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Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas by F. Bart Miller

2016; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/com.2016.0031

1559-0887

Richard Serrano,

African history and culture studies

Reviewed by: Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas by F. Bart Miller Richard Serrano F. Bart Miller, Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014, 261 pp. Miller’s monograph is the first English-language book-length study in over twenty years of Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978), who along with Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor is considered one of the three fathers of Negritude. Considering the rise in recent years of Francophone Studies in tandem with the institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies in anglophone academia, this long gap is somewhat puzzling. Damas was long overdue for reconsideration and retheorization. Although Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas’s is not entirely convincing in every particular of its argument, Miller’s great contribution is to bring the long arc of Damas’s intellectual itinerary to the attention of scholars who have largely missed the significance of his oeuvre. Miller wants to make sense of Damas’s work by grafting genre studies onto Postcolonial Studies. He examines four of his principal works, one per chapter, by analyzing how Damas manipulates genre conventions while constructing his own version of Negritude, which Miller tucks into the larger academic discourse of Postcoloniality. The strongest chapters are those on Retour de Guyane (1938) and Veillées noires (1943), two key but lesser-known works by Damas. The first is a long essay about the inadequacies and evils of French rule in Guyane and the second a collection of rewritten folk tales from Guyane. Miller summarizes the content of the two works, analyzes their structure as essay and tales, and adds a few biographical asides to illuminate Damas’s intellectual trajectory. The chapter on Black-Label (1956) is particularly important, since it marks Damas’s return to poetry and seldom shows up in criticism. Miller for some reason sets the poem up as an epic and then an anti-epic; while the latter is more convincing, the argument could have been further developed (that the poem is divided into cantos might remind the reader of Dante’s Commedia, for example). Nonetheless, Miller manages to demonstrate how this poem is both intensely personal, focused on the anguish of the alcoholic narrator, and also illustrative of the woes of cultural assimilation. The chapter on Pigments (1937) is the weakest of the four, unfortunately. With the exception of the final poem of the collection, “Et Caetera,” which concerns itself directly with current events, the poems of Pigments are elusive and do not lend themselves to the bludgeon of postcolonial theory, which insists so much that literary texts mean one thing and must keep meaning it. These poems’ meaning, however, is constructed out of voice, ambiguity, rhythm, and irony, none of which are easily defined, and none of their effects in Pigments easily summarized. Although it may be true, as Miller asserts, that “Pigments can be thought of as a sort of instruction manual, an early work which enacts what is necessary to become [End Page 382] adept, or independent of colonialism’s ideological grasp on the individual colonial subject” (71), most of the individual poems are more slippery than Miller allows. Miller’s pages on the poem “Ils sont venus ce soir” are a good example of how insisting that Damas’s work is always about colonialism (which strikes me as already too broad and yet somehow also too limiting a category in this case) distorts the meaning of individual works. The poem never spells out who “they” are nor who the not-they dancing in the poem are either. Declaring that the poem is about colonization or slavery or assimilation or anything else is well and good, but the poem itself resolutely refuses to reduce itself to one interpretation or another. The title of the collection is Pigments, which is multiple and plural and not merely black or black-and-white; from the first page then the collection asks the reader to think about a world multiple, plural and never just black or black-and-white. Miller is also too eager to take Damas’s pronouncements about his life and work at face value. His biography is admittedly...