A Fishing Town's Long Goodnight

ttVlBW King continuedfrom previous page taken in by Olga, a half sister in Paris, after her parents and Rosalia, a mentally challenged sister, died in Guadeloupe (her mother was hit by a car, her father by lightning, and Rosalia died in a fire). Mina has a menial job in Paris, finding companionship with her West Indian and Mauritian fellow workers. She beds mostly white Frenchmen but refuses emotional attachment and rejects offers of love or marriage. It is significant that in contrast to her Caribbean friends in Paris, she wants no children. Motherhood, children, and family are part ofthe life she lacks. She realizes, "I have no family. I'm alone." One scorned woman kept eighteen black dolls, representing the children she had wanted to conceive. Her frozen emotions are projected on both Paris and Piment. The Parisian suburb where she lives is: "Five oblong blocks rising between scrawny stands of trees. And six boxlike buildings covered with graffiti. Behind the façades blossoming with satellite dishes were the apartments—chicken coops and rabbit hutches." Guadeloupe seems no better: "The town of Piment—miserable hovels, hideous shops, narrow sinuous streets. . .had remained almost exactly the same as Mina remembered it, just slightly more dilapidated." She "passed some young boys on scooters , the spitting image of kids in the project, Nike tennis shoes, same wasted looks on their faces." The story examines the origin of Mina's emotional coldness. Pineau, a psychiatric nurse in Paris, has written of how West Indian patients living in France continue to be haunted by their beliefs in a traditional world ofspirits. She says one ofherthemes is witchcraft versus psychiatry. Mina believes in magic, curses, evil spirits. When she is having sex, Mina is visited by Rosalia's ghost, who wears the burning clothing in which she died. Is Rosalia making Mina feel guilty for her barren sex life? After twenty-one years in France, Mina feels she can only understand her emotions and lay to rest Rosalia's ghost by returning "home," where she finds the spirit world is still present in Piment. The villagers claim to see Rosalia's ghost, who returned from Paris before Mina's arrival. She leams of the curses put on her family and herself by an elderly woman who was rejected by Mina's father. This woman kept eighteen black dolls, representing the children she had wanted to conceive. As a result of her curses, Mina's parents, her father's first wife, and Rosalia are dead, Olga is barren, and Mina is unable to love. Mina, who believes in the curses, destroys the dolls and forgives the woman. The past, with a background of incest, is only gradually revealed as the story moves back and forth between Paris and Guadeloupe and between the present and the past. There is a parallel story, more schematic and less fully developed than Mina's. Victor, one of Mina's French lovers, is advised by a fellow patient in a mental hospital to go to Guadeloupe to find the truth about what has caused his mental illness for years. When he goes to the island, chance encounters with some local men bring him friendship and self-respect, and he is able to recover memories of how as a child he saw his father's body after he had hanged himselfbeing cut down by three men in black (the "ghosts" who have haunted the man). As the story ends, Mina and Victor are together. Is this the result of psychological insight or the removal of evil spirits? While the translation usually reads well, readers may think that a woman with "size 1 05 bras" is enormous. One hundred and five centimeters is a size forty-two in the United States.Detail So, while there is no doubt that from Devil's Dance is interesting, those cover unfamiliar with Pineau's novels might want to begin with The Drifting ofSpirits (2000) or Macadam Dreams (2003), in which family life in Guadeloupe is portrayed more forcefully. Adele King is emérita professor of French at Ball State University. Her publications include French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style and Rereading Cámara Laye, as well...