Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum

Introduction: Novels as Museums in a Postmodern Age

Introduction Novels as Museums in a Postmodern Age Following the 2001 passage of the so-called Taubira law, which declared slavery and the slave trade to be crimes against humanity , the French government created a national Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery made up of writers, museum curators, and historians hailing from France and its overseas departments: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, and French Guiana.1 The committee’s mandate was to increase public awareness of the history of French involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. French president Jacques Chirac appointed acclaimed Guadeloupian novelist Maryse Condé as the committee’s president. Condé has written three slavery-related, postmodern historical novels: the two volumes of the diasporic family saga Ségou; and a neo–slave narrative about an enslaved Barbadian woman, Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem. She is also the author of two other works of fiction portraying contemporary characters who discover and own up to their obligations toward the enslaved dead: Les dernières rois mages , a novel about an African American woman who appropriates her Martinican husband’s African ancestor in order to downplay her own ties to plantation slavery in the United States, and the novella Nannaya , about a Jamaican businessman who becomes obsessed with the idea that he is descended from a notorious slave from his country’s past. The committee members’ disciplinary backgrounds, as well as Condé’s highprofile appointment as the group’s leader, attest to the considerable impact that artists and other humanists have had in framing what little public discussion there has been of this topic in France. Further proof of art’s power to commemorate the history of a people can be found in the first yearly report the committee submitted to the prime minister of France. In the report’s appendix, the committee lists the various museum exhibitions held in France and its overseas 2 Introduction departments that have addressed the themes of slavery, the slave trade, and/or abolition since 1985. That date was chosen as the starting point because it marked the three-hundredth anniversary of France’s adoption of the Code Noir, or Black Code, a decree that specified how slaves were to be treated throughout the colonies from 1685 to 1789. By taking stock of the memorial activities that had been ongoing before the date of the committee’s formation, this group documented a strong popular desire to learn more about the country’s colonial past—its moral failures as well as its economic successes. Rather than issuing a call to conscience and atonement from on high, the Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery tapped into already-existing grassroots efforts to confront France’s historical involvement in the trade in human beings. Thus, one of this committee’s functions is to act as a clearinghouse for information about, and to promote further public performances of, what the cultural theorist Mieke Bal calls “cultural memorization,” which she defines as “an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and re-described even as it continues to shape the future.”2 Implicit within both this definition and the committee’s report is the sense that the work of cultural memory promotes a critical reckoning with the social, cultural, and economic cost of a nation’s previous policies, rather than merely constituting nostalgia for a bygone era. This public act of taking stock serves as a precedent for shaping the future direction of governance. Based upon the committee’s recommendation, President Jacques Chirac officially declared May 10 to be a national day of remembrance for the victims of slavery. In a public speech marking the occasion in 2006, Chirac formally appointed yet another Francophone novelist, Édouard Glissant from Martinique, to chair a task force that will collaborate with the Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery to establish a National Center for the Remembrance of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. Glissant publicly addressed what he saw as his mission as the official chair in charge of spearheading efforts to establish this center in an editorial published in the French newspaper Libération on May 9, 2008. Like Condé, Glissant has found inspiration for his novels, plays, and theoretical works in the topic of slavery.3 Chirac’s two leadership appointments demonstrate his recognition of the important artistic contribution African-descended writers and other artists make to French culture. His speech also pointed to the continued existence of different kinds of bondage throughout the world...