Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past by Bonnie Thomas (review)

The metaphors of postcolonial identity such as the rhizome, the archipelago, and the mangrove provide the framework for this book. Thomas looks at what she terms "the personal narratives" of five Francophone Caribbean writers who all engage with the traumatic legacies of their pasts, both personal and collective. The narratives include autobiography, fiction, travel writing, and essay. These writers tell their poignant life stories by connecting them to their history of slavery and colonial exploitation, and to the continuous challenges to the legitimacy of their identities. Through this literary process they open a path toward reconciliation, healing, and interrelations with the rest of the world. In other words, they break free from the determinism of their painful history. To support her arguments, Thomas relies on the theories of prominent Caribbean scholars, particularly Édouard Glissant's fundamental concepts of Relation and Tout-Monde, as well as of historians and essayists outside the Caribbean such as Ricœur, Le Goff, de Certeau, LaCapra and others. Thomas asserts that the writers being discussed—Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat, and Dany Laferrière—reframe "the past as a place for renewal," and as a starting point for shaping a promising future (5). The merit of this study is its examination of each writer's entire body of personal accounts, told in various registers and often spaced over time. The connecting links between them rest on their visions of identity, Creole culture, belonging, and the meaning of the act of writing. Importantly, the writers also address such subject matters in their 'purely' fictional works, thereby blurring the dividing line between individual and collective, subjective and objective, and autobiographical and historical accounts. Beginning with Maryse Condé, Thomas shows how that prolific author has crafted a coherent and holistic representation of herself by "filling in the gaps of her personal history" (24). In doing so, she reaches an understanding of the forces that shaped her world without ceasing to question them. For Gisèle Pineau, writing is a therapeutic medium, which by freeing her imagination has allowed her to heal from the traumas of her individual and collective histories. Patrick Chamoiseau found in the creolized imagination the path to embrace the diversity of the world, or diversalité, and to reconcile with the past while celebrating the multifaceted Caribbean culture. Through her works written in English, the Haitian Edwidge Danticat rethinks history and challenges the notions of identity and belonging, including the language of expression. Her strategy is to interweave the political and the personal to create a collage composed of past, present, and future elements. Finally, Dany Laferrière also addresses the issues of migration, history, and belonging, but his direction differs from Danticat's as he seeks a new "American" approach to identity, thus looking to the future with confidence. Although Connecting Histories does not bring any new insights into these rich literary productions, the book includes many worthwhile commentaries and a wealth of scholarly references that will be valuable to students and general readers of Francophone Caribbean literature.