Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

257 Pages·2013·3.167 MB·English

by  Louise Hardwick

Childhood, Autobiography
and the Francophone Caribbean
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 24
Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean.indd 1 11/03/2013 09:46:29
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
Series Editors
EDMUND SMYTH CHARLES FORSDICK
Manchester Metropolitan University University of Liverpool
Editorial Board
JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS MIREILLE ROSELLO
University of Melbourne Dartmouth College University of Amsterdam
MICHAEL SHERINGHAM DAVID WALKER
University of Oxford University of Sheffield
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem-
porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in
Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical
practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural
and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All
manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression
are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes
in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary
culture.
Recent titles in the series:
8 Maeve McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau: 16 David Scott, Poetics of the Poster:
Recovering Memory The Rhetoric of Image-Text
9 Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic: 17 Mark McKinney, The Colonial
Travels in Culture and History Heritage of French Comics
10 Celia Britton, The Sense of Community 18 Jean Duffy, Thresholds of Meaning:
in French Caribbean Fiction Passage, Ritual and Liminality in
Contemporary French Narrative
11 Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes:
Intercontinental Travel in Francophone 19 David H. Walker, Consumer
African Literature Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption
in Modern French Literature
12 Lawrence R. Schehr, French
Post-Modern Masculinities: From 20 Pim Higginson, The Noir Atlantic:
Neuromatrices to Seropositivity Chester Himes and the Birth of the
Francophone African Crime Novel
13 Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in
Narratives: Works of Mourning in 21 Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial
Progress Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and
World-Space in French Cultural
14 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts:
Theory
Contemporary French Writing of the
Photographic Image 22 Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the
Collège de France
15 Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A
Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial 23 Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A
Canon Social and Cultural History
Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean.indd 2 11/03/2013 09:46:29
LO UISE HARDWICK
Childhood, Autobiography
and the Francophone Caribbean
Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean.indd 3 11/03/2013 09:46:29
First published 2013 by
First published 2013 by
Liverpool University Press
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2013 Louise Hardwick
Copyright © 2013 Louise Hardwick
The right of Louise Hardwick to be identified as the author of this book has
The right of Louise Hardwick to be identified as the author of this book has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
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A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-84631-841-2 cased
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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
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Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean.indd 4 11/03/2013 09:46:29
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition 1
1 The Emergence of a Tradition 24
2 Apples and Mimic Men: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une
Enfance créole 55
3 The Poetics of Ethnicity in Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du
devant-jour and Le Cahier de romances 83
4 Alienation and Estrangement in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur
à rire et à pleurer 108
5 Childhood, the Environment and Diaspora: Daniel
Maximin’s Tu, c’est l’enfance and Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil
selon Julia 132
6 Thwarted Expectations? Stasis and Change in Haiti in
Dany Laferrière’s L’Odeur du café and Le Charme des
après-midi sans fin 158
7 Parental Paradigms and Gender Stereotypes 181
Afterword 203
Notes 208
Bibliography 230
Index 243
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Maryse
Condé, Gisèle Pineau and Dany Laferrière for generously discussing
several of the ideas expressed in this analysis with me.
At the University of Oxford, I am particularly indebted to Toby
Garfitt for his guidance, enthusiasm and friendship, which proved
inspirational. I am extremely grateful to Jane Hiddleston, Jonathan
Mallinson and Jennifer Yee, who provided advice and camaraderie.
During my Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, Martin
Crowley and Emma Wilson offered valuable support. At the University
of Birmingham, colleagues in French Studies have been a source of
friendly encouragement in the final stages of the project, and Béatrice
Damamme-Gilbert, Angela Kershaw and Berny Sèbe kindly provided
helpful comments on sections of the manuscript. Conrad James in
Hispanic Studies and Stewart Brown in the Centre of West African
Studies organized events which brought new perspectives to my own
work on the Caribbean. Particular thanks go to Jennifer Birkett, who
read the work in its entirety; her generous guidance was invaluable. My
students have brought the récits d’enfance to life, and I am especially
grateful to those who shared their own responses to these texts with me
during seminars at Birmingham.
At Liverpool University Press, I would like to thank the anonymous
reviewers of the proposal and manuscript for their constructive comments,
as well as Anthony Cond for his efficiency and encouragement. In the
wider Francophone Caribbean community, Jenny Zobel and Emily
Zobel Marshall discussed aspects of Joseph Zobel’s literary production
with me, and Martine Maximin discussed her stage adaptation of Le
Cœur à rire et à pleurer; for their kind encouragement, I am hugely
grateful. Fellow members of the community of French and Francophone
studies in general, and the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies
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Acknowledgements vii
in particular, have been inspirational. Special thanks must go to Patrick
Crowley, Charles Forsdick and Lorna Milne.
A three-year doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council enabled me to commence this project, and a further AHRC
grant permitted me to visit Martinique and Guadeloupe. Funding from
the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham, Homerton
College, Cambridge, the International Council for Canadian Studies,
the Mairie de Trouville, Trinity College and the Faculty of Medieval
and Modern Languages at Oxford, the Université Laval, Quebec, and
the European Science Foundation assisted me with travel to present my
work at a number of international conferences.
Family and friends, in Birmingham, Cambridge, Oxford and
elsewhere, have been a fantastic source of support, distraction and
adventure. This book is dedicated to my parents, Elaine and George
Hardwick.
Sections of the Introduction build on the insights I explored in the
article ‘The Rise of the récit d’enfance in the Francophone Caribbean’
in Postcolonial Poetics, edited by Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston,
and a section of Chapter 4 draws on my earlier article ‘“Est-ce cela être
aliené?” Alienation in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer’ in
Alienation and Alterity, edited by Paul Cooke and Helen Vassallo. I
would like to thank the editors for permission to reproduce this material.
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Sinon l’enfance, qu’y avait-il alors qu’il n’y a plus?
Saint-John Perse, Pour fêter une enfance, Eloges (1911)
du crachat sur la face
et cette histoire parmi laquelle je marche mieux
que durant le jour
la nuit en feu la nuit déliée le songe forcé
le feu qui de l’eau nous redonne
l’horizon outrageux bien sûr
un enfant entrouvrira la porte…
Aimé Césaire, ‘En vérité…’, Ferraments (1960)
that child who puts the shell’s howl to his ear,
hears nothing, hears everything
that the historian cannot hear, the howls
of all the races that crossed the water
Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea Is History’,
The Star-Apple Kingdom (1980)
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Introduction:
Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition
Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition
Et j’ai beau avaler sept gorgées d’eau
trois à quatre fois par vingt-quatre heures
me revient mon enfance
dans un hoquet secouant
Léon-Gontran Damas, ‘Hoquet’, Pigments (1937)
Representations of childhood are anything but simple. Childhood may
be, on the one hand, a democratic trope which derives its appeal from
the fact that it is a stage common to all humankind, or it may serve to
emphasize the intense alienation and isolation of individual experience.
Writing about childhood can function as an initiation into an unknown
society, the child’s learning curve correlating with that of the reader.
Alternatively, it may be an act of consolidation, as readers – particularly
those who are familiar with the context being described – identify
recognizable experiences. While childhood often evokes nostalgia and
celebration of (a lost) innocence, it is just as frequently used in order
to cast a critical eye over significant moments of social conditioning or
indoctrination, and their consequences.
The literary accounts of childhood examined in this study are
strongly aligned with autobiography. Autobiographical forms of writing
in Francophone Caribbean literature have, however, long been neglected,
occupying an annexed position in both an individual author’s wider
output and the critical studies of such works. Autobiography is not a
major identifiable genre in Francophone Caribbean literature before the
1990s. Prior to this, the overwhelming majority of authors approached
questions of identity formation from the standpoint of collective identity,
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