Cent vies et des poussières by Gisèle Pineau (review)

PINEAU, GISÈLE. Cent vies et des poussières. Paris: Mercure de France, 2012. ISBN 978-27152 -2951-8. Pp. 290. 19,80 a. Pineau’s novel is a logical development in the trajectory of her prolific oeuvre and yet surprises at moments with its audacity. While several of this Guadeloupean writer’s better-known works, notably Un papillon dans la cité and L’exil selon Julia, have dealt with the alienation of exile and immigration, this eighth novel takes on the grim realities of a poor urban community, Ravine claire, which spills over with challenges and sadness in a postcolonial, postmodern world. As in her earlier works, Pineau’s protagonists are women of several generations living under one roof, narrating their stories from varying temporal and psychological vantage points, but intersecting in the precarious space of the Guadeloupean case, or shack. Gina Bovoir lives with her ailing mother and her seven children, all by different fathers, and experiences no greater joy than when she is expecting. The churning cycle of childbirth that is represented in the microcosm of Gina’s home has become, in essence, another addiction in a ghetto that is filled with countless addictive manifestations—drugs, alcohol, sex, and consumerism , to name a few. Her mother fading into dementia, her eldest children disappearing into prison and prostitution, her youngest past the point of infant dependence, Gina constantly longs to escape into the sweet promise of a newborn . Sharon, Gina’s adolescent daughter and the novel’s other protagonist, wishes her mother dead rather than see her further ensconced in this grotesque version of maternity. Sharon longs for the time when she will be able to leave her family behind and turns her attentions to the nation to the north that is about to inaugurate its first black president. At the same time that the women’s narratives evoke the struggles of everyday life in postcolonial Guadeloupe, their lives are also infused with the legacy of slavery, racism, and the exploitation of the plantation economy. Pineau’s tendency to incorporate temporal shifts and overlapping narratives in order to remind her readers of the present’s debt to the past finds its central metaphor in the family home itself, which has been built on the site of a maroon massacre. Space and chronology are collapsed; the bones of runaway slaves emerge from the foundation of Gina’s case and the novel’s contemporary narrative thread is interrupted by the ghostly voice of a maroon slave woman. Pineau’s works, such as L’espérance Macadam or the nonfiction essay collection Femmes des Antilles, typically trouble the distinction between Guadeloupe’s present and past. With Cent vies, Pineau reveals a frenetic Guadeloupe wound so tight from the pace of globalization that it can no longer afford to juxtapose stories of the suffering of enslaved ancestors with the problems of the present without asking if its contemporary consumerist pursuits dishonor this legacy of resistance. At the heart of Cent vies are the themes that have made Pineau’s fiction so relevant for scholars of contemporary Francophone fiction; maternity, genealogy, memory, witnessing , and the psychological conditions of postcolonial communities are woven together in another of Pineau’s intricate tapestries. Absent from this novel are her preoccupations with immigration and transcultural identities forming in the space between France and Guadeloupe. In this urban, exclusively Guadeloupean novel, urgency and despair seem far more pronounced than in her earlier works, yet this distress is communicated in Pineau’s usual lyrical, often incantatory prose. It is unfortunate that her editors did not afford her language the same careful attention— Reviews 1299 the last half of the novel contains a surprising number of typographical errors that detract, if only slightly, from the quality of the novel as a whole. Rhodes College (TN) Laura Loth PROPHÈTE, EMMELIE. Impasse Dignité. Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2012. ISBN 978-2923713 -71-7. Pp. 203. $19,95 Can. Pour José, personnage principal de ce troisième volet—après Le testament des solitudes (2009) et Le reste du temps (2010)—de la trilogie de Prophète, le temps se décline autrement. Il n’aurait donc pas vraiment besoin...