Beyond “The Drama of Consciousness” and Against the “Drama of the Manifesto”: Poetic License and the Creolist Discourse

The purpose of this essay is to discuss how the concept of créolité can be currently tied to the socio-cultural realities of Martinique (as well as of Guadeloupe and Guiana), and to the developments of their political landscape. To what extent can theory and poetics really affect the everyday culture and politics in Antillean and Caribbean communities? This rapport was briefly dealt with in the creolist manifesto’s appendix as at once a philosophical, poetic, and utilitarian matter. What role does the genre of the manifesto play in the possibility of effecting sociopolitical change?

For indeed, in 1989, créolité was a new self-reflexive method for three Martinican authors (as Antilleans or Caribbeans) in the search for the meaning of their place and the place of their culture in the world. Créolité was also a concept that formulated a principle of representing this cultural identity via its social and poetical forms. In Praise of Creoleness, the manifesto that gave birth to this widely discussed concept, was Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s collaborative effort to describe the heterogeneous character of Caribbean cultures and societies in addition to the phenomenon and processes at the root of their diversity. The genre of the manifesto had both provided a base for this act of writing and also very craftily allowed the coauthors to avoid what Wilson Harris, describing what inevitably accompanied the dual positioning of the Caribbean writer, calls the “drama of consciousness” (48). This is because, through the form of the manifesto, Praise exposes its coauthors’ desire to locate their voices within a collectivity of ideas (pertaining to an intellectual community, notably) of which the creolist manifesto itself became both a generative source (but not the only source) and a generated product.

In this essay, I thus determine how the creolist manifesto was apt to make an impact on Martiniquan society. The creolists’ rhetoric certainly sounded exalted, but it was based on their vision of all the aspects it might penetrate, from the étant to the cultural and societal, “langage” / “speech,” and of course “langue” / “language.” They believed that the Creole language was the most authentic expression of their being, as well as a means of keeping their affiliations intact while putting forth a vision of hope for Caribbean cultures and societies through art. The question of the Caribbean Creole artist and writer’s role in society must thus be addressed. The word “Creole” in that sense could also have political implications. The dramatic overtone of the creolists’ discourse that the genre of the manifesto at once authorizes, supports, and sets forth also contained an invitation to dedramatize, which has consistently been neglected by créolité’s detractors. Beyond poetical and rhetorical performance, Praise called for human action and, in order to promote their movement and best serve the implementation of their vision, the creolists encouraged Martiniquan artists to integrate all the cultural components deemed capable of influencing the destiny of both their movement and of Martinique.