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Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism

2002; Indiana University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/ral.2002.33.2.210

1527-2044

Cilas Kemedjio,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Negritude, the claim of Africa as matrix, is an affirmation of identity that finds its full significance in the context of the black world. The rehabilitation of the Storyteller as ancestor of cultural practices in societies born out of the plantation situates Creolite in the heart of the Caribbean archipelago. Negritude and Creolite thus appear as the two essential components of an achipelagic consciousness that, at the level of literary criticism, is revealed through the exploration of intertextual linkages that weave together the literary Caribbean. Patrick Chamoiseau, in Ecrire en pays domine, meditates upon his own writing quest that remains attentive to the echoes of the “sentimentheque,” the collection of wellloved books and authors who have marked the author’s imaginary. Chamoiseau’s intertextual horizon is composed of, among others, readings of Breytenbach, Garcia Marquez, Lamartine, V. S. Naipaul, Glissant, Cesaire, the masters of the word whose Ancestor is the Storyteller on the Plantation. The transfiguration of well-loved books and well-loved authors into appreciable presences is the product of an intertextual networking that, with Chamoiseau as well as other writers of the Antilles, forms the basis of literary creation: “Et ces forces s’etaient imposees a moi avec l’autorite imperiale de leur monde qui effacait le mien. Elles m’avaient annihile en m’amplifiant. Et c’est avec ces mondes allogenes que mes ecrits fonctionnaient dans un deport total. J’exprimais ce que je n’etais pas. Je ne percevais du monde qu’une construction occidentale, deshabitee, et elle me semblait etre la seule qui vaille ” ‘These forces imposed themselves upon me with the imperial authority of their world, which obliterated mine. They had destroyed me while enlarging me. And it is with these foreign worlds that my writings operated in a complete alienation (deport). I expressed what I was not. I only perceived the world as a Western construct, uninhabited, and it seemed to me the only one that mattered’ (44). The expressions of anguish formulated by Chamoiseau as a response to the state of dependency in which Antillean literature emerges bears witness to a malaise that, beyond cultural practices, questions the very foundation of societies in the Caribbean archipelago: Colonized for more than five centuries, quintessentially Western, Caribbean peoples face the challenge of somehow recasting the modernist paradigm of progress, which is unashamedly triumphalist and Eurocentric. How at the same time to appropriate and subvert the central ideas associated with modernity? How to write in the colonizer’s language yet assert one’s own vision of the world? How to both represent and resist the march of History set in motion by Columbus? (Edmondson 125)