Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism

Négritude, the claim of Africa as matrix, is an affirmation of identity that finds its full significance in the context of the black world. The rehabilitation of the Storyteller as ancestor of cultural practices in societies born out of the plantation situates Créolité in the heart of the Caribbean archipelago. Négritude and Créolité thus appear as the two essential components of an achipelagic consciousness that, at the level of literary criticism, is revealed through the exploration of intertextual linkages that weave together the literary Caribbean. Patrick Chamoiseau, in Ecrire en pays dominé, meditates upon his own writing quest that remains attentive to the echoes of the "sentimenthèque," the collection of well-loved books and authors who have marked the author's imaginary. Chamoiseau's intertextual horizon is composed of, among others, readings of Breytenbach, García Márquez, Lamartine, V. S. Naipaul, Glissant, Césaire, the masters of the word whose Ancestor is the Storyteller on the Plantation. The transfiguration of well-loved books and well-loved authors into appreciable presences is the product of an intertextual networking that, with Chamoiseau as well as other writers of the Antilles, forms the basis of literary creation: "Et ces forces s'étaient imposées à moi avec l'autorité impériale de leur monde qui effaçait le mien. Elles m'avaient annihilé en m'amplifiant. Et c'est avec ces mondes allogènes que mes écrits fonctionnaient dans un déport total. J'exprimais ce que je n'étais pas. Je ne percevais du monde qu'une construction occidentale, déshabitée, et elle me semblait être la seule qui vaille " 'These forces imposed themselves upon me with the imperial authority of their world, which obliterated mine. They had destroyed me while enlarging me. And it is with these foreign worlds that my writings operated in a complete alienation (déport). I expressed what I was not. I only perceived the world as a Western construct, uninhabited, and it seemed to me the only one that mattered' (44). The expressions of anguish formulated by Chamoiseau as a response to the state of dependency in which Antillean literature emerges bears witness to a malaise that, beyond cultural practices, questions the very foundation of societies in the Caribbean archipelago:

Colonized for more than five centuries, quintessentially Western, Caribbean peoples face the challenge of somehow recasting the modernist paradigm of progress, which is unashamedly triumphalist and Eurocentric. How at the same time to appropriate and subvert the central ideas associated with modernity? How to write in the colonizer's language yet assert one's own vision of the world? How to both represent and resist the march of History set in motion by Columbus? (Edmondson 125)

These questions formulated by Richard Price and Sally Price ("Shadowboxing the Mangrove") in Belinda J. Edmondson's Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation seem to me to be the first principles of the fundamental problematic determined as much by the critical discourse on Antillean literature as by creation of the imaginary in the Caribbean space. The books discussed in this review essay propose, each in its own way, diverse answers to these basic questions. Following the lead of Lettres créoles by Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, which Richard and Sally Price consider "a canon-fixing history of French Antillean literature" (127), the criticism of Antillean literature, through the past decade, is a veritable exploration of the authors and foundational texts from whose ranks Aimé Césaire emerges as the tutelary ancestor. The exploration of intertextual connections, the sign of an archipelagic consciousness in its plenitude, and the genealogy of women's writing constitute the other preoccupations of the texts in this review essay.

The year 1993 was marked by an avalanche of homages to Aimé Césaire on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, from film festivals to the organization of colloquia and...