“Griffus ou non griffus”: Naming, baptism, and global racialized capitalism in Césaire’s La tragédie du roi Christophe

ABSTRACT

This article extends scholarly analysis of race in imperial capitalism by examining the naming and baptism of formerly enslaved Black people in Aimé Césaire’s 1963 La tragédie du roi Christophe. King Christophe, the protagonist, attempts to give his people a foothold in a world system based on their exploitation by giving names – or griffes (meaning both “claws” and “signatures”) – to his aristocracy in order to bind them and their land to him. The article argues that Christophe resorts to tropes of naming and baptism as sacralizing gestures to establish power structures that will anchor his state against the flow of European-dominated capitalism. The term griffe, however, also refers to a person of mixed race; in a context where both whiteness and racial admixture are suspicious, the pun on griffe problematizes Christophe’s reliance on the power of naming. Christophe’s tragic fallacy is to trust language at the expense of other considerations.

KEYWORDS:

• Aimé Césaire
• La tragédie du roi christophe
• baptism
• griffe
• racial capitalism
• Haiti

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge Kate Aid, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, whose suggestions proved invaluable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The danger of re-invasion is discussed by Trouillot (1972, 3) as well as Dubois (2004, 10–11).

2. All translations of La tragédie into English are my own. For an analysis of spitting imagery as metaphor for imperial capitalism in La tragédie, see Tolliver (2020, 39–45).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under [Grant FA-252195-17].

Notes on contributors

Julie-Françoise Tolliver

Julie-Françoise Tolliver is associate professor of French and francophone literature at the University of Houston, Texas. Her monograph, The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures (2020), won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2017–18) and the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award (2020). She co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, “Alternative Solidarities: Black Diasporas and Cultural Alliances During the Cold War” (2014). Her work has appeared in Contemporary French Civilization, Women in French, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and the American Review of Canadian Studies.