When One Drop Isn't Enough: War as a Crucible of Racial Identity in the Novels of Mayotte Capecia

By now, Frantz Fanon's (in)famous attack on Mayotte Capécia as a "mudslinging storyteller" who betrays her race with a white man has been widely criticized as revealing a troubling gender bias in his seminal work, Black Skin, White Masks. Susan Andrade states that Fanon's anger at Capécia's "whitening of the race" is merely "a mirror-reversal of the miscegenation anxieties of the colonial white men" (220); Gwen Bergner argues that Fanon treats women as commodities, the means of mediation between black and white men, ironically recreating "the structure of colonialist discourse" he seeks to deconstruct (83); and Jennifer Sparrow and Maryse Condé both argue that Capécia simply describes the social reality of the racial hierarchy prevalent in the Antilles and that Fanon punishes her for telling a culturally accurate, albeit disturbing, story—a story that reflects exactly the same insecurities and destructiveness that Fanon exposes in Black Skin, White Masks (Sparrow 180, Condé 131). In a similar context, critics also focus on the themes of racial identity and miscegenation in Capécia's work, usually in relation to later writers such as Michèle Lacrosil, Jacqueline Manicom, and Maryse Condé.¹ What has been ignored, to date, is the importance of the specific historical context of Capécia's novels, as Beatrice Stith-Clark acknowledges in the foreword to her recent translation of the novels (xi). The second half of Je suis Martiniquaise and all of La Négresse blanche are set during the Second World War when Admiral Robert, a Vichy naval officer, controlled the island; a full understanding of these historical details is crucial to any analysis of Capécia's work. This time period, known in Creole as Tan Robé, was a critical moment in Martinique's history that caused the shift away from the idealization of white culture toward the acceptance of the values of négritude. For the majority of the black population, this was a profound moment of community redefinition that exposed the lie behind the promise of assimilation—that black Martinicans were just as "French" as the "French French"—but, as seen in Capécia's novels, for the woman of color, and particularly for a woman of color with children fathered by a white man, this change was somewhat more complicated than simply embracing one's African heritage. The communal rejection Capécia's heroines face for bearing the sons of white men mirrors Fanon's condemnation of her, but, at the same time, her characters' "punishment" is also a critique of négritude and of the gendered double standard so often seen in community-identity politics.

Je Suis Martiniquaise, published in 1948, traces the life of an Antillean woman named Mayotte, beginning with her birth and ending with her flight from the island shortly after the war.² Born and raised in a village, she describes herself as "colored" (of "mixed" race or métisse) and as a high-spirited tomboy who enjoys a carefree childhood (8).³ Initially, she seems not to exhibit racial shame. When a white boy insults her, Mayotte throws an inkwell at him, her "way of transforming whites into blacks" (9). She states that she "had no prejudices" and that she happily played with both black and white children (9). These assertions, however, are undercut as Mayotte begins to demonstrate the desire for whiteness that permeates her society. Although she does not allow whites to disparage her blackness, even as a child, she herself prefers white skin, blue eyes, and blond hair over her own dark skin, hair, and eyes. She admires the Jesuit priest not only because the entire village respects and defers to his authority but also because he is "young, tall, very blond, very handsome" (22). To Mayotte, all that is "good," powerful, and respectable is white. She is shocked when she watches the U.S. film Green Pastures in which God and the angels are portrayed as black: "How can God be conceived with Negro features? That's not...