Spatial Identities and Glissantian Detour: Narrative Strategies in Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove

Abstract

This article analyzes narrative strategies in Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove in light of Édouard Glissant's theory of “detour.” The novel revolves around the death of a stranger in a small Guadeloupean village and the testimonies of those gathered at his wake. A traditional reading of the text points to an orderly, contiguous time frame (dusk-night-dawn) setting limits for the action of the text. Multiple narrators, however, form a tapestry of spatial identities whose relations are porous, tangled, and overlapping, ultimately refusing to be constrained by the boundaries of the imposed structure of the narrative. The result is a text fraught with temporal and spatial discontinuities, gaps, and absences. Ultimately, these narrative strategies of resistance perform a textual detour, creating openings and fresh perspectives from which to reexamine assumed connections between Antillean identities and the past.

Keywords:

• Maryse Condé
• detour
• Édouard Glissant
• identity
• narrative strategies
• temporal dimensions
• Traversée de la mangrove

Notes

¹See, for example, Sidney Mintz's study on the development of Afro-Caribbean plantation culture and his discussion of the “intricacies of resistance and accommodation” (76).

²“L'espace Martiniquais est un anti-espace, limité au point de rogner sur l'être, mais divers au point de le multiplier infiniment. Ambiguïté. C'est là une île qui est comme une anthologie des paysages qu'on appelle tropicaux” (Glissant, Discours 471; italics added).

³“Nous avons avancé que la Relation est totalité ouverte, en mouvement sur elle-même. C'est dire que ce que nous soustrayons de cette idée, telle qu'elle s'est ainsi forgée, c'est le principe d'unité. Le tout n'y est pas la finalité des parties: car la multiplicité dans la totalité est totalement une diversité. (Glissant, Poetique 206; italics added).

⁴Celia Britton makes a similar argument about meaning in her study of Traversée as she points out the ways in which Condé transgresses the codes she has created. Britton notes that meaning relies on relationships between the various parts of a whole: “Each element is meaningful because it forms one term of a relation with others and is integrated into a vertical hierarchy of levels” (“Breaking” 39). Britton's larger point is that Condé performs “loops” and “skids” violating syntactic and hermeneutic codes, troubling meaning by bringing in “irrelevant” information, thus producing an “irreverent” text.

⁵Maroons were frequently in contact with plantation slaves, exchanging goods and food.

⁶My analysis of Sancher as agent of detour is largely inspired by Britton's examination of Massoul's story about the Senegalese ticks in Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren A. Brown

Lauren A. Brown is an adjunct assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at Occidental College. Her primary research interests include contemporary Francophone Caribbean literature, plantation societies in the French Atlantic, and Black France.