Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean by Louise Hardwick (review)

Louise Hardwick’s study considers the genre of the francophone Caribbean childhood memoir, or récit d’enfance, which rose to prominence during the 1990s but, as the author shows in Chapter 1, actually builds on century-long literary traditions in Antillean fiction of writing both autobiographically and about childhood. Although, in generic terms, the development of this tradition is blurred around the edges, with poetry, prose, and nonfiction contributing towards the growth of literary interest in the francophone Caribbean childhood, the problem of genre remains fundamental to Hardwick’s study, and a number of theoretical perspectives, including Philippe Lejeune’s Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) and Serge Doubrovsky’s concept of ‘autofiction’, are productively brought to bear on the central corpus. The book’s principal strength lies in its close reading of the memoirs themselves: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une enfance créole (1990), Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour (1993) and Le Cahier de romances (2000), Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (1999), Daniel Maximin’s Tu, c’est l’enfance (2004), Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia (1996), and two volumes of Haitian-born Dany Laferrière’s Autobiographie américaine (1991, 1997). Hardwick addresses a number of recurrent postcolonial problems alongside literary questions of genre and the ‘friction between memory and imagination’ (p. 68), identified as one of the central tenets of the récit d’enfance. These include colonial alienation, considered through the theoretical lens of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952); the unequal linguistic position of Creole in the Caribbean; and race, socioethnic categorization, and métissage. A final chapter deals with the Caribbean family, including the recurrent tropes of the absent father, and the grandmother as primary carer of the child. As Hardwick notes, these texts share many commonalities with their anglophone Caribbean counterparts, and the analysis could be extended productively within a regional comparative framework, as it is already enriched by the inclusion of a Haitian author. Running throughout Hardwick’s analysis of this Caribbean corpus is the enduring shadow of slavery and the plantation past. This manifests itself variously through haunting scenarios such as the role-played abuse of the child narrator in Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, adults’ silence, and, much more rarely, their attempts to explain the inexplicable. Through her sustained critical attention to the pivotal ‘scene of recognition’, or moment of realization of the slave past that silently surrounds the world of the young protagonists, Hardwick shows that this unspoken collective trauma has a fundamental impact on narrative renditions of Caribbean childhoods. While childhood memoirs are very often viewed as narratives that focus on the individual coming-of-age story, Hardwick offers new insight into the collective character of francophone récits d’enfance by Caribbean authors, demonstrating persuasively that the ongoing narrative impact of slavery cannot be elided.