Cannibal Plants: Tropiques and Martinican Aesthetics

The "cultural journal" Tropiques was published on the island of Martinique during the regime of the collaborationist Vichy government. Contributors to this journal found themselves limited in the content they could publish by right-wing government censors whose official position encouraged the expression of a certain amount of "regionalism," as this was considered by the regime. One recurrent motif was the topic of plants—a seemingly benign topic, but one which, when read as a dialog between the contributors, both subverts tropes associated with flora and shows an emerging sense of what could be a Martinican or Antillean identity. This dialog consisted in texts ranging from botanical descriptions to probably the most well-known example: an article by Suzanne Césaire called "L'Homme plante," where she uses ethnographer Leo Frobenius's image of the "plant man" to describe the character of the Martinican people. This image seems to evoke passivity, but in the end, it is not only a complex metaphor for a model of autonomy and resistance for the individual Martinican, but also develops a sense of the emplacement of the population as a whole in the geography of the Antilles and it is a concrete emblem for the struggle for alimentary and economic autonomy exacerbated under the wartime blockade.