Ethics as Re/Cognition in the Novels of Marie-Célie Agnant: Oral Knowledge, Cognitive Change, and Social Justice
Introduction
Marie-Célie Agnant is one of the many Haitian writers who have contributed to a substantial body of black francophone writing in Quebec. This group includes authors such as Dany Laferrière, Emile Olivier, Gérard Etienne, Anthony Phelps, Max Dorsinville, Jean Jonassaint, Joël Des Rosiers, and Edgar Gousse. Like many of her compatriots, Agnant was directly marked by the Duvalier dictatorship when she arrived in Montreal in 1970.1 Here she has worked as a teacher and translator, and as a writer of poetry, short stories, novels, children's books, and essays. After her 1994 volume of poetry, Balafres, she went on to write two novels1, La dot de Sara (1995) and Le livre d'Emma (2001), as well the collection of stories Le silence comme le sang (1997). She has also produced four children's books and transcribed Haitian legends in L'oranger magique (2003) and La légende du poisson amoureux (2003).
As a group, Haitian Québécois writers have received an uneven reception within Quebec and the larger 'francophonie,' and apart from Laferrière, they have remained mostly invisible in English Canada. Within the predominantly male Haitian Québécois corpus, Agnant is one of the very few women writers. As we will see, she has occasionally addressed some of the possible reasons for this situation herself in terms of women's access to public language and writing and the role of oral transmission in Haitian culture, both at home and in the diaspora. To what extent the transmission of oral knowledges and her own writing will find recognition in Canada is, at this point, still an open question, one in which I seek to intervene. While her work has now received some attention in francophone criticism (Lequin, Bernier, Naudillon, Ndiaye) and recently been discussed in Quebec Studies (Proulx), she still seems largely unknown in the rest [End Page 838] of Canada, where discussions of black writing and race in general often remain limited to works in English.2 The reception of Agnant's work, together with that of many other francophone writers contributing to diasporic writing in Canada, suggests that linguistic difference continues to pose problems for the recognition of black writing in Canada and limits the reach of scholarly inquiry. Agnant's writing itself calls attention to linguistic difference because it addresses variations within French, together with gendered access to registers of orality and writing. Drawing attention to these issues, she poses an even wider set of questions – concerning interpretation, cultural translation, ethics, and ultimately justice – which are the subject of this essay.
I approach these issues in terms of what I designate as 're/cognition' to emphasize the ambivalent and often contradictory duality by which cognitive change ('re – cognition') inevitably draws on available categories in a process of pattern matching (written here as simply 'recognition') that produces identification as acceptance under dominant standards. In this sense, recognition limits re – cognition because the former assimilates potential difference to what is already known or accepted.3 Raymond Williams expressed this problematic by saying 'that much incorporation thus looks like recognition' (125); reversing his formula, I suggest that much recognition functions as incorporation. I assign the shorthand double sign of 're/cognition' to signal the differential between difference and assimilation, between re – cognition and recognition, between the dialogic emergence of the new and the dialectic incorporation into the old.
In what follows, I explore re/cognition in several steps with respect to the questions of cultural conveyance and diaspora, cognitive change, reader response, ethics, and social justice raised by Agnant's work. Section i inquires into ethics and the politics of reading – drawing on work by Nancy Fraser, Martha Nussbaum, and Winfried Fluck – to discuss the ability of...
