Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance From the French Caribbean by Emily Sahakian (review)

In the four decades since the modern black feminist movement was inaugurated, scholars have produced an impressive body of research focusing on black women. Building on the intellectual and cultural work of a small group of African American women who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, struggled against enormous odds to ensure that the voices of black women would not go unheard in the (re)making of cultural history, feminist scholars in the final decades of the twentieth century undertook the task of producing new knowledge about black women, while simultaneously transforming their academic departments and training new scholars to continue their work into the twenty-first century, particularly in literature and history.

Among the fruits of this lineage is Emily Sahakian's Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean, which brings new knowledge to a less developed area of scholarly inquiry: women in African diaspora theatre and performance studies. The only full-length, single-authored text in English that focuses on black women playwrights from the francophone Caribbean, Sahakian's book discusses seven plays by four women: Martiniquan Ina Césaire; French-born Guadeloupean Simone Schwarz-Bart; and Maryse Condé and Gerty Dambury, both also from Guadeloupe.

Sahakian explores the works of these playwrights through the lens of creolization, which she defines as "a practice of reinventing meaning and resisting the status quo that corresponds with the syncretic Caribbean performance practices of storytelling, music, dance, and ritual" (3). She impressively situates her readings of the plays within the social, cultural, and historical contexts of slavery, colonialism, and current theories about theatre and performance. For example, in chapter 1, Sahakian discusses how two figures that are specific to the Caribbean environment's experience with slavery—the Marilisse and the Chestnut—are reinterpreted to address issues of gender and sexuality in Césaire's Rosanie Soleil (Fire's Daughter) and Condé's Pension les Alizés (The Tropical Breeze). Marilisse was the name of a young enslaved girl who served as her master's concubine until he no longer needed her and was then sold at auction. The name later became an insult, defining black women who became involved with white men, regardless of their circumstances, as seductresses and traitors to their race. The Chestnut represents the tough Caribbean woman who can endure anything, even the horrors of slavery, without cracking. Sahakian argues that these controlling images "limit women's participation in the public sphere, prescribing that they wield power only through sex or in the domestic space of the home" (24). Césaire and Condé disrupt those images by granting the women in their plays a degree of power and agency.

In chapter 2, Sahakian's readings of Condé's An tan revolisyon (In the Time of Revolution), Césaire's Mémoires d'Isles (Island Memories), and Dambury's Lettres indiennes (Crosscurrents) are informed by what she calls "the conventions of intercultural and postcolonial theaters" (53). Explaining that the plays "remix the signifiers of universalism and difference" (54), she also reveals the ways by which the playwrights challenge notions of the universal and particular; that is, aspects of our being and subjectivity that we all share as humans—for example, love, hate, birth, death—and those that make us different: the social, cultural, and historical contexts into which we are born. Condé, for example, was commissioned to write An tan revolisyon to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution. According to Sahakian, the play, which revisits the French and Haitian revolutions, was performed in Guadeloupe in a large park with a cast of about sixty actors and more than 2,000 spectators (55). Since the show's two performances sold out and the audience reception was positive, the actors, producers, and production team expected it to have a longer run in Guadeloupe and tour other Caribbean countries. However, neither opportunity materialized. Suggesting that the play was too provocative, Sahakian...