L'Inde Perdue, L'Inde Retrouvée (India lost, India found): representations of Francophone Indo-Caribbeans in Maryse Condé's Crossing the mangrove and Ernest Moutoussamy's A la recherche de l'Inde perdue

Abstract

In this essay, the study of Indo-Caribbean writing is expanded beyond its customary focus on the Anglophone region to explore representations of Caribbean Indianness in the literary works of two Francophone Guadeloupean writers, Maryse Condé and Ernest Moutoussamy. The essay examines the ways in which each author points up the shortcomings of creolization discourse when it comes to accounting for the experiences of Indo-Caribbean subjects. Also at stake is how Condé and Moutoussamy deploy the theoretical positionings of the Indianité and coolitude movements to better elucidate the elided experiences of Indians in Guadeloupe.

Keywords:

• Indianité
• coolitude
• Indo-Caribbean
• Indian diaspora
• creolization
• indenture narrative

Notes on contributor

Lisa Outar researches and writes about Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature as well as, more broadly, postcolonial literature. She has a BA from Princeton University and an MA and a PhD from The University of Chicago. She specializes in writings by and about Indo-Caribbeans. Her work has appeared in The South Asian Review, The Caribbean Journal of Education, South Asian History and Culture, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Stabroek News and in the edited collections Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar West Indian Literature and South Asian Transnationalisms. She is currently completing a manuscript about the production of the category of Indianness within discourses of nationalism, creolization and diasporic identity in the Caribbean and its various diasporas.

Notes

1. A term for the dark waters crossed by Indian migrants in their journeys away from India, a crossing which was associated with the traumatic shattering of caste identity and with the potential for reconstitution of new forms of kinship.

2. Condé's text is available in English translation, whereas Moutoussamy's is not. I cite from the English version of Condé's novel and provide both the original French and my own translations of Moutoussamy's poems and the other comments made in French which are pertinent to this discussion.

3. See, for example, Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1992) for his elevation of a rural Trinidadian performance of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, to a symbol of the joy that is possible in the Caribbean when the propensity to mourn the brokenness of traditions in the region is put aside.

4. See, for example, George Lamming's 1958 novel Of Age and Innocence for a description of how an imagined Indo-Caribbean propensity for clannishness and endogamous behavior brings about the collapse of an anticolonial movement.

5. Indianité is seen by some as an answer to negritude, though Moutoussamy is careful to argue that it is not a doctrine or an ideology, but ‘au service de l'humanité’ and ‘l'unité de la nation’ (1994, 9).

6. See Bissoondath's short story (1988) ‘Security’ and Mootoo's ‘Sushila's Bhakti’ (1993) as examples.

7. It is interesting that Torabully describes Condé's work as being of fundamental importance to the understanding of coolitude, singling out Crossing the Mangrove for its demonstration of the operation of creolization.

• [C]ondé's novel demonstrates the impossibility of creating a collective consciousness of the Guadeloupean community. This ‘failure’ is a metaphor of the process of creolization; a reminder that the totality of vision of this kaleidoscopic community is but a process with various possible combinations. It also underlines that there is no need of a predating identity capable of subsuming the others, or of achieving a synthesis in which otherness is reduced to sameness. Memories and histories are intertwined here like the roots of the mangrove, indicating that the various identities are engaged in an active interplay where new forms, and new imaginaires, are possible. (Carter and Torabully 2002, 167–168).

See, for example, Confiant's self-styling as a creole Hindu and his remark that

• aujourd'hui à la Martinique, il y a plus de gens au phénotype non indien qui se pressent aux cérémonies indiennes que de gens au phénotype indien! C'est une excellente chose! (Now in Martinique, there are more non-Indians who flock to Indian ceremonies than Indians! This is a great thing!). (2008)