Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (review)

This is the kind of comparative analysis of Black diaspora literature that one desperately looks for more frequently. Indeed, postcolonial studies and more specifically Caribbean studies suffer from the fear of crossing boundaries and examining common features. Valérie Loichot's comparative study of Edouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Saint-John Perse is based on the assumption that these novelists and poets, American and Caribbean, Black and White, deal with the "mother/father divide." The selected authors all deal with paternity, naming and filling in the blatant father failure, allowing for a feminist reading of their work that pays particular attention to the portrayals of female characters and the "womanly text" set in an "apparently masculinist text" (5). Taking her clues from Derrida, Spivak (the subaltern), Bhabha (mimicry), and Freud ("family romance"), as well as from diaspora studies (Gilroy) and African American criticism (H. L. Gates, Jr.), she examines how the four authors supplant the real fathers with unreal, "fictional" fathers.

In her first chapter, Loichot explains where the "obsession" with the father figure and the Name comes from. She traces the deep wounds left by the "slavery family" in the Caribbean and the Deep South. In the "plantation universe," parental roles became problematic for both slaves and masters who lived in promiscuity while the harsh reality of slavery threatened the formation of harmonious families and the nurturing of children by their genitors. Yet, in spite of the constant tension and racial friction, the "postplantation narratives" display a sense of "community" and "family," one "defined by its inherent discontinuity, pain, and violence" (21).

In chapter 2 the author deals with Glissant's La Case du commandeur. This novel blurs the lines of kinship and interweaves a genealogy of incest. The conflation of gender and parental roles is aptly shown through a close reading of Glissant's deconstruction of the nuclear family. Loichot doubts whether to call Glissant an "equalist" writer, and his fiction indeed cannot be called "feminist" (69). Glissant's "slippery logic of authority" (68) is related to the "opacity which is more than lack of transparency." For his involvement with the diasporic past, Glissant is indeed compared to "his counterparts Walcott and Brathwaite" (148).

Loichot next explores the problematic father figure in a very well known piece by Nobel Prize winner, Saint-John Perse. The "fragmented structure of Éloges has nothing to do with Caribbean context," states Loichot, yet she stresses that Perse cultivated "a violent hatred against the real family" (95) "de souche française" (98), and that "the patterns of illegitimacy and doubt continue after the laws were suspended in the postplantation" (104). The French poet links a double place of origin (Guadeloupe and France) to the family's genealogy and renames his real name and name of the "habitation" of Bois Debout rented by his father, Alexis Saint Leger Leger. This chapter illustrates how the renaming as Saint-John Perse corresponds to a double gesture of self-referential signifying, sheltering from and testifying to the troublesome Plantation Americas.

In chapter four, Loichot's uses two key concepts from Glissant, métissage and créolisation, to analyze Faulkner's Light in August. Taking up Tony Morrison's Playing in the Dark, she discusses the polarization in the American society of Black and White that so much damages "métis" specifically, or people or color in general.

In her conclusion, "Postplantation Communities" Loichot formulates her wish to have fulfilled her academic and ethical duty by showing that literatures of the US (South and North) and the Caribbean need to be extracted from the Plantation academic ghetto and recast as active agents of these other bellies of the world" (198). This new volume of the "New World Series" is an agreeable read that once more confirms the strong similarities between what she calls the Post-plantation Literatures.