Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Cesaire, Glissant, Conde (review)

In Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé, Jeannie Suk examines the debate over the concept of postcoloniality, placing what has largely remained a phenomenon of anglophone postcolonial studies within the context of the francophone literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Following an introductory chapter that examines the content of this debate and its relevance to the French Antilles, the author examines in successive chapters Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Edouard Glissant's Discours antillais, and, in the course of three chapters, the fiction of Maryse Condé.

In the author's introduction, Suk rapidly surveys the reception of De Manian literary theories of allegory in postcolonial thought (Homi Bhaba, Christopher Miller, Fredric Jameson). Suk emerges from this critical survey to formulate the work's underlying query: whether it is "possible to read postcolonial literature as preoccupied with allegory, without neatly projecting its alterity on to a nostalgic annulment of postcolonial discontinuity" (17). Thus the "paradox" at the heart of Suk's study lies in the author's willful appropriation of "postcolonial" critique from anglophone literary studies: the continuing neocolonialism of the French Overseas Departments, the uninterrupted (though certainly variable) four centuries of political domination of French Antillean colonialism up to the present day, in its very blatancy, demands a "practice of reading that accentuates the commonality of the problems that arise from colonialism, its aftermath, and continuation" (19).

An examination of Césaire's Cahier follows this introduction, examining this protean text's reinscriptions and transformations of the literary trope of the voyage ("Crossings, Returns") "that both constitutes a nostalgic quest for something lost and figures poetic activity" (24). Suk provides an overview of the poem's critical reception, then moves to a reading that describes how "Césaire's self-conscious effort to recover an original authenticity to be found in his Antillean and even more alienated African roots confronts the legacy of European exoticism that projected a distant elsewhere as a realm of return to primal rejuvenation and wholeness" (31). Suk examines various intertexts that serve to illuminate Césaire's poetic voyage (Baudelaire's "Parfum exotique," Mallarmé's "Brise marine," Breton's narrative "Martinique charmeuse de serpents"), to conclude that the Cahier'sradical novelty necessarily operates in critical relation to such precursors and contemporary voices as it engages the trope of the voyage (36). In its paradoxical status as a poetic document that seeks to construct an elusive Antillean identity, the Cahier serves, in Suk's reading, to render the inherent tension between aesthetic object and history (55).

Glissant's Discours antillais refocuses Antillean postcolonial experience, in Suk's reading, via a self-reflexive critique of the quest for authenticity initiated in Césaire's Cahier (57). Figured as a "space of discontinuity" that actually generates historical consciousness, Suk probes the recuperation of history in its political and literary dimensions. Suk examines Glissant's critique of the Césairien "teleology of return" (58) via the concept of relation. Glissant finds the loss of history to operate through the mechanisms of communal trauma (61), and in this light, the Antillean literary focus on the "return" becomes a veritable return of the repressed. Glissantian détour in turn offers the means to resist colonial hegemony via a strategic outflanking, at once linguistic, historical, and political (64-67). As a "renunciation of logocentrism," Suk takes the détour to put into play serial supplementarity, deferral, and displacement (67). In tracing the operational similarity between Freud's model of trauma (Moses and Monotheism) and that of Glissant, Suk shows with remarkable clarity and originality that Glissantian rememoration functions via delayed insight: traumatic events such as Louis Delgrès' 1802 rebellion are only truly understood in the moment of their (postponed) representational reconstruction, rather than amid the immediate shock of their original occurrence (77). Suk closes her analysis with a penetrating interrogation of Glissant's celebration of this Antillean mnemonic deferral: does Glissant...