Disaster, Transgenerational Endurance and Duration in Béké Writing

Abstract

This article interrogates the preoccupation with transgenerational endurance and duration apparent in béké representations of “natural” disaster. It begins with a brief overview of the earliest literary texts to emerge from the French Caribbean islands: Auguste Prévost de Sansac de Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique (1806), and Jules Levilloux’s Les Créoles ou la vie aux Antilles (1835)—both of which feature catastrophes that claim the lives of plantation owners and pose a threat to their daughters, the bearers of béké culture. I then consider texts by béké women who lived in Martinique at the time of Mount Pelée’s eruption in 1902, an unprecedented disaster which eradicated almost half of the island’s white population: Clémence Cassius de Linval’s Cœurs Martiniquais (1919) and Élodie Dujon-Jourdain’s Le Sablier renversé (1912). In doing so, I trace a lineage of male and female béké authors who lament white losses in the aftermath of “natural” disaster and remain anxiously preoccupied with the caste’s longevity. Such an approach reveals how white Creoles have, across generations, taken to writing to promote, protect and preserve their culture. Anxieties around the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language consistently resurface in this intergenerational literary output which spans more than a century. As we shall see, some of these temporal concerns converge with Édouard Glissant’s observations on time and memory in the French Antilles, specifically his sedimentary poetics of duration.

Keywords:

• Béké
• transgenerational endurance
• duration
• “natural” disaster
• Mount Pelée

Introduction

According to Mark Anderson, “Nothing shakes one’s worldview more than the experience of a natural disaster” (2011, 3). After all, a disaster is, by its very definition, “a rupture or inversion of the normal order of things” (2011). Disasters decimate human-made environments in seconds, and thus cast into sharp focus nature’s dominance over humankind. These events also pose a threat to the status quo, opening up carnivalesque conditions in which hierarchies and privileges are (temporarily) suspended.¹ For béké writers, disasters have long symbolized the deterioration of their hegemonic power, and in the white Creole imaginary, the ethnocaste’s extinction is always perceived as an imminent threat, irrespective of the (prevailing) economic dominance of the caste. This victim complex, or “complexe obsidionale” as Roger Toumson names it, has been apparent since the first known French Antillean novel, published in 1806 (1989, 171).

Generational relations in and between white Creole families, as well as the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language, are strong features of these narratives: a dwindling patriarchy weakens the plantation superstructure, infants are breastfed by their mothers rather than a da (the crossing of racial boundaries between white child and non-white wetnurse is depicted as both dysfunctional and destructive), contact between béké children and the enslaved and their descendants is limited if not prohibited, white children are forbidden from speaking Creole and engaging in Creole practices such as storytelling (thus obstructing intergenerational cultural exchange), and endogamy is prevalent. Generational hierarchies also inform plantation ideology: the male planter, much like the French monarch—once a figurative father to the nation—constructs himself as a paternalistic master over the enslaved. Within the white Creole community, concerns around cultural and corporeal contamination are compounded by an anxiety rooted in the environmental, for while the crossing of racial/social boundaries poses a threat to béké culture over time, “natural” disasters have the capacity to obliterate multiple generations in a matter of seconds, a fact which became all too apparent following the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902.

White Creole writing has generally been overlooked in the French Antilles due both to its perceived lack of literary quality, and its unfashionable status. Considered a manifestation of the white (masculine) hegemonic “norm,” early Creole texts have traditionally been an object of suspicion and hostility in Francophone Postcolonial studies. Referring to the contracted lineages of French Caribbean writing that do not take account of these white-authored texts, Jacqueline Couti asserts that “Martinican literature was not inaugurated in the twentieth century with great authors such as Aimé Césaire. It existed in the nineteenth century and this must be studied to understand on-going conflicts and identity construction in the French Antilles” (2016, viii). Furthermore, as Maeve McCusker argues, we must scrutinize early béké writing both to reveal the fallacies which lie at the center of hegemonic identities and uncover (unexpected) continuities with contemporary Black authors whose works also exhibit spatial, temporal and environmental preoccupations (2021, xiii).

Following McCusker, I place this notoriously closed society under the spotlight by examining understudied fictional and personal writings by members of the béké community. I interrogate in particular the ways in which these authors express a preoccupation with transgenerational endurance and durability exacerbated by the occurrence of “natural” disaster on the islands.² I begin with a brief overview of two early white Creole fictional works: the first known French Caribbean novel, Auguste Prévost de Sansac de Traversay’s Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique (2017 [1806]), and Les Créoles ou la vie aux Antilles by Jules Levilloux (2020 [1835]). Both stories feature earth-shattering socio-political upheavals including the French and Haitian Revolutions, but they are also set against the backdrop of “natural” catastrophes such as storm-induced shipwrecks and plantation-destroying cyclones which cause the death of the white planter patriarch and pose a threat to white daughters—the custodians of whiteness. I then consider fiction and non-fiction by a subsequent generation of béké women, written in response to, or inspired by, a catastrophe which annihilated between one third and one half of Martinique’s white population—the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902: Clémence Cassius de Linval’s (pen name, Jean Max) Cœurs Martiniquais (1919) and Élodie Dujon-Jourdain’s almost entirely ignored récit de vie, Le Sablier renversé (written c.1912, published in 2002 [1912]). The title of the récit, bearing the name given to an instrument which is filled with sediment and used to measure the passage of time, explicitly evokes the temporal concern which as we shall see, so often pervades writing by members of the white Creole community. It is significant that the instrument is upturned, a metaphor perhaps for progress, evoking a sense of moving forward in time (as opposed to stasis) and speaking to the desire for endurance and duration so prevalent among the caste. In examining this literature spanning more than a century, I trace a genealogy of male and female béké authors who lament white losses in the aftermath of “natural” disaster and remain anxiously preoccupied with transgenerational endurance and durability. Such an approach both allows a fuller picture of the literature of the French Caribbean and provides insight into the perspective of women in what A. James Arnold describes as a “phallogocentric” literary tradition (1994, 6).³ In particular, this approach reveals how white Creoles have, across generations, taken to writing in an attempt to promote, protect and preserve béké culture.

Catastrophe and Cultural Contamination in Early Béké Writing: Les Amours (1806) and Les Créoles (1835)

Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, et description de l’île de la Martinique (1806), shifts between a love story and descriptions of the Martinican environment.⁴ Given the date of publication, it is arguably too soon to process more recent events such as the Haitian Revolution of 1804; Traversay therefore displaces the crisis at the heart of the novel, reflecting on the downfall of the figurative French father, Louis XVI, and the ramifications for the patriarchal order on the plantation—a space in which the planter constructs himself as a benevolent, paternal ruler over the enslaved. As one nineteenth-century French planter’s diary demonstrates, the death of the “père de la nation”—the progeny of the ancien régime and a symbol of continuity—was taken by those living in the colonies to reflect the dwindling power of the planter and signaled an urgent need to reclaim paternal authority on the plantations of the French Antilles.⁵ An ideology of paternalism which suggested a filial and generational association between master and the enslaved—whom writers such as Levilloux describe as “hommes-enfants” (2020 [1835], 15)—played a key role in sustaining and legitimizing the least benign of institutions. As Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observe, “Slave-owner paternalism involved not a good, painless, or benign slavery—all contradictions in terms—but a slavery in which masters took personal interest in the lives of their slaves” and the system relied not on benevolence but “the constant threat and actuality of violence” (2011, 2).

As well as focusing on a need to reassert patriarchal order, Traversay also stresses the importance of virtuous wives, mothers and in particular, daughters, in safeguarding white Creole culture. Carina, the only child of plantation owners M. and Mme Sainprale, is due to marry her cousin Zémédare.⁶ Following the death of her honorable mother (who nursed Carina as an infant and was responsible for her education), the young woman strays from virtue whilst under the care of her lenient father. She socializes with debauched characters, gambles, and is seduced by and set to marry a libertine French soldier named Mélidore. It is on board a ship to France that the soldier reveals his true nature and dies from smallpox. Carina and her father later become shipwrecked during a storm. When M. Sainprale falls into the water, Carina dives in after him and, as Couti observes, Carina’s attempt to save her father demonstrates her role as the guardian of patriarchy (2016, 16).⁷ Struggling to remain above water, M. Sainprale and his daughter sink in each other’s arms, “elle saisit son père et le soutient quelque temps, luttant avec succès contre la fureur des vagues. Ses forces bientôt s’épuisent, elle perd connaissance ; son père est étroitement serré entre ses bras, elle va périr avec lui” (Traversay 2017 [1806], 161).⁸ M. Sainprale’s weakness is therefore twofold: not only does he struggle to control Carina’s unruly behavior, but he is also physically frail, unable to save himself and his daughter from the stormy waters. Miraculously, Zémédare, who just happens upon the shipwreck, comes to their aid. He manages to bring both back to the shore and attempts to revive them: while he succeeds in resuscitating Carina, M. Sainprale does not survive the ordeal. His death reflects a dwindling patriarchy and represents the urgent need for planters to reclaim paternal authority.

The concern for Carina’s virtue throughout the narrative also reveals the importance placed on white women’s sexuality. By the novel’s close Carina, having returned to virtue, enters a convent before finally agreeing to marry her cousin. She and Zémédare go on to have a large family in France and their eldest is named Carina—assuring the continuation of both family bloodline and the mother’s name. It is significant, as McCusker observes, “that the child who marries at the novel’s end, and the only one identified in terms of gender, is female” (2021, 35). Traversay therefore evokes a diminishing patriarchy and a white Creole culture dependent on virtuous women. It is also notable that the future generation are born in the space of the metropole, rather than on the island, though the family do eventually return to Martinique. Zémédare encourages his compatriots both to plant trees (which have been depleted by felling to support the colonial project) and to put down familial roots on the island. In an extended passage he reflects on trees as harbingers of the future, and as a resource for future generations:

Pourquoi, demanderai-je à mes compatriotes, nous refusons-nous si obstinément à multiplier les arbres auprès de nos demeures, à embellir nos routes ? […] je n’ai vu pour ainsi dire nulle part, que l’on eût planté des arbres avec l’intention de jouir de leur ombrage. Je crois voir la cause de cette insouciance générale, dans l’habitude où l’on a toujours été dans les colonies, même parmi ceux qui y sont nés, de n’y regarder son établissement que comme ne devant avoir qu’une durée très limitée […] aimons le pays qui nous a vus naître, où nous sommes entourés de tous les objets de nos plus tendres affections. Nos pères ont fertilisé par leur sueur l’habitation que nous légua leur tendresse ; ils sont enterrés dans la terre qui nous nourrit. Abandonnerons-nous leurs ossements à des mains étrangères ? Qui est-ce qui ira pour nous verser des larmes et jeter des fleurs sur leur tombe ? Fuirons-nous tous ceux qui nous aiment pour aller vivre malheureux et inconnus dans des pays éloignés ? Dépouillerons-nous nos enfants de l’héritage que nous n’avons reçu qu’à la charge de le leur trans mettre ?… Apportons au contraire tous nos soins à l’améliorer, à en augmenter pour eux la valeur, à leur en faire chérir le séjour. (Traversay 2017 [1806], 104)

Zémédare refers to the fact that the colonists have always considered their “durée très limitée” yet they have remained on the island over generations. There is an explicitly intergenerational impulse in this extract, expressing both the urge to remain close to the burial place of ancestors (“ils sont enterrés dans la terre”) and the desire to provide for future generations (“Dépouillerons-nous nos enfants de l’héritage que nous n’avons reçu qu’à la charge de le leur transmettre ? Apportons au contraire tous nos soins à l’améliorer, à en augmenter pour eux la valeur”). As McCusker observes, Zémédare seems to suggest that “Through the sedimentation of time […] the alien island becomes a patrie; through habituation, the plantation, called the habitation, becomes habitable, hospitable, home. Or, as contemporary geographers might put it, space, invested with a sense of time, becomes place” (2021, 45). McCusker’s use of the term “sedimentation” here evokes Glissant’s sedimentary poetics in which he makes a connection between endurance and duration, to which I shall return later.

Much like Les Amours, Les Créoles ou la vie aux antilles (2020 [1835]) (set on the neighboring island of Guadeloupe) also involves a complicated romance. The text centers on the life of Estève O’Reilly and his forbidden love for a white Creole woman, Léa. The son of a white planter and an unnamed woman whom the narrator refers to as a “mulâtresse,” Estève “passes” as white (Levilloux 2020 [1835], 20). He is sent to school in France, where he meets Briolan, the son of a plantation owner (and brother of his future love interest, Léa). When a cyclone descends upon the island, killing Briolan’s father and destroying the family plantation, Estève invites Briolan, his surviving family and their freed slave and former wet nurse, Iviane, to take refuge at his father’s plantation (the praise of inter-béké solidarity is a typical trope of white Creole writing and continues into the twentieth century: Dujon-Jourdain’s father takes on his father-in-law’s debt for instance). Estève is unaware, however, that Iviane, who was formerly enslaved by his father and breastfed him as an infant, knows the truth about his lineage. Estève falls in love with Briolan’s sister, Léa, and they are set to wed, but before the two can marry, Iviane reveals Estève’s secret lineage. As McCusker notes, Iviane’s role as da to both white and “mixed-race” children allows her to “cross intimate racial boundaries and otherwise forbidden frontiers” (2013, 73). According to Couti, this crossing of racial boundaries highlights Mme Briolan’s failure in safeguarding whiteness (2016, 83). Unlike Traversay’s Mme Sainprale, then, Mme Briolan allows her daughter to become contaminated by the da’s breastmilk and her Creole language. Demonstrating the impossibility of their union, Estève and Léa are killed during a slave rebellion led by Iviane’s son. It seems that the cyclone is a key event in the text, killing Briolan’s father, destroying the family plantation, and displacing Léa from the protection of this patriarchal space. The disaster leaves the white woman vulnerable to contamination by outsider Estève, and their relationship jeopardizes the supposed racial purity of the white bloodline.

In both early Creole texts, then, “natural” disaster represents both literal and metaphorical destruction in colonial plantation society, signaling the death of the white planter patriarch who provides for future generations and endangering daughters, the guarantors of white lineages. Interestingly, in Les Créoles (Levilloux 2020 [1835]), it is the cyclone—occurring long before a slave rebellion—which destroys the family plantation, and which ultimately makes Léa (and the family bloodline) vulnerable to contamination. Les Créoles paints a much bleaker picture for the white Creole community than Les Amours (Traversay 2017 [1806]), depicting the plantation as an apocalyptic or “dead end” space as McCusker puts it (2021, 47). As we shall see, this apocalyptic thinking becomes increasingly evident in the literary output of the subsequent generation of female writers responding to one of the worst “natural” disasters in modern history: the eruption of Mount Pelée in May 1902. In considering these texts produced over the course of a century, I demonstrate how white Creole lineages appear at once strong (the community is tightknit: intermarriage and inter-béké solidarity is ubiquitous and outsiders—namely non-whites and metropolitans—are shown to be transgressive) and fragile, growing inexorably weaker over time. I shall also show how colonial plantation society—a civilization still in its infancy and struggling against a succession of revolts and “natural” catastrophes—at once compels white Creoles to think generationally and makes it difficult to ensure longevity of any kind. Across these texts, it seems that the generational cycle clashes with the cycles of “natural” disasters—the annual cyclone season and the unpredictable tectonic shifts that lead to volcanic eruptions. From this perspective, these generational cycles seem to work against nature and the environment, and vice versa.

“L’année Terrible”: The Eruption of Mount Pelée (1902) in White Women’s Writing

The eruption of Mount Pelée remains firmly lodged in the intergenerational collective memory—and in the literature—of the béké community in Martinique. According to Henriette Levillain, “Les seuls récits de vie écrits par les membres de la société aristocratique blanche des îles coïncident avec la crise sucrière du tournant du siècle, aggravée en Martinique par l‘éruption de la Montagne Pelée (1902), par conséquent avec les premiers départs vers la metropole” (Dujon-Jourdain and Dormoy-Léger 2002, vii–viii). At around 8:00am on 8th May 1902—after weeks of warning signs which were ignored or downplayed by government officials who were keen to avoid an evacuation due to an upcoming and hotly contested election between white conservatives and Black socialists—Pelée erupted, producing a nuée ardente, a phenomenon then unknown to scientists.⁹ Martinique’s former capital, Saint-Pierre, was decimated and 30,000 residents were killed in just ninety seconds. In the years following the disaster, Saint-Pierre remained something of a ghost town, with Pelée literally and metaphorically casting a shadow over the city space. And indeed, as Jack Corzani observes, Saint-Pierre’s reconstruction would be for some time largely literary, given a reluctance to rebuild in an area that was perceived to be vulnerable and the fact that Fort-de-France soon emerged as the new Martinican capital (1999, 76). Although Pelée has acquired metaphorical resonance in the literary works of prominent Martinican authors such as Aimé Césaire—who uses the eruption there as an image of successful slave rebellion—literal depictions of this momentous historical event (especially in fiction) are scarcer and often repressed (particularly in writing by békés).¹⁰ Saint-Pierre was once known as the Little Paris of the Antilles given its cultural vibrancy (it was home to an especially lively theater scene) and seeming sophistication. This reputation was of course also connected to its demographic make-up: it was considered to be the stronghold of the béké caste, in contrast with Fort-de-France for example. Both were of course, in reality, predominantly “Black” cities.

In her examination of early béké texts, McCusker observes that “A number of shared literary topoi reflect the hemorrhaging of social, political, and economic power away from the white ethno-class […] natural disasters such as hurricanes and shipwrecks are prevalent, as though to suggest that even the gods are aligned against the planters” (2013, 64).¹¹ And indeed, such an outlook prevails in béké accounts of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée, which focus excessively if not entirely on the plight of the white Creole community. Despite the impact of the event on Saint-Pierre’s largely Black population, békés have often portrayed the disaster as though it were an exclusively white catastrophe. In Hiver caraïbe for example, Paul Morand recounts an anecdote which Nobel Laureate poet Saint-John Perse shared about his grandmother: “Saint Léger […] me racontait que sa grand’mère, créole de vielle souche, parlait volontiers de cette catastrophe de la Martinique, où il était mort sept milles personnes. On lui objectait qu’il y avait eu quarante mille victimes : « Ah ! répondait-elle, si vous comptez les gens de couleur »” (qtd. Corzani 1999, 78).¹²

According to Christopher Church, of the estimated 30,000 who died in the eruption, “53% (sixteen thousand) were black, 33% were (ten thousand) mulatto and 13% (four thousand) white” (2017, 210). In overstating the number of white fatalities and entirely disregarding the non-white victims, the poet’s grandmother espouses a selective or racist vision of the disaster, and her flippant remarks are symptomatic not only of an ethnocaste losing its grasp on history, but they also reflect the mindset of a plantocracy who did not even see the non-white majority population, for whom the enslaved had the same status as furniture or animals. After all, the enslaved had been treated like chattel, branded, and burned, their humanity denied. This view is historically consistent with that of some of the earliest travelers to the French Caribbean islands, such as Père Labat, a notoriously cruel missionary in the late seventeenth century, who remarked: “Nous étions cinq personnes dans le canot avec cinq nègres” (qtd. Loichot 2013, 51). Labat denies the enslaved personhood, just as Saint-John Perse’s grandmother overlooks the non-white victims of the eruption. Thus, the béké woman’s comments encapsulate a long history, speaking to the origins, as well as the dissipation, of the plantocracy.

Clémence Cassius de Linval’s Cœurs Martiniquais is another novel which conveys a béké-centric historical viewpoint similar to that of Saint-John Perse’s grandmother. Linval was born in Saint-Pierre c.1880 where she lived with her family until the eve of the eruption, when they decided to flee the city.¹³ While she and her immediate family managed to escape Saint-Pierre before its destruction, much of her extended family perished in the disaster (Corzani 1999, 88). I shall also draw on Élodie Dujon-Jourdain’s neglected récit de vie, Le Sablier renversé (written c. 1912, published 2002 [1912]), which dedicates a chapter to 1902, described by the author as “L’année terrible.” Dujon-Jourdain, who lived in the nearby village of Le Prêcheur, was eleven at the time of the eruption. She recalls how the family, unable to rebuild their business in the aftermath of the catastrophe, reluctantly relocated to Paris. Both texts demonstrate the symbolic resonance of the event for the white Creole community and reveal in particular the béké preoccupation with transgenerational endurance.

Cœurs Martiniquais (Max 1919) centers on two white Creole families living in Saint-Pierre. Having been orphaned following a violent cyclone in 1891, the novel’s protagonist, Ginette Daubray, is adopted by the Fougeras family. Ginette’s uncle, Rodolphe, later marries Ginette’s adoptive sister, Anne-Marie Fougeras, solidifying the bond between the two families. In later years, Anne-Marie’s brother Roland hopes to marry Ginette, but she is intent on entering a convent. Rejected by Ginette, Roland leaves for Paris and is unaware of the events that are unfolding in Saint-Pierre in the spring of 1902. As Roland soon realizes, his entire family (as well as his beloved Ginette) perish in the volcanic disaster. He is devastated by this discovery and is overcome with a desire to return to his hometown. The novel ends several years after the eruption, when Roland finally returns to an unrecognizable Saint-Pierre which remains in ruins.

In this novel, the author exhibits the persecution complex described by Toumson, and aims to legitimize a white Creole power in decline (1989, 193). Linval is typical of nostalgic béké writers, who, as Annette Joseph-Gabriel highlights, regularly write in the language of “loss and annihilation” (2017, 14). The author does not imagine a new city rising from the ruins, but instead laments the loss of white livelihoods, lives and especially the old colonial order. She attempts to resurrect an imagined béké paradise, reconstructing Saint-Pierre as a martyr and a mother in the preface to the novel: “On a beaucoup dit de Saint-Pierre… qu’il me soit permis à moi aussi, de pénétrer au sein de ma cité et à travers les scories qui la souillent, de toucher à ce qui fut son cœur, Cœur de martyre et cœur de mère (Max 1919, 3).¹⁴ Here, Linval draws on religious, Catholic imagery, expressing a familiar persecution complex entrenched in the béké psyche. “Les scories” represent not only the volcanic rock ejected by Pelée at the time of the eruption, but also refers to the accusations of immorality made against the city. By recasting Saint-Pierre as a martyr and a saintly mother, Linval attempts to dig beneath the scoria that sullies her beloved city, now in ruins, and to challenge the belief that the disaster was an act of divine retribution inflicted upon a city perceived as the modern Sodom and Gomorrah.

In Linval’s reconstruction of Saint-Pierre, non-white figures are barely visible and those who are appear, quite literally, from “behind the scenes.” Early in the novel for instance, Ginette’s nanny, Da Ti-Clé—portrayed as a devoted and loyal servant to the white family—watches Ginette’s school play backstage rather than taking a seat in the audience.¹⁵ The da is later erased altogether from her role in the upbringing of the white child, when the Fougeras family adopts Ginette following the death of her parents during a cyclone. This erasure represents the more general removal of the non-white population from Linval’s reimagined Saint-Pierre.

Da Ti-Clé is, however, granted a brief moment of narrative authority (via indirect speech) when she tells Ginette and Anne-Marie about the Tombeau des Caraïbes, the site where the indigenous people of the island jumped to their death rather than surrender to French colonists: “C’était une haute falaise recouverte de gazon vert, taillée à pic sur la mer qu’elle surplombait en certains endroits. La tradition rapportait que, traqués par les Européens venus à la conquête de l’île, et acculés par eux en ce lieu, les Caraïbes, plutôt que de se rendre, s’étaient précipités là, dans les eaux” (Max 1919, 100–101).

Daniel Brant views Ti-Clé’s brief narrative intervention as “the manifestation of the text’s postcolonial unconscious,” given the fact that Linval appears to surrender narrative authority to “a subaltern figure who momentarily troubles the effacing silence in which colonial discourse enshrouds settler violence” (Brant 2015, 159). And certainly, in evoking this story of the native Caribs, it appears that Ti-Clé both preserves the memory of the island’s indigenous peoples and reveals the violence of colonial conquest. However, upon hearing the story, Ginette and Anne-Marie lament not the loss of Carib lives and culture, but instead mourn the unaccomplished civilizing mission: “Ceux-ci, insensibles à la civilisation dont ils ignoraient les bienfaits, n’avaient pas hésité à sacrifier à l’esclavage qu’ils appréhendaient, leur sauvage liberté. Un peu de mélancolie montait à l’âme des deux femmes en y songeant, pendant que Ti-Clé évoquait devant l’abîme ces images légendaires du passé” (Max 1919, 101). The statement does indeed testify to the layers of violence and suffering inscribed in the landscape. It is striking, however, that the author does not share the story of the indigenous Caribs with the intention of exposing early settler violence. Rather, Linval constructs this event as an opportunity missed, given that the colonists did not get the chance to “civilize” the “sauvage.”

As well as being given a diminutive name, Ti-Clé’s narrative authority is in fact undermined from the very outset of the novel. When Ginette relays another of Ti-Clé’s stories to Blanche (“white”), a young French visitor to the island, Madame Lebon (whose surname appears synonymous with goodness) quickly dismisses the story as superstition: “vous donnez, là à Blanche, un bel aperçu des superstitions qui ont cours en notre pays […] ces sottes croyances ne sont que des fables qui se transmettent ici, de siècles en siècles” (Max 1919, 9). I would argue, then, that Ti-Clé’s brief narrative interventions (and her general presentation) is intended to reinforce stereotypes about the non-white woman, namely her association with magic and malevolence. Mme Lebon, quickly quashing Ti-Clé’s story, depicts her as “Other,” a superstitious conteuse. Ti-Clé’s “otherness” (and her eventual erasure from Ginette’s life) prefigures the eventual erasure of the non-white population from Linval’s whitewashed Saint-Pierre. Ultimately, however, the violence of this quashing reveals the symptomatic anxiety on the part of the white woman about the threat posed to whiteness/Blanche by this world of Carib and Black mysticism.

Later in the text, the author once again constructs Saint-Pierre as a space of whiteness when Ginette and her friends climb Mount Pelée prior to the eruption. When the group reach the mountain’s summit, they discover the cross erected by the first settlers on the island as well as a bottle containing the names of some well-known béké families. Deciding to continue this white Creole tradition, they too leave their mark on the mountain by inscribing their own names and placing them inside the bottle. This scene, in which a group of young békés—the next generation of the owning class—mark and name their territory, testifies to what McCusker identifies in much earlier writing as an insecurity of ownership among a caste whose existence could be traced back only a few generations (2018).¹⁶ As we saw earlier, despite “this sense of a constricted past, or of a radically foreclosed future” (McCusker 2021, 46) characters such as Zémédare in Traversay’s 1806 novel do indeed imagine, project forward, pave the way and even provide for future generations. Zémédare associates the planting of trees with the “putting down of roots” and, “connecting time past, present, and future,” this act becomes “an existential intimation of the longue durée” (44). The text’s narrator also evokes La Fontaine’s fable in which a (childless) old man plants trees for the benefit of the next generation, “My great nephews will owe this shade to me / Well well!” (qtd. McCusker 2021, 45).

The scene in Linval’s text similarly registers this temporal dimension: the bottle is a connector between time past and present—a kind of time capsule—presupposing a future béké generation to receive it and thus speaking to the desire for endurance so prevalent in the white Creole caste. At the same time, it poignantly suggests the ephemerality of any sense of possession and dramatically reinscribes nature’s dominance over humankind, given that the bottle would have been smashed into smithereens at the time of the eruption. As discussed earlier, the colonists perceived their establishment on the island as very limited in time (“d’une durée très limitée” [Traversay 2017 [1806], 104]). As Mary Gallagher observes, “‘durée’—the French word for duration—has the same etymology as ‘dur’ meaning ‘hard’” (2002, 85). For Glissant, there is a link between endurance and duration “ils enduraient, ils duraient dans” (1996, 87) which suggests, as Gallagher notes, that “endurance confers ‘l’épaisseur de la durée’ or the density of duration” (2002, 85). In this context, the volcano—both a primordial witness and a reminder of what is yet to come—is the ultimate symbol of endurance and duration and perhaps explains why the békés had from their arrival on the island right up to the current generation in Linval’s text, attempted to mark and name it as their own.

Despite the author’s attempt to assert white Creole ownership and cleanse Saint-Pierre of non-white figures, they continue to haunt the fictional city especially as the eruption draws near. The narrator reveals, for instance, that when the ash produced by the volcano whitens the skin of the city’s Black residents, the children sing “aujourd’hui les noirs sont devenus des blancs” (Max 1919, 110). This exposes the author’s anxiety that the disaster has not only blurred but erased Martinique’s racial lines entirely, thus challenging white Creole dominance on the island. It is also significant that the observation is made by young Black children: Given the imperative to “blanchir la race” experienced by non-whites, over generations, this event appears to short circuit what should take generations of “mixing” to achieve.

In order to underscore this symbolic loss for the béké community, the narrator claims that in the beginning of 1902, “Jamais la ville n’avait paru plus riante, sous sa montagne et son ciel bleu. Jamais ses rues […] n’avaient revêtu plus d’entrain et de gaîté” (Max 1919, 77). Here the author reinforces notions of innocence and martyrdom, idealizes Saint-Pierre and constructs it as a city supposedly destroyed in its prime. The destruction is so seemingly unthinkable that when Roland (now living in Paris) is notified of the disaster by telephone, he responds in disbelief, “Saint-Pierre détruit !… Non, non, ce n’est pas possible ! Cet homme a dû se tromper” (119). For Roland (and indeed the author of Cœurs Martiniquais), it is inconceivable that this béké stronghold has been obliterated. The incomprehensibility of trauma becomes apparent as more details of the disaster begin to emerge. A telegram from one of Roland’s relatives in Fort-de-France confirms Saint-Pierre’s fate in explicit terms: “Tous, tous, ils avaient péri, sans qu’on pût trouver trace de leurs cadavres. Broyés. Carbonisés, détruits, par cette formidable trombe de feu sortie du sein du Mont-Pelé, et, cela, en moins de temps qu’on ne prend pour l’écrire ou le raconteur” (123). The statement emphasizes the speed at which the destruction took place and testifies to the enigmatic nature of the traumatic experience, underscoring the inability of written or spoken language to convey both the speed at which the eruption occurred and the extent of its destruction: obliterating buildings and businesses but also multiple generations of the owning-class in mere instants. The event is depicted here as an apocalypse of sorts and indeed in her memoir, Élodie Dujon-Jourdain similarly reflects on “ces journées inoubliables” of 1902 (2002, 86). She describes what she had witnessed as an eleven-year-old girl living on the outskirts of Saint-Pierre in the months and weeks leading up to the eruption, “Cela débuta par des odeurs sulfureuses violentes, émanations qui noircissaient toute l’argenterie” (85) but cannot conjure the events that took place on the morning of 8th May 1902 and instead defers to an image of what is widely considered as an apocalyptic event—the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79AD: “l’image de Pompéi ou d’Herculanum se présentait naturellement à l’esprit […] c’était le sort d’Herculanum et de Pompéi que nous attendions” (85–99). The reality of the 1902 disaster is repressed in Dujon-Jourdain’s account and in fact, she refers to the island as “Le vert paradis” in the ensuing chapter. Of course, it may be that Linval and Dujon-Jourdain concentrate more on a quest to (re)construct an imagined béké paradise rather than dwelling on the disaster itself, an example of the “plucky” planter type, endlessly resourceful in the face of adversity, identified by McCusker (2021, 138–159).¹⁷ But the precise examples above point rather to the “complex obsidionale” described by Toumson and an imaginary which remains anxiously preoccupied with the caste’s longevity.

Conclusion

For early béké writers like Traversay and Levilloux, “natural” disasters act as an allegory for the dwindling power of the planter patriarch in the wake of political upheavals such as the French and Haitian Revolutions. In both Les Amours and Les Créoles, disasters pose a threat not only to the planter but also his progeny, particularly his daughters, who, depicted in the texts as the first line of defense against miscegenation and cultural contagion, are the guarantors of white Creole bloodlines. We witness something of a shift in the years between Traversay’s novel and Levilloux’s text: while in 1806 there remains hope for regeneration among the white Creole caste, colonial plantation society has become a “dead end” by 1830. In more recent béké texts which refer to the devastating eruption of Mount Pelée, catastrophe signals a seemingly irreversible end to white hegemony, having decimated almost fifty percent of the island’s small but “dominant minority” (Kovátz Beaudoux 2002, 59). In reinventing an essentially white Saint-Pierre, authors such as Linval, for example, construct a version of history for a caste which, as we have seen, has long perceived itself as being on the cusp of extinction. She attempts to recover a city that never really existed, rather than imagining the rise of a new, transformed Saint-Pierre. In Cœurs Martiniquais, the unspeakable loss of Saint-Pierre serves as a metaphor for the rapidly diminishing power of the white Creole community in twentieth-century Martinique. The real tragedy of Saint-Pierre, her novel suggests, is less the loss of majority Black lives and more the toppling of an old colonial hierarchy which signaled an apocalyptic end to the status quo. This is also borne out in Dujon-Jourdain’s memoir, in which the author recounts the downfall of the family business and their subsequent migration to the more economically and climactically stable metropole.

Many rewritings of the eruption from the perspective of contemporary Black writers including Suzanne Dracius, Gisèle Pineau and Daniel Maximin, for example, often associate the 1902 volcanic disaster with more optimistic themes such as liberation and regeneration, while békés exhibit a persecution complex, frequently depicting their existence as a relentless struggle against socio-political upheaval and “natural” catastrophe. As Levillain suggests, white writers like Dujon-Jourdain “pressentant sans doute sa prochaine disparition,” took to writing to “nourrir la mémoire de ses descendants des traces de son existence aux îles” (2002, ix).

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Margaret Cunningham

Margaret Cunningham was awarded her Ph.D. for a thesis entitled “Paradise Lost?: Narratives of Disaster in the French Caribbean,” at Queen’s University Belfast in July 2023. Her research is concerned with the ways in which writers from the Francophone Caribbean imagine, construct, measure and in some cases, repress the cultural effects of “natural” disaster in fiction and non-fiction.

Notes

1 For Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnival was a celebration of “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions […] People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations” (qtd. Solnit 2009, 167).

2 I place natural in quotations because catastrophes are not natural, but humanmade. For as Martin Munro reminds us, “acts of nature, whether hurricane, landslide or earthquake, can inflict terrible human suffering because of human failures” (2010, 63), and I shall give an example of such failures later in the article.

3 This masculine dominance described by Arnold perhaps explains why Linval published under a male nom de plume (Jean Max) in 1919.

4 The novel is modelled on Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788).

5 Each year, Pierre Dessalles commemorates the death of the French King and laments the loss of the monarchy. See Forster and Forster (1996).

6 Endogamy or intermarrying (and the aspiration to “préserver la race”) is a strong feature of this notoriously closed society, a fact that continues to haunt their literary imagination today. See McCusker (2021).

7 This is a retort to Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, whose character Virginie could not swim. See Couti (2016).

8 Further references are to this edition of the novel and page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text.

9 A dense cloud of scorching hot gas, ash, and volcanic rock. The term was coined by geologist Alfred Lacroix following the eruption. See Romero (2013).

10 In Césaire’s writings, the volcano is linked to the maroon slave, phallic imagery and sexual eruption. See for example, Ormerod (1979, 61–74), or Rosello (1992, 115–139).

11 Discussing the life stories of béké women writing in the early twentieth century, Henriette Levillain similarly remarks that “la vie du planteur apparaît dans ces récits comme un combat de tous les instants contre les cyclones.” See Dujon-Jourdain and Dormoy-Léger (2002, ix).

12 French reporting followed a similar trend, focusing on the wealthy relatives of metropolitans (often government officials and/or members of the plantation owning caste) who perished in or were affected by the disaster. French aid distribution also seemed to privilege those who had managed to make their way to the metropole prior to or in the wake of the eruption, since, as one official remarked, “those in Martinique [had] perished, whereas in France and Paris they [found] themselves in a precarious position.” The majority of those who made it to the metropole came, of course, from the upper echelons of Martinican society, the béké and “mulatto” castes, and would ultimately have much of their lost finances restored through insurance claims. State assistance in the immediate aftermath of the event for members of Martinique’s much poorer, displaced population (about 20,000 of them, many of whom sought refuge in Fort-de-France) however, would amount to around seventy-five centimes per day. Some of these refugees were forced to return to their homes which sat at the foot of the volcano, despite ongoing volcanic activity. They were among the one thousand people killed in a second eruption on 20th May. See Church (2017, 205–208).

13 Corzani does not specify where Linval resettled. However, given the novel’s place of publication (Paris), one could speculate that she, like many other white Creoles including Dujon-Jourdain, relocated to the metropole after the disaster of May 1902. We also know that Linval had family living in Paris at the turn of the century. Corzani notes for example, that Clémence is the aunt of Paule Cassius de Linval, author of Mon pays à travers les légendes: contes martiniquais (1960), born in Paris in 1899.

14 Further references are to this edition of the novel and page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text.

15 Similar portrayals of the béké/da relationship are also evident in the personal writings of békées such as Élodie Jourdain. See Dujon-Jourdain and Dormoy-Léger (2002).

16 McCusker has explored this sense of insecurity in earlier béké novels. See McCusker 2018, 209–224.

17 McCusker discusses the “plucky Creole protagonists” of Marie-Reine de Jaham’s fiction for example. See McCusker 2021, 138–59.