“Ce Noir qui aurait pu être mon frère”: Race and Fraternité in Marie NDiaye’s Fiction

Abstract

Marie NDiaye’s novels engage with race and identity in profound, if elusive, ways. In this article, I contend that NDiaye uses allegory to suggest what cannot be stated directly. In a Benjaminian fashion, she uses literary and artistic fragments to both draw connections and expose fissures between the Départements d’Outre-Mer (D.O.M.) and the metropole, between the era of the French slave trade and the present, and between black and white French citizens. I show that the politics of NDiaye’s works come into sharper relief when considered within the particular political moment of their publication. On May 23, 1998, forty thousand people descended on the streets of Paris in the name of memory to demand that France recognize the slave trade as a crime against humanity. Their call was answered on May 10, 2001 when the “Loi Taubira” passed the Senate.¹ Between the march and the passing of the Loi Taubira, NDiaye published two works haunted by the slave trade: her 1999 novella, La Naufragée, and her 2001 novel, Rosie Carpe. La Naufragée and Rosie Carpe engage with the memory of the slave trade and the devoir de mémoire through an essential question of fraternité. They are books that ask, “Who counts as my brother, my equal, my fellow man?”

Keywords:

• Marie NDiaye
• Rosie Carpe
• La Naufragée
• slavery
• memory
• race

Notes

1 Christiane Taubira: Loi nº 2001–434 du 21 mai 2001 tendant à la reconnaissance de la traite et de l’esclavage en tant que crime contre l’humanité.

2 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne, London, Verso, 1998.

3 Andrew Asibong, Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition. Liverpool, Liverpool UP, 2013. Lydie Moudileno, “Marie NDiaye’s Discombobulated Subject.” SubStance, issue 111: The French Novel Now, vol. 35, no. 3, 2006, pp. 83–94.

4 Maud Fourton, “Marie Ndiaye, Rosie Carpe: Du tant bien que mal au malgré tout: Une fiction de l’ambivalence et de la complicité.” Christian Oster et Cie: Retour du romanesque, edited by Aline Mura-Brunel, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2006. CRIN Vol. 45, pp. 49–64.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Jensen

Laura Jensen is a Lecturer in French Studies at Smith College. Her current book project is titled New Faces of French Universalism: Marie NDiaye, Bessora and Leïla Slimani. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a specialist in contemporary French and Francophone literature, and her research explores the space between those two categories. Her interests include race and representation, and the relationship between text and image.