Daniel Honoré’s Ma Chine-nation: Afrasian Métissages and Animality in La Réunion

ABSTRACT

This article examines an uncirculated French-language poetic collection written by half-Chinese, half-African Reunionese poet Daniel Honoré. Entitled Ma Chine-nation (1995), the collection recounts among many episodes the return of the Afrasian poet to his father's homeland of China and his self-identification to persecuted maroons in La Réunion during colonial times. Offering a window into the poet's relationship toward China, Africa, and La Réunion, Ma Chine-nation is written in French and Reunionese Creole with certain poems loosely presented in the form of a Chinese ideogram. Honoré’s collection offers a diversity of plurilingual poems in which the poet bridges Africa and La Réunion with China via the figure of an escaping slave or “maroon” in the context of French colonialism. Historically, both Chinese coolies and African slaves, working concurrently under the French Empire in La Réunion, engaged in marronage during the nineteenth century. Honoré animalizes the maroon figure and racializes it as African and Asian, poetically overlapping the Afrasian body onto that of an animal. When seen through Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “becoming-animal,” the métissages of human/animal and African/Chinese resist colonial signification and conflate both groups’ experiences. This article proposes an analysis on Sino-African métissage and animality, making space for an understudied Asian contribution to Francophone Indian Ocean Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Afrasia
• métissage
• animality
• marronage
• Réunion
• China

Notes

1. Beginning in 1844, La Réunion establishes its first formal political ties with China; and censuses show that approximately 1,800 Chinese nationals reside on the island (Gerbeau 169). Given the long-shared trade relations between La Réunion and China, La Réunion sees a diasporic movement of Chinese migrants from Singapore and southern China, mostly from Fujian and Macao, along with populations of (Chinese-)Malaysians. Coming to La Réunion as voluntary coolies to work in the agricultural sector that was taken away from them in China, approximately one hundred sixty Chinese arrive by 1845. The low wages and mistreatment occurring among Chinese coolies during the mid-1800s push the French colonial regime to a defensive position, requiring them to reassess the continued engagement of Chinese coolies working alongside African slaves on the island. Historically, the relationship between Chinese coolies and African slaves had been strained. French-language newspapers circulating in La Réunion in the 1840s, such as La Feuille hebdomadaire de l’Île Bourbon, are quick to affirm that “Les Africains seuls conviennent à nos cultures. […] [Les Chinois sont] les pires des travailleurs dans l’échelle des engagés” (qtd. in Wong-Hee-Kam, La Diaspora 55).

2. Among the numerous poems of Ma Chine-nation, only a few structurally evoke Chinese ideogrammic brushstrokes or characters, such as the last section of the poem “Révolte dans un guetali” that resembles the “na” (捺) horizontal brushstroke (71). Several poems (or portions of which) that do have an unconventional spacing conform to the ideogram structure of wáng (王), such as the middle portion of the poem “Mei Xian” (33).

3. Often associated with an allegory of the “original” Reunionese woman, Héva is a legendary figure known to have fled slavery. The evocation of Héva's sister rather than Héva herself presents a curious choice, as there exists no mention of Héva's sister in any available sources on Reunionese colonial legends.

4. The ideogram serves as both a signifier and signified as it “encapsulates the acoustic image, the name, the concept, and the thing in a seamless connection” (Lay Tan 46).

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Notes on contributors

Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland

Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland is Assistant Professor of French at Texas Christian University. He specializes in Francophone Asia Pacific Studies, Critical Mixed Race Studies, and Queer Studies and has published in numerous journals including the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Modern Language Review, and the New Zealand Journal of French Studies. His book project, Japanese Ethnocide in the French Pacific, examines the threatening of Asian cultural identity in Melanesia and the role mixed race children played in relation to the French Pacific Empire.