"Devoured by Writing": An Interview with Gisèle Pineau

This interview was conducted on June 14, 2006, in the writer's Paris apartment.

LOICHOT: In your novels that deal with exile, specifically Un Papillon dans la Cité and L'Exil selon Julia, the acts of tasting, eating, and cooking are fundamental to preserve or to recreate a link with the Caribbean. Could you say a few words on the importance of food for Caribbean exiles? The example of Félicie, in L'Exil selon Julia, who recreates the Antilles in her dish of lentils, comes to mind.

PINEAU: I wanted to tell you that when I was a child in Paris, my mother received packages from the Caribbean. Her mother sent her spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla, and my mother tried to recreate dishes from the land of Guadeloupe with these spices. So, Creole spices are indeed very, very prevalent in my works. You mentioned little Félicie who tries to recreate her land in her dish. As a child, I maintained a link with Guadeloupe by working with bland French food, trying to give it a taste of home; just like Creole language, I think it's very similar. My grandmother was the only one who spoke Creole, and that gave us a taste of the land, of the flavors of the land, the scents of the land.

LOICHOT: You talk about "bland food." I noticed that French food often appears to be dead in your novels. You talk about "chocolate éclairs that look like dead phalluses" in Chair Piment.

PINEAU: I do? [laughter] But it's not actually true because I love French cuisine, like all other cuisines. I'm really very curious about world cuisines. French food is not at all bland, but in the Caribbean, we always season meals with a lot of chili pepper, a lot of spices, a lot of aromas, a droplet of rum even in kids' puddings! Creole cuisine creates deep links to the island. When Antilleans prepare Creole dishes here, it's a way for them to maintain a relationship with the land, and I think that cooking allows one to plant roots in the land, even for those who can't travel often or can't go back home every year. Thanks to the cuisine, they call themselves Creole.

LOICHOT: Do the senses of taste and smell bring about different memories from that of photographs?

PINEAU: Smells . . . I am a writer who works with all my senses. I don't think I am a purely cerebral writer. I need to smell all the scents, to feel all sensations in order to write. Therefore, I think that in my novels, words are a little bit like fruit. I relish words. I mix words like when I cook, I mix words like spices, I always try to give them a slight Creole touch. Smells are very important. When I arrived in Guadeloupe—I don't have much recollection of my first trip at age four—but my second visit in 1970 was an explosion of sensations that stimulated me intensely. There were strongly scented, very colorful markets. It was very far from anything I had experienced in France because when we lived in that Parisian suburb, everything was very grey, we wore navy-blue skirts, white shirts. It was blue, black, and grey.

LOICHOT: You evoke a poverty of colors.

PINEAU: But there must have been colors somewhere because in the summer, there were colors, which I must have forgotten. Do you remember the two sections of L'Exil selon Julia: "The World in Black-and-White" and "Colors"? The same goes for cooking: it was a bland world. Even if my memory is not reliable, you know, I had to build my own childhood. When my brothers and sisters read L'Exil, they did not recognize themselves because it was my own way of seeing the world.

LOICHOT: A vision distorted by the prism of childhood . . .

PINEAU: And by the pain of always being rejected, repelled, by the rampant racism. This environment threw a very dark veil upon my...