Re-enchantment and Ecological Restoration in the BD adaptation of Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel: A Path towards Coexistence

Abstract

Although France abolished slavery for the second time in 1848, the economic and social realities in the French Caribbean reflect persistent power dynamics between béké owners and black workers who are not only dispossessed of their land, but also of their bodies, perpetuating the commodification of labor-power and cycles of economic exploitation. The adaptation in bande dessinée (BD) of Zobel’s novel by Michel Bagoé and Stéphanie Destin published in 2018 by Présence Africaine marks a return to spatial subjectivity. The visualization of interactions between the human and non-human worlds, made possible through the BD format, provides us with an intimate cartography of the Martinican land that is divorced from representations of a charted landscape brought under the control of the colonizer, or white plantation owner. This article investigates forms of dispossession of land and bodies exemplified by Zobel’s depictions of the plantation society, and places them in contrast with visions of abundance and sustainability in an uncharted, re-enchanted, non-human world in the BD adaptation by Bagoé and Destin.

Keywords:

• Joseph Zobel
• Rue Cases-Nègres
• bande dessinée
• plantation society
• enchantment
• coexistence

Notes

1 Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais, 38.

2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

3 In this scene, we see the children chanting and dancing amidst the flames as they celebrate their newly-granted access to a forbidden place, owned by békés. Given this evidence, the children can be seen to make a gesture of unconscious defiance, breaching access and movement restrictions that determine their parents’ lives.

4 The petites bandes were spaces on the plantation reserved for children who would be tasked to collect guano and tall grass.

5 In Le Discours antillais, Édouard Glissand describes the Martinican landscape. He portrays the north of the country as a space where “the knotted mass of somber greens which the roads still do not penetrate” served as refuge for maroons (10). Through a description of the density and impenetrability of the landscape in the BD, the history of marooning, in particular slave resistance, is recuperated as well as repurposed to reflect defiance towards the charted and controlled plantation space.

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Notes on contributors

Jennifer Boum Make

Jennifer Boum Make is Assistant Professor in the Department of French & Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Her teaching and research include a focus on migration, and representations of otherness and hospitality in contemporary Caribbean and Mediterranean contexts. Her broad areas of interest include: Francophone postcolonial theory; Caribbean and Mediterranean Studies; ethics; as well as questions of mobility and circulation of people and cultures. She has published or has forthcoming publications in Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, Convergences Francophones, Nouvelles Études Francophones, and Francosphères.