and coming home in the Caribbean by emphasizing their semantic impossibility; coming out and coming home are gestures that can exist only in speculation, not in actualization. In the sedentary, territorialized culture of the Caribbean, a native cannot return as a native, only as a débarqué (Frantz Fanon’s fresh returnee). Similarly, homosexuality can only exist through narrative speculation, in the figure of the macoumé (presumed homosexual), because if homosexuality is said to be foreign in the Caribbean, “speculating and joking about it are not” (67). Condé’s writing, by implicitly linking the débarqué and the macoumé, turns away from the rooted imagery of a Caribbean identity, insisting instead on “the price of leaving, the price of—in all its polysemy—being out” as well as the “failed attempts to go home” (88, 89).

Chapter Three explores testimonial writing, particularly that of Haitian writers Dany Laferrière and Edwidge Danticat, and its narrative context of emission. Here, Boisseron looks at how these...