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Francophone Caribbean Women Writers Rethinking Identity, Sexuality, and Citizenship Odile Cazenave In a number of recent articles, I have examined the implications of age, space, and gender for the postcolonial Francophone novel. Notably, in “Francophone Women Writers in France in the Nineties” I look at Francophone women authors and what it means to be writing a postcolonial novel within France—how Caribbean women writers in that instance have shifted their gaze, no longer necessarily directing it only toward the Antilles, and how some of the more recent narratives address the question of French Caribbeans living in the metropole and in the United States. In “Écritures des sexualités dans le roman francophone au féminin” I analyze how Francophone women novelists write sexuality into the Francophone novel, in particular how writing of sexuality allows the Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau to recapture the missing genealogical link and reconstruct French Caribbean his/her/story. Finally, in “Le roman africain et antillais” I address the issue of political commitment for Francophone African and Caribbean women authors in the last fifteen years, looking at the textual strategies they may be using to rally political energy and express or resist the ways globalization affects postcolonial identities within the specific configuration of Francophone literatures and cultures. In the present essay, I focus more specifically on the representations of sexuality and citizenship in Francophone Caribbean literature. Looking at the latest works by the Martinican Suzanne Dracius, the Guadeloupeans Gisèle Pineau and Maryse Condé, and the Haitian Marie-Célie Agnant, I address the issue of sexuality, identity, and citizenship in their narratives—how sexuality becomes a topos to express the ambiguities of a Francophone Caribbean identity; how each writer negotiates the tensions between the different possible poles of identity and their definitions of citizenship; how through sexuality they explore these different sites. I examine in particular how migration intersects with or affects the notion of identity and citizenship , how the mental or physical going back home in Condé’s Desirada (1997) and Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003), in Agnant’s Le livre 88 Odile Cazenave d’Emma (2001), and in Pineau’s Chair Piment (2002) pushes (or does not push) each protagonist to find new strengths within the Caribbean space. As Carole Boyce Davies demonstrates in her introduction to Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), the question of renegotiation of identity for the migrant protagonist is central to the narratives of black women writers. As I have shown in “Calixthe Beyala’s Parisian Novels,” this renegotiation operates along two axes: a geographic one (Africa/Europe) and a temporal one (yesterday/today). The success of the protagonist’s transformation depends on the importance granted to one rather than the other parameter. Black women’s writing, Boyce Davies points out, must go through an initial phase of demystification of home, of the motherland and family. It is only then that the black woman writer will be able to redefine a new geography and her own individual identity. Once that stage has been reached, the writer must explore the contours of her new environment, including its new community and cultural components. The diasporic communities living in that new space must also be looked at, as its profile may have been modified. These different concerns are at the core of several novels by French Caribbean women writers. Some, like Suzanne Dracius’s L’autre qui danse (1989), focus on the issue of finding a place to fit in within French society, black Paris, or the Caribbean. Others focus on the dilemma of choice of space anchorage. The most recent ones add new trajectories to the initial journeys—from the island to Paris/the metropole, from the metropole to the African continent (and not necessarily restricted to Francophone countries), or from Paris/the metropole back to the Caribbean. In the late eighties and early nineties, several French Caribbean novels addressed the issue of finding one’s sense of identity by reconnecting with the home space (Warner-Vieyra, Femmes échouées). Dracius’s L’autre qui danse is particularly representative of the dilemmas revolving around the issues of identity and citizenship. The novel offers a picture of the return to the island and raises the question of belonging for “Negropolitains” in either space, the Antilles or the metropole. The narration describes the mental and physical decentering of Rhevana, a young French Caribbean born in Paris who is in search of her historical and spiritual...

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