The consequences of “not‐Paris”?

Abstract

Postcolonial modernity has meant the creation of a very unusual set of circumstances for writers of the French‐speaking Caribbean. Called upon to insert themselves forcibly into a space from which, historically, they have been excluded, many of these writers have sharpened their revolutionary horns in Paris, political and cultural capital of the former imperial power. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, Paris has been a veritable inevitability for the francophone elite, a seemingly unavoidable destination that has served at once as a space of painful disillusionment, self‐interrogation, and even community‐building catharsis. While the quandary of negotiating this difficult relationship has been widely discussed, what has been less thoroughly considered is how the very framework in which this tension is negotiated has had an impact on canon formation in the region. In effect, more attention must be paid to the correlation between a refusal of theory and a certain degree of marginalization; to the possibility that an unquestioning acceptance – expectation – of theory as paradigm sets problematic boundaries and subtly undercuts regional unity in the postcolonial Americas.

Keywords:

• Antilles
• négritude
• antillanité
• créolité
• spiralisme
• postcolonial
• theory
• Paris
• exile
• francophonie

Notes

1. For a thorough and very fair examination of Le Brun’s position as expressed in Pour Aimé Césaire and Statue cou‐coupé see Bongie 342–47.

2. See Maeve McCusker in Forsdick and Murphy 118. “This circulation via the metropolis undercuts the explicitly anti‐hegemonic rhetoric of the créolité movement, which is recuperated, as a commodity, by the centre against which it positions itself – a mainstreaming of the margins which is of course symptomatic of the postcolonial artist more generally.”

3. Arguably a less dramatic act, worthy of noting here is Edmond Laforest’s symbolically resonant suicide in 1915. The well‐known Haitian poet is said to have serenely tied an Encyclopédie Larousse around his neck before jumping off a bridge into a river and drowning. This appears to be a particularly clear affirmation of “not‐Paris”.

4. This is a term first used by Haitian ethnologist Jean Price‐Mars to describe and condemn the Haitian elite’s alienated aspiration to French cultural standards and values.

5. Comments extracted from personal interviews with Maryse Condé. I discuss in greater detail this relative absenting of the Spiralists from critical discourse in my essay “Physical Internment and Creative Freedom: The Spiralist Contribution”.

6. An example of this might be the veritable obsession in postcolonial literature with providing corrected versions of regional history, noted by Graham Huggan among others. Huggan writes in the article “Prizing ‘Otherness’” that “there is still a residual conservatism playing about the Booker’s edges: a conservatism brought out in approaches to the prizewinning novels’ themes. One such theme, which some critics have regarded as a gauge of the Booker’s ‘postcoloniality’, is revisionist history. More than half of the prizewinning novels to date investigate aspects of – primarily colonial – history, or present a ‘counter‐memory’” to the official historical record (418–19). For discussion of the notion of “counter‐memory”, see Foucault (23).

7. Here I reference Watts, who opens his study with the following citation from Yanick Lahens’ L’Exil: entre l’ancrage et la fuite, l’écrivain haïtien: “For we are aware that more and more it is the literary institution (teaching, research, criticism, publishing) that determines creation and not the other way around” (62).

8. “By the simple fact of knowing how to read and write, the Haitian novelist is privileged, a member of the elite that controls political and intellectual life in Haiti” (Hoffman 45).