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

This review begins by recalling the eloquent summation of creolization by Édouard Glissant. That “all the Americas contain microcultures, where pidgin becomes creole, where creoles return to pidgin ways, where languages are emerging or dying, where the old and rigid sense of identity is confronting the new and open way of creolization.”¹ The concept of creolization is ambiguous and precarious, an often-debated phenomenon in discourses of slavery and the Atlantic World. We have come to understand creolization in terms of the early modern Atlantic, as the cultures of Africa, Europe and Indigenous America merged to form new world societies and temporalities. But the process is ongoing; an evolutionary phenomenon that is an extension of the torturous sugar cane fields and the portentous slums, and for one scholar of performance studies, Emily Sahakian, the theatrical stage.

In her book, Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean, Sahakian examines seven plays, written during the 1980s and ’90s, by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury and Simone Schwartz-Bart. The University of Georgia professor draws upon Francois Vergés’ interpretation of creolization: that the phenomenon, at its core, is a process of interdependent exchanges which continuously occur in the “zones of conflict and contact”. Moreover, these processes are the “harbingers of an ongoing ethics of sharing the world” (205). When applied to performance studies, Sahakian contends creolization encompasses the process of cultural reinvention which is inclusive of “theatrical, cultural and epistemological transformation through mixing, juxtaposition, contradiction and conflict” (2–3). Furthermore, these processes are an extension of the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism. Through her examination of the plays by the aforementioned French Caribbean women playwrights, Sahakian suggests creolization, when found in performance, redefines and rejects the familiar conventions of Caribbean orality, music, religion, and dance.

Gender and its contesting legacies is the subject of Sahakian’s first chapter. Here she examines how Césaire’s Rosanie Soliel (Fire’s Daughters) and Condé’s Pension les Alizés (The Tropical Breeze Hotel) imagine and confront gender, slavery’s past and performance to deconstruct the stereotypes of the Marilisse (the seductress) and the Chestnut (the strong black woman). Although these stereotypes deny black women their subjectivity, Sahakian posits they also situate women’s bodies as contested sites of political struggle. Hence, the plays written by Césaire and Condé blur the lines of antiquated colonial social constructions that presume the public and private lives of French Caribbean women. Moreover, they insist on the primacy of women’s agency, which is brought to the fore on the theatrical stage. In addition to Césaire and Condé, Sahakian relies on a number of scholars, like M. NourbeSe Phillip and Darlene Clark Hine, to examine gender and its intersectionality with performance. When arguing for the role of creolization, however, distinctions between the phenomenon and agency become obscured with the latter perhaps becoming a more prominent observation.

In the next chapter, Sahakian utilizes the term “French republican universalism” to explain France’s rhetoric of nationalism which supersedes religion, ethnicity, class, and gender (52). Here she recollects Aimé Césaire’s Negritude, Édouard Glissant’s Antillanité and Jean Benabe’s, Patrick Chamoiseau’s and Raphael Confiant’s Créolité, suggesting that French Caribbean authors sought to reclaim French republican universalism, on their own terms, rather than repudiate it all together. Condé’s Antan revolisyon (In the Time of Revolution), Ina Césaire’s Mémoires d’Isles (Island Memories) and Gerty Dambury’s Lettres indiennes (Crosscurrents) manifest Caribbeanness “as a dynamic historical process of creolization” (53). Borrowing from Stuart Hall, Sahakian argues that the three plays and their productions are “never complete but always in a process of becoming or reproduction created simultaneously in points of similarity and difference” (53), thus reflecting the ongoing process of creolization.

Glissant reminds us that the oral legacies of the plantation were another...