Paris Noir au féminin: Fabienne Kanor’s DOM-TOM Histories

Abstract

This essay considers the relationship between Caribbean women and the contemporary Parisian landscape in the work of Fabienne Kanor. In reviving the narratives of working-class migrants from the French Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, Kanor evokes an urban interaction strikingly different from that of interwar Black Paris. Born in Orléans to parents from Martinique, Kanor also marks a contrast with other Afro-Parisian women writers in that her novels are permeated with a disavowed history of slavery, forced migration, and cultural assimilation. Drawing on her parents’ narratives as ‘beneficiaries’ of the BUMIDOM, the state agency created in 1962 to foster migration from French Overseas Departments, Kanor’s 2004 novel D’Eaux douces cogently illuminates one of the shadow narratives of May ’68: that of DOM-TOM Parisians, whose determination to erase their racial and cultural history would leave a generation of black women to confront that absence in their everyday encounter with the French capital.

Keywords:

• Fabienne Kanor
• D’Eaux douces
• Paris noir
• BUMIDOM
• Martinique
• immigration

Notes

1 Challenge magazine, edited by Dorothy West, was published from 1934 to 1937. See Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda & Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. U of Massachusetts P, 1979, p. 98.

2 See www.walkthespirit.com, and www.blackparistour.com. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018.

3 There is a second, less visible and successful, market for the sights and sites of Afro-Antillean Paris, represented for example by Kévi Donat’s bilingual online tour company, Le Paris Noir: Black Paris Walks. www.blackpariswalks.com. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018. Bennetta Jules-Rosette cogently examines this distinction in print guidebooks of the late twentieth century (see “Black Paris: Touristic Simulations.” Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 21, no. 4, 1994, pp. 679–700).

4 Khadi Hane, Des Fourmis dans la bouche. Paris, Denoël, 2011.

5 Lauren Ekué, Icône urbaine. Paris, Anibwe, 2005; Léonora Miano, Blues pour Elise. Paris, Plon, 2010.

6 Afropolitanism, generally evoked in the Anglophone context (see for example Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism.” Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, edited by Simon Njami, Jacana Media, 2007, pp. 26–29; and Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar.” The LIP Magazine, 3 Mar. 2005, www.thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018), has come under critiques of elitism, consumerism, and lack of political consciousness. For an excellent summary of this debate, see Susanne Gehrmann, “Cosmopolitanism with African roots: Afropolitanism’s ambivalent mobilities.” Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 61–72.

7 Fabienne Kanor, Humus. Paris, Gallimard, 2006.

8 Along similar lines, Kanor asserts in another interview that “cette mort d’une extrême violence est à concevoir comme un acte d’émancipation” (“Sillonner” 60).

9 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien. Paris, UGE 10/18, 1980.

10 See for example Dominique Aurélia, “Dislocations textuelles et reconfigurations identitaires dans Humus de Fabienne Kanor.” Archipélies, vols. 3–4, 2012, pp. 303–312; and Célia Sadai, “D’eaux douces de Fabienne Kanor: Triptyque cruel sur un corps insulaire.” La Plume Francophone, 2 Apr. 2009, www.la-plume-francophone.over-blog.com/article-29794601.html. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018.

11 Fabienne Kanor, director, Des pieds mon pied: documentaire. Cipaf, 2009.

12 Marshall writes of the basement in her childhood home in Brooklyn, where her immigrant mother would gather with other women: “the best of my work must be attributed to them: it stands as a testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the wordshop of the kitchen” (89).

13 See also Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François, “Espace océanique, parole archipélique et polyphonie mémorielle dans Humus de Fabienne Kanor.” Women in French Studies, vol. 25, 2017, pp. 77–92.

14 “Le corps des femmes porte la mémoire,” asserts Kanor (Francis 280).

15 See Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Houghton Mifflin, 1996, pp. 272–281. See also Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s claim that the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in 1969 signaled the beginning of the decline of the Négritude movement (Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape. U of Illinois P, 1998, pp. 70–73).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dawn Fulton

Dawn Fulton teaches French and comparative literature at Smith College. She has published articles on immigration and urban space in Francophone literature (works by Calixthe Beyala, Jean-Roger Essomba, Alain Mabanckou) and is the author of Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism. She is currently working on Afro-feminism in French and Francophone literature.