Continuing the Tradition? Michael Roch and the Future of Martinican Literature

Abstract

In recent years, Patrick Chamoiseau has appeared to take a new writer, who is both continuing and renewing the Martinican literary tradition, under his wing: Michael Roch. This article explores this emerging writer, focusing in particular on his 2022 novel Tè Mawon and its relationship of both continuity and rupture with the work of its literary predecessors, Chamoiseau and fellow Martinican Édouard Glissant. To do so, this article examines the novel’s various allusions to the work of Chamoiseau and Glissant, as well as the manner in which the concept of Caribbean generations is thematised in the novel. It then explores how such generational interaction is a two-way dialogue by exploring Chamoiseau’s endorsements of this newcomer. In positioning Roch as the latest “son” in the exclusive, highly selective, and strongly gendered Martinican literary family tree—with Chamoiseau the father and Glissant the grandfather—this article highlights how his novel is both a development of and a departure from the work of his predecessors. This piece is thus a reflection on the intergenerational tendency of literature from and about Martinique, offering insight into the future potentiality of the literary tradition as embodied through Roch.

Keywords:

• Michael Roch
• Patrick Chamoiseau
• Édouard Glissant
• literary generations
• Franco-Caribbean Science Fiction
• Afrofuturism

Martinican literature has long been characterised by a generational dynamic. A politically resistant, markedly self-referential tradition, this writing can easily be traced along generational lines, with authors and thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau often posited as generational emblems of their literary milieus, whose works have been fundamentally informed by those of the generations before them. While, conventionally speaking, literary generations are seen as being premised on the idea that “new generations arise and displace preceding ones” (Hentea 2013, 569), what is striking about the Martinican literary tradition is the collaborative nature—between a select few—of intergenerational writing. As Maeve McCusker notes, given that until relatively recently the “recognised elders of francophone Caribbean writing were still alive,” thinkers such as Césaire and Glissant were at once “precursors and contemporaries to younger writers” like Chamoiseau (2013, 81), meaning that their works have not only been inspired by one another, but they have also been highly referential and often in direct conversation.¹

Such interactions between and across generations of writers have led to the formation of what could be described as various intergenerational cliques within French Caribbean literary spheres, where writers are “often strategically aligned with one school of thought or another” (McCusker 2013, 81). For instance, the “patrilinear mode” (Milne 2024) of the Martinican literary tradition, stretching from Césaire to Glissant to Chamoiseau’s Martinican-orientated créolité movement—whose three male founders declared themselves “à jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire” in Éloge de la Créolité (18 via Milne 2024)—has long operated alongside a strong tradition of women’s writing and feminist scholarship within the French Caribbean, such as the internationally acclaimed work of Guadeloupean writers and thinkers like Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau. These writers, across these two literary camps, are widely and internationally regarded as the voices of the French Caribbean, all associated with, or against, certain literary movements and belief systems, their work often in direct conversation with, or contestation to, one another.² To this end, Mary Gallagher has contended that for many readers, it has long been the case that “contemporary French Caribbean writing begins and ends with the work of three or four writers” (2001, 9), and such literary dominance could be seen to risk stifling and overpowering the work of up-and-coming writers emerging from the French Caribbean. Indeed, it has been argued that the oversaturation of the French Caribbean literary scene by a small group of writers means that there is little space for “a new generation of writers,” who may not be able to “find room in this crowded literary field” (McCusker 2013, 88–89).

However, in recent years Chamoiseau has appeared to take a new writer under his wing, a writer who is both continuing and renewing the Martinican literary tradition: Michael Roch. A Science Fiction and Afrofuturist author and screenwriter, Roch was born in France in 1987 with Guadeloupean heritage. Since 2015, Roch has been remarkably prolific, publishing eleven novels and many short stories, as well as regularly hosting online creative writing workshops and delivering seminars on Afrofuturism in prisons and universities across the Antilles. A genre that counteracts the “relative absence of people of colour” from Science Fiction (Bould 2007, 177), Afrofuturism prioritises and showcases the speculative—and often dystopic—futures of the African diaspora, offering them a lens through which “to better understand [their] lives and possibilities beyond [their] present circumstances” (Gipson 2019, 84). Alongside authors such as Nadia Chonville and Christophe Gros-Dubois—whose work will be discussed later in more detail—Roch is one of the first to consider Afrofuturism in a French Caribbean literary context, exploring throughout his oeuvre the intersection of science, technology, and African diasporan history and culture. Indeed, the author is the pioneer of what he has branded as Franco-Caribbean Science Fiction (Kantcheff 2022): a new genre that deals with contemporary issues facing the region such as climate change, accelerated globalization, and rapid advances in technology. Although this literary genre is new, some of its concerns—particularly within a French Caribbean context—are not; anyone familiar with the work of Chamoiseau will recognise these ecological and migratory issues as ones that are central to his more contemporary interventions.³ While these themes persistently arise throughout Roch’s oeuvre, it is with his latest two novels—Tè Mawon (2022) and Les Choses Immobiles (2023)—that the author has begun to explicitly align himself with the Martinican literary tradition. These texts not only deal with similar themes to Chamoiseau’s more contemporary work, but they also take place within the French Caribbean, and more precisely the intellectual landscape of Martinique is palpable throughout them. This is particularly the case in Tè Mawon, where there is a real sense that Roch is continuing the literary tradition started by his male predecessors, directly alluding to and developing key concepts of Chamoiseau and Glissant. Indeed, despite Roch’s Guadeloupean roots, it is unequivocally the “masculinist […] Martinique-centric” (McCusker 2013, 85) literary tradition that his work takes inspiration from, with the author even moving from France to Martinique in 2015, where he continues to live and write.

In this article, I argue that Roch is continuing and galvanising the Martinican literary tradition of Glissant and Chamoiseau through his 2022 novel Tè Mawon. First, I explore the intergenerational themes present in the text, from the novel’s various allusions to Roch’s literary predecessors to the manner in which generational interaction is depicted in the novel. I then argue that it is not only Roch who is positioning his work within the Martinican literary tradition by exploring how Chamoiseau has pulled Roch into his own literary ranks. This article thus challenges the idea that new voices writing from Martinique are somewhat doomed to work in the shadows of more established French Caribbean writers, by shedding light on how Chamoiseau is actively engaging with and promoting the work of Roch, directly helping to consolidate and advance his own literary tradition. Thus, in positioning Roch as the latest “son” within the exclusive, highly selective and strongly gendered Martinican literary family tree—with Chamoiseau the symbolic father and Glissant the grandfather—this article offers a reflection on the intergenerational tendency of literature from and about Martinique, exploring the future potentiality of the literary tradition as embodied through Roch.

From L’En-Ville to Lanvil: The Generational Continuity of Ideas

Tè Mawon is a polyphonic, Afrofuturist text set around the year 2070, in the fictional megalopolis of Lanvil. At a time when the US and the continents of Europe and Asia have collapsed under pandemics, droughts, and right-wing political extremism, Lanvil is the envy of “ce qu’il reste du monde développé” (Roch 2022, 21). Stretching from Cuba to Venezuela, Lanvil “a noyé ses îles pour entrer dans l’ère urbaine et technologique, pour survivre, aussi, aux nouvelles problématiques écologiques et démographiques” (21). In this new era, Lanvil inhabitants have computer screens embedded into the corner of their eyes and wear face coverings to protect them against the sun’s ever-growing intensity. A vertical megalopolis, Lanvil is divided into two: at the top the “corpolitiques” (9) rule from anwo—Creole for the French en haut—which is characterised by “de voies rapides ornées de lumières, de zones calmes et résidentielles, de zones balnéaires dotées de restaurants et hôtels de luxe” (22). Anwo sits on top of “le quart-monde” of anba—Creole for the French en bas—the financially and materially deprived realm where the lower classes of society struggle to survive and where “toute la merde d’anwo […] nous tombe dessus” (88). It is this hierarchical landscape that the characters of the novel navigate. Over three days and nights, five characters living across anwo and anba narrate the novel: Ézie, Lonia, Pat, Joe and Patson. In anwo, sisters Ézie and Lonia are translators, working closely with the political leader of Lanvil, Ernesto Kossoré. In the slums of anba, Pat—the brother of Ézie and Lonia—plots to overthrow the unequal structures of Lanvil by attempting to find and, ultimately, return to, the land of his ancestors; the tè mawon that the title of the novel alludes to. The final two narrators of the novel, Joe and Patson, are an inseparable duo who continuously move between anwo and anba, searching for Joe’s missing lover and doing anything possible to impress Patson’s father, the aforementioned Pat.

Already, the extent to which Roch’s novel takes inspiration from the work of older generations of Martinican authors is apparent. While the setting and plotline of Tè Mawon are undoubtedly innovative, “Lanvil” inevitably brings to mind Chamoiseau’s conceptualization of “l’En-ville” in Texaco (1992). This Prix Goncourt-winning novel recounts the intergenerational history of Martinique, from when the island was a slaveholding French colony through to the end of the twentieth century. Resembling the French ville, Chamoiseau uses l’En-ville throughout Texaco to denote the city of Fort-de-France, employing the term to signify “non pas une géographie urbaine bien repérable, mais essentiellement un contenu, donc, une sorte de projet” (Chamoiseau 1992, 492), going on to explain that in the context of Texaco, “ce projet […] était d’exister.” For Chamoiseau, l’En-ville represents a desired space of opportunity and emancipation, where linguistically and culturally diverse individuals come together to create the city, forming new communities and societies that ultimately make up an urban space outside of the plantocracy. As Roch explains, his Lanvil is an extension of Chamoiseau’s imagining of this concept, the space where “le monde entier se retrouve pour faire monde” (Roch via YouTube 2022). Much like in Texaco, then, the “city” in Tè Mawon is created through the gathering of people from diverging contexts. While in Texaco, this coming together was due to the liberation of the enslaved communities of the plantations, in Tè Mawon this enormous urban hub of multilingual, multicultural activity is the result of political and climatic global displacement.

However, while Lanvil boasts a global reputation for being a “utopie de projections dont l’image, toujours positive, toujours paradisiaque, se diffuse tout autour du monde” (Roch 2022, 98), the structural inequalities at the core of this megalopolis mean that, in reality, it is merely a “masque d’images et de lumières” (47), far removed from its international image. The emphasis in these two quotations on the “image” of Lanvil points to the superficiality of the megalopolis, which evidently does not live up to its promises and its idealized projection as a utopic haven for all migrants of the world. This fissure between the expectations and realities of Lanvil echoes the tension that exists in Texaco regarding the somewhat unfulfilled potential of l’En-ville. Indeed, although first imagined as a tabula rasa that holds emancipatory power beyond the plantations, the initial optimism for the potential of l’En-ville is eventually overridden by a sense of ambivalence in the final sections of Texaco, particularly during the Temps Béton, where “l’En-ville nous ignorait. […]. Nous étions venus pour ses promesses, son destin, nous étions exclus de ses promesses, de son destin” (Chamoiseau 1992, 405–406). L’En-ville thus leaves much to be desired for its inhabitants, who evidently feel let down by this space that once symbolized liberation and a new beginning for the formerly enslaved.

It is exactly such disillusionment that characterises life in Lanvil; while appearing to be a sanctuary for climate and political refugees seeking asylum, “chaque jour, [Lanvil] oublie un homme ou une femme, et laisse cette personne dans sa misère” (Roch 2022, 49). In both Texaco and Tè Mawon, then, the cities are personified as figures of false promises and neglect, respectively ignoring and forgetting their inhabitants who had higher hopes for their lives within these spaces. By adopting Chamoiseau’s conceptualization and depiction of l’En-ville and repositioning it to reflect the realities of his dystopic universe, Roch is therefore able to develop and expand the strong sense of disappointment that inhabitants of l’En-ville felt through his portrayal of Lanvil, placing his novel in direct conversation—or perhaps, response—to Chamoiseau’s text. Thus, although never explicitly referencing Chamoiseau in his novel, Roch nonetheless forges a theoretical and thematic continuity between his work and that of Chamoiseau, firmly aligning himself with Chamoisian preoccupations through creating a direct parallel between the disappointing realities of l’En-ville and Lanvil.

Despite this thematic parallel, there is, however, a more deceptive quality to Lanvil than to l’En-ville. At the heart of the formation of Lanvil, there appears to be a deliberate will to portray the megalopolis to the wider world as something that it emphatically is not. This is not only apparent through Roch’s emphasis on the superficial “image” of Lanvil, as the above citations highlighted, but also through his description of the megalopolis as being “un joyau en surface, pourri au cœur” (2022, 22). Here, Lanvil is depicted as a poisoned chalice, projecting a misleadingly enticing image of itself onto the rest of the world. Although the realities of l’En-ville are far from the expectations and promises of its creators, in Chamoiseau’s conceptualisation of this space there is not the same sense of wilful deceit that is found in Lanvil. When transplanted onto Roch’s dystopic universe, Chamoiseau’s l’En-ville thus has a much more illusory quality, and this could in part be due to the international prestige of Roch’s Lanvil. While, towards the end of Texaco, l’En-ville is depicted as a homogenizing, dominating entity, taking Texaco “sous son aile” and absorbing the very “âme de Texaco” into its being (Chamoiseau 1992, 486–487), this space does not boast the same international status or recognition as Tè Mawon’s Lanvil, which is presented to the reader as a powerful, internationally admired megalopolis. Given that “la citoyenneté lanviloise” is sold “tout autour du monde” (Roch 2022, 49), the prosperity of Lanvil largely relies on a global projection of and belief in its falsified, carefully calculated image, and in this regard there are tangible, financial benefits to Lanvil portraying itself favorably. As a “carnival quotidien qui camoufle le vrai monde derrière les steamers placardés sur ses buildings monumentaux” (47–48), Lanvil therefore projects a compelling display of smoke and mirrors, seemingly representing the last beacon of hope in the ruined world that it inhabits. Thus, in distorting the scale and international influence of Chamoiseau’s l’En-ville, an impoverished and marginal bidonville on the outskirts of Fort-de-France, Roch reimagines this concept through a disingenuous and ironic light, ultimately renewing this ideal by applying it to a vastly different diegetic context and demographic of Caribbean inhabitants.

Like Grandfather Like Son: Tout-Monde and the “Mawon” in Tè Mawon

Tè Mawon’s generational continuity with the Martinican literary tradition stretches further back than Chamoiseau, given that throughout the novel, Roch also incorporates theoretical ideals coined by Glissant. For instance, a crucial concept that is threaded throughout the novel is that of the “tout-monde.” Glissant describes “tout-monde” as “notre univers tel qu’il change et perdure en échangeant, en même temps, la « vision » que nous en avons” (1997b, 176). This idea of exchange is central to Glissant’s notion of “tout-monde,” which can be seen as an imagining of a relational world founded on the co-presence of beings navigating “la folle diversité du monde” (173). Through “tout-monde,” the cultural, linguistic, and contextual specificities of all individuals co-exist in conversation and relation to each other, “dans sa diversité physique et dans les représentations qu’elle nous inspire” (176). As a “philosophical space dedicated to new forms of being and knowing” (Drabinski 2019, 157), Glissant’s “tout-monde” thus exists “without centre, without a single root, and therefore without the compulsions and intractable violence of any variety of nationalism” (170). As such, the somewhat utopian ideal of “tout-monde” has the potential to eradicate societal hierarchies through cross-cultural contact, highlighting the transformative and radical potentialities of the phenomenon.

It is this vision of social equality and liberation that Pat, in anba, seeks throughout Tè Mawon, explicitly searching for the “tout-monde” in order to overthrow the unequal divide between anwo and anba. Although many tell Pat that “le Tout-monde est une légende” (Roch 2022, 35), he believes it to be a real place: the land of his ancestors that has been buried under Lanvil. He thus plots to return, in a very literal sense, to this forgotten land, telling his comrades of his plan to dig down to the “tout-monde”: “la foreuse, nous allons la voler. Nous détruirons les murailles qui nous séparent du Tout-monde […] nous y construirons un monde neuf et équitable, pour toutes et tous” (34). Like Glissant’s conceptualisation of “tout-monde,” for Pat the “tout-monde” is thus an egalitarian utopia, a place of possibilities where everyone is connected and exists in relation to one another.

However, in the fictional economy of Roch’s novel, the “tout-monde” has been reimagined as a tangible place as opposed to a philosophical ideal, understood by Pat as an actual territory where Lanvil inhabitants could live in harmony and equality. What is even more interesting is the geographical location of this supposed land. As mentioned, Pat believes the “tout-monde” to be buried beneath Lanvil, and as such, his hunt for the “tout-monde” is ultimately a journey into the past, a way through which he and his comrades can “honorer les ancêtres qui ont donné leur sang pour construire cette tè” (Roch 2022, 33). This emphasis on the historical and ancestral importance of the “tout-monde” is in direct contrast with Glissant’s imagining of the term, which is instead a forward-thinking vision of a world in relation. Once more, then, Roch employs an easily-recognizable Martinican concept in a manner that enables it to expand its meaning, and in this case, take on new meaning, given that in his dystopic universe, the “tout-monde” no longer signals a theoretical projection into the future, but rather a very physical search for the past. By transplanting the notion of “tout-monde” into a diegetic context that is almost a century after Glissant first conceived of it, Roch thus creates a temporal distortion in his text, forging a clear thematic connection to the work of Glissant yet rupturing this alignment through making this once future-orientated concept the long-buried past.

Such a temporal rupture between these imaginings of “tout-monde” could be read as a metaliterary acknowledgement on the part of Roch of his own generational remove from Glissant. While the notion of “tout-monde” has long informed theories and literary works emerging from Martinique, the fact that Roch chooses to physically bury the concept in the fictional economy of his novel could symbolize how French Caribbean literature has now moved beyond its previous theoretical preoccupations, layered over with newer interventions that speak to more contemporaneous issues that the islands are facing. For instance, in this present moment, authors writing from and about the French Caribbean are becoming increasingly concerned with technologically-orientated, dystopic imaginings of the region. Indeed, Roch is not alone in exploring the Afrofuturist possibilities of the region, but such a literary approach has also been adopted by fellow “Antillean newcomers” Nadia Chonville and Christophe Gros-Dubois (Labridy 2023). These authors use literature to examine the speculative, often dystopic futures of the French Caribbean (Labridy 2023), as is the case in Chonville’s feminist dystopic short story “Twati an vè-a,” (2022) and Gros-Dubois’s time-bending short story “Barbecue, fille de la mangrove – le cycle luttes” (2023).⁴ Roch is undoubtedly part of this emerging, Afrofuturist literary generation, concerned as his work is with the fate of the Antilles and its inhabitants. However, while, horizontally speaking, Roch is aligned with this new movement of Afrofuturist French Caribbean literature, the fact that his work persistently invokes Glissant and Chamoiseau nonetheless places him in a vertical, intergenerational dialogue with them, and to this end, perhaps Pat’s fictional search, in anba, for the “tout-monde” could be regarded as emblematic of Roch’s literary approach. Just as Pat looks to his ancestors and searches for the past in the hope of advancing his society, so too does Roch turn to his literary predecessors and their theories in order to enrich his own literary practice and emerging movement. Much like his fictional character, then, Roch is committed to unearthing and bringing into his present (literary) moment the past by invoking pre-established literary concepts in a manner that both sustains and reimagines them. To this end, Roch is able to honor his ancestors like the fictional Pat, while also ensuring that their literary legacy and tradition lives on by employing their concepts to the Afrofuturist context of his novel.

The extent to which the novel is inextricably associated with Glissant becomes all the more apparent when we consider its title. The “tè” in Tè Mawon signifies earth, and as such, the Creole title could be translated into French as terre marron. The title of the novel is thus a direct allusion to the marrons: enslaved peoples who escaped the plantations during slavery and lived freely outside of the plantocracy. The figure of the marron is central to much of Glissant’s theoretical and fictional work, in which the marron is positioned as “le seul vrai héros populaire des Antilles,” whose escape from the plantocracy signaled “un exemple incontestable d’opposition systématique, de refus total” (Glissant 1997a, 180). For Glissant, the marron is thus the “unconditional refuser of the system” (Burton 1993, 473), representing radical liberation and resistance to racial and colonial oppression in the French Caribbean. While the “‘mythe’ glissantien du marron” has been critiqued for overstating the real-world significance of the figure of the marron in Martinican history (Burton 1997, 17)—resulting, according to Richard D.E. Burton, in Glissant diffusing a “méconnaissance fondamentale de l’histoire de son pays” (Burton 1997, 66)⁵—Glissant’s interventions on this radical figure have nonetheless been highly influential across literary generations. Indeed, the marron has come “to stand for a generalised attitude of revolt against colonial oppression and neocolonial assimilation” (Britton and Burton 1998, 527) in Martinican literature; for instance, Chamoiseau and his associated créolité movement also posit marrons as the heroes of the Antilles “qui affrontèrent l’enfer esclavagiste” (Bernabé et al. 1989, 37).

It is exactly this emancipatory potentiality that characterizes the mawon in Tè Mawon, where, to Pat’s mind at least, the “tout-monde” is the terre marron of his ancestors that holds the power to free the most oppressed classes of Lanvil from their (metaphorical) shackles. Indeed, Pat believes that the repressive rulers in anwo “nous cachent les derniers pitons” of the terre marron (Roch 2022, 34) due to the power this space yields to topple the unequal societal divide between anwo and anba. The notion of the marron thus symbolizes resistance to oppression and hegemonic dominance in the novel, and in this regard Roch evokes the image of the marron in a manner that bolsters the radical and subversive connotations that this figure holds in much of the work of both Chamoiseau and Glissant, reproducing the reverential treatment that the marron has often been afforded in Martinican literature. By adopting a semi-hagiographical approach to the marron, Roch directly emulates the poetics of his predecessors, co-opting their defiant imagining of this figure of the French Caribbean and directly applying it to the concerns of his novel. Through the notion of the marron, then, the intergenerational layering at play in Roch’s work becomes all the more apparent, and in this regard, Tè Mawon can be seen as a manifestation of a kind of palimpsest of influence, drawing on and expanding ideas derived from Glissant that had already been previously developed by Chamoiseau.

Lost through Generations? The (Non)Transmission of Ideas in Tè Mawon

Despite the thematic significance of ancestral honoring, the novel points to the tension that arises when ideas are passed down from generation to generation, which inevitably results in their various (mis)interpretations. As previously mentioned, many throughout the novel try—in vain—to convince Pat that the “tout-monde” is a “vieux mythe” (Roch 2022, 35) as opposed to a real territory, and this culminates in an intertextual reference to the work of Glissant. This is the only instance in the novel where Glissant is explicitly referred to, and it is by Pat’s estranged brother, Clod. In a plea to force Pat to move beyond his obsession with the “tout-monde,” Clod tells his brother of an old book he found: “Traité du Tout-Monde, par Édouard Glissant,” explaining that “ce que cet homme a écrit au siècle dernier n’est qu’une vision de l’esprit. Le tout-monde n’est pas un territoire, mais une pensée à la croisée de la politique, de la philosophie et de la poésie” (143). Once more, Roch references the literary practices and ideals of previous literary generations by in this instance directly naming them, which here functions to highlight the fissure that exists, within the novel, between Glissant’s meaning of “tout-monde” and how it is understood by Pat in his dystopic universe. There is a dismissive quality to the above quote, not only through the use of “n’est qu’une,” but also through Clod’s insistence on the temporal and generational detachment between Glissant—referred to as “cet homme” who wrote “au siècle dernier”—and the current situation of Lanvil. Far from an ancestral, revered ideal, here “tout-monde” and its creator are disregarded by Clod, further calling into question the relevance of this concept in this dystopic context.

Ultimately, Clod’s skepticism towards “tout-monde” proves to be valid, given that despite Pat’s best intentions, the “tout-monde” remains unobtainable and unreachable throughout the novel, which ends with the realisation that Lanvil will be “toujours la même” (Roch 2022, 213). Reimagining the concept of “tout-monde” through the character of Pat to then thwart this interpretation by explicitly referencing—and dismissing—Glissant therefore enables Roch to offer a pessimistic vision of an idea conceived by a literary predecessor, underlining how, in the context of Lanvil, Glissant’s vision of the world will remain impossibly idealistic. While Roch’s novel undeniably signals a continuity with the literary generations that came before him, this diegetic citation of Glissant therefore introduces a distinct rupture between Roch’s work and that of his predecessors. Instead of taking Glissant’s ideal at face value, Roch embeds into his novel a tension between what could be seen as the aspirational tenor of Glissant’s forward-thinking theory and the realities of its meaninglessness in such a futuristic context. Roch thus simultaneously galvanizes and challenges this concept by applying it to a diegetic setting that is almost exactly a century after Glissant first coined “tout-monde.” In so starkly leapfrogging temporalities, Roch is able to acknowledge both the potentialities and limitations of Glissant’s concept, applying it to the futurist universe of his novel in a manner that both sustains and troubles it. Thus, just as repositioning Chamoiseau’s l’En-ville as Lanvil made it a more degenerate place, so too does Roch’s portrayal of Pat’s interpretation of the “tout-monde” offer a more pessimistic vision of this ideal. In his dystopic rewriting of these two concepts, then, Roch reimagines them both through a more negative lens, highlighting how, in the context of Tè Mawon, these visions can never truly be realized.

Pat’s misinterpretation of the notion of “tout-monde” also raises the question of how concepts and memories more generally are transmitted through generations. As Roch points out, Pat’s understanding of the “tout-monde” underscores “le problème de transmission de la pensée des plus anciens au plus jeunes” (Roch via Roussel 2022), whereby over time meaning is lost and/or warped as memories and ideals become further and further removed from their original sources. Given that Pat is nearly a century removed from Glissant, his misunderstanding of the “tout-monde” can thus be seen as a case study on what happens when “memory becomes history,” when “memory is apart from the teller rather than a part of, intrinsic to, the teller, and thus can only be made accessible through an imaginative refocusing” (Aarons and Berger 2017, 42). It is exactly this refocusing that the “tout-monde” undergoes in the novel, reconceptualized—albeit unknowingly—by Pat as a physical land, an impossibly idealistic utopia of equality. Pat’s multigenerational remove from Glissant thus reveals how, as Roch puts it, “à travers le temps, les choses se perdent” (Roch via Roussel 2022), and in such a context, “the question of memory’s transmission and mediation becomes as important as its content” (Rothberg 2009, 270).

The Future of the Tradition

Roch’s literary interaction with his predecessors is by no means a one-way dialogue; the idea that the writer is continuing and revitalizing the Martinican literary tradition has also been attested to by Chamoiseau. Chamoiseau has been vocal in his support for Roch, giving Tè Mawon his endorsement through supplying the novel with its front-cover accolade, which proclaims: “Michael Roch ajoute une dimension précieuse à notre littérature.” In using the possessive pronoun “notre,” Chamoiseau firmly roots Roch’s work within his own Martinican literary family tree, declaring that this newcomer is part of his tradition of writing and welcoming the new aspect that he is bringing to it. This largely echoes the relationship, particularly at the beginning of Chamoiseau’s writing career, between Chamoiseau and Glissant, with Glissant writing a preface for Chamoiseau’s first novel—Chronique des sept misères (1986)—that is both celebratory of Chamoiseau’s work and that also invokes the generational discrepancy between the two authors: “Patrick Chamoiseau est d’une génération qui n’a pas vibré aux généralités généreuses de la Négritude, mais qui a porté son attention sur le détail du réel antillais” (3). There thus exists a lineage of literary endorsements within this highly exclusive Martinican family tree, which seemingly suggests that these writers have actively chosen their respective literary successors, teeing them up and thus inevitably informing the way their work will be received. Indeed, as McCusker notes, through inhabiting “the fields of criticism, theory, interviews,” Glissant and Chamoiseau are able to a certain extent “impose overt and self-conscious control over the reading and criticism of their own and other’s writing” (2013, 88), given that, in positioning the work of younger writers in continuity with that of their own, the literary appraisals of these established names will undoubtedly influence the manner through which their work is read and engaged with by readers and critics alike.⁶

In praising the work of Roch so publicly, and emphatically aligning it with that of his own, Chamoiseau thus appears to be consolidating his own literary tradition, ensuring its longevity by anointing Roch as the newest member of this multigenerational clique. This became all the more apparent during my interview with Chamoiseau, where it seemed as through the author believed that Roch represented the future of Martinican literature, given that his speculations on the evolution of the priorities of literature produced from Martinique almost directly mapped onto the key themes of Tè Mawon. For instance, the author contended that newer writers emerging from Martinique would have “aucun intérêt” in the debates that consumed his literary generation, “par exemple, c’est quoi ma langue,” stating that “toutes nos vieilles problématiques linguistiques seront complètement dépassées par les nouvelles réalités” (via Kennedy 2023, 120). For Chamoiseau, these new realities would be ones primarily concerned with climate change and technological advances:

La nature se sera effondrée […] nous allons habiter autant la virtualité numérique, le monde de l’internet, que notre monde physique. […] nous serons confrontés fondamentalement à l’intelligence artificielle. Le fait d’être confronté à l’intelligence artificielle va nous obliger à nous poser la question, non pas est-ce que je suis martiniquais, mais qu’est-ce qu’un être humain ? Si la machine peut être aussi humaine que moi, qu’est-ce qui me reste comme humanité ? Donc, toutes ces questions-là vont bouleverser la littérature de fond en comble dans les années qui viennent. (119–120)

The importance that Chamoiseau places on the technological focus of future Martinican literature is largely in line with the primary concerns of Tè Mawon, which ultimately explores the end game of our current, turbulent moment of the twenty first century, marked as it is by climate emergencies and unprecedented technological growth. Thus, while Roch employs and develops the concepts of his literary predecessors, it is nevertheless crucial to acknowledge the ways in which his novel advances the Martinican literary tradition, departing thematically from the questions that once preoccupied Chamoiseau—such as postcolonial identities and linguistic (un)belonging—by instead exploring the most pressing concerns of his own generation, ultimately questioning how we may begin to navigate the ecologically disastrous, transhuman⁷ future that awaits us in the not-so-distant future. In this light, the most apparent way in which Roch’s work embodies Chamoiseau’s predictions on the future of Martinican literature is through the genre of his novel.

As the self-proclaimed pioneer of Franco-Caribbean Science Fiction (Kantcheff 2022), Roch’s work departs from that of his literary predecessors through its Afrofuturist nature, exploring as it does the intersection between various African diasporas, their associated cultures, and their use of and access to technology. Despite the fact that Afrofuturism has gained interest and visibility in recent years—particularly through blockbusters such as the Black Panther franchise—the genre is only beginning to be explored in depth in a French Caribbean context. Indeed, as previously mentioned, French Caribbean writing is currently taking a speculative turn, not only with the work of Roch, but also other emerging writers such as Chonville and Gros-Dubois. A common thread throughout the literature of these three authors is that they all, to varying degrees, play with literary temporalities in order to “reframe the past, interpret the present, and imagine the future on their own terms” (Labridy 2023). The future-orientated nature of Roch’s work and that of his contemporaries could be seen to stand in stark contrast to the work of Chamoiseau—particularly at the height of the créolité movement—which has been heavily critiqued for being overly backward-looking, accused of depicting a “museumified Martinique […] a ‘pastified’ Martinique that promotes a ‘feel-good’ nostalgia” (Price and Price 1997, 15) and that bolsters “a stereotypical portrayal” of Martinican society (Condé 2000, 164). However, as Labridy points out, “what felt like a nostalgic regression” could instead be seen as “the necessary steps backward one takes before leaping ahead” (2023). In exploring the history of the islands and its people, Chamoiseau’s créolité movement arguably paved the way for Roch’s emerging literary generation, enabling these newer writers to “turn their gazes toward new worlds and new temporalities and to speculate wildly from a place of self-possession” (Labridy 2023). It is thus such literary trailblazing that Roch’s novel pays homage to, opening up an intergenerational dialogue through developing the ideas of his literary predecessors while simultaneously curating his own literary generation in the process.

Only time will tell if Roch and his forming generation will obtain the literary success and status of the generations that came before them, but for now, we can hope that the emergence of this new literary moment signals a riposte to Martin Munro and Celia Britton’s claim that “the great vitality that fuelled the remarkable half century or so of Martinican creativity, the classic movement from négritude to antillanité to créolité, has been considerably dimmed, and […] the forward-looking impetus implied in that movement has been halted” (2017, 168). In grounding his innovative, technologically-centered novel in ideas conceived of by these former literary generations, Roch’s work marks a distinct new moment in this literary movement, expanding its potentiality through propelling it, quite literally, into the future and opening it up to new genres that are becoming increasingly prominent in this moment of the twenty first century. With Chamoiseau having seemingly elected Roch as his heir, the latter can be seen as the latest bud on the exclusive, masculine Martinican literary family tree, carrying this tradition into the next literary generation while also paying homage to the writers that came before him. In following in the footsteps of his literary predecessors through taking direct inspiration from their theoretical ideas, while simultaneously rupturing this continuity by exploring these concepts in a new literary genre and mapping them onto concerns of his own generation, Roch is therefore ushering in a new moment within the Martinican literary tradition, ensuring its longevity throughout Tè Mawon by opening the tradition up to new, Afrofuturist imaginaries.

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Laura Kennedy

Laura Kennedy holds a Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast and is the co-founder of the research network “Literary Dislocation(s).” Her work has been published in journals such as The French Review and The Translator. At the intersection of Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies, her research explores the politics and poetics of language in francophone and anglophone World Literature, examining how—and why—writers from various regions within the Caribbean, Africa, and the metropolitan margins engage with the once colonial languages of French and English.

Notes

1 This has particularly been the case for Glissant and Chamoiseau, who co-authored several publications before Glissant’s death in 2011 such as their 2007 essay Quand les murs tombent. L’identité nationale hors-la-loi ?

2 See McCusker’s “Authorising a tradition: Theory, criticism and (self-)canonisation in French Caribbean writing” (2013) for an in-depth consideration of the tensions and overlaps between these two literary traditions.

3 Although Éloge de la Créolité and its associated movement were groundbreaking at the turn of the twenty first century, in this contemporary moment Chamoiseau as a theorist and writer has moved well beyond his former créolité preoccupations, publishing instead on ecological and migratory issues through works such as Les neuf consciences du malfini (2009), Frères Migrants (2018) and Refusons l’Inhumain ! (Chamoiseau and Le Bris 2022).

4 See Labridy’s “permission to speculate wildly” (2023) for a detailed exploration of these texts.

5 Scholars such as Celia Britton have pointed out the limitations of Burton’s critiques of Glissant. For Britton, Burton’s is an “unfair” reading of Glissant’s positioning of the marron given the highly “selective citation[s]” of Glissant’s oeuvre, which do not account for Glissant’s “careful and ironic balancing of the positive and negative aspects” of the figure of the marron (Britton and Burton 1998, 527).

6 Of course, one must also acknowledge the complicity of the critic in informing how writers are perceived and read, particularly in a generational, French Caribbean context. Many of the most cited edited collections on French Caribbean writing have started from the generational grouping together of authors, for example Penser la Créolité (Condé and Cottenet-Hage 1995) and L’Héritage de Caliban (Condé 1992), and articles and special issues such as this one undoubtedly fuel this phenomenon of categorically positioning authors in collaboration with or contestation to one another. Thus, while interrogating the role of the author in creating and sustaining various literary traditions and writing cliques, I nonetheless remain mindful of my own involvement in such literary groupings.

7 Transhumanism is the belief that “current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science […] which may make it possible to […] extend our intellectual and physical capacities” (Bostrom 2010, 55). Through transhumanism, the humanist subject would become freed from “the constraints of the flesh” (Schmeink 2016, 39) thanks to the use of technology, ultimately resulting in a transhumanist subject who could have “much greater intellectual faculties than any current human being” (Bostrom 2010, 56). As a megalopolis whose inhabitants have technology embedded into their very beings, Lanvil can thus be seen as a transhumanist society.