FROM MUSE TO MILITANT - OhioLINK Electronic Theses and

FROM MUSE TO MILITANT:
FRANCOPHONE WOMEN NOVELISTS AND SURREALIST AESTHETICS
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School
of The Ohio State University
By
Mary Anne Harsh, M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
2008
Dissertation Committee:
Approved by
Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras, Advisor
Professor Karlis Racevskis
Professor Sabra Webber
______________________________
Advisor
French and Italian Graduate Program
ABSTRACT
In 1924, André Breton launched the Surrealist movement in France with his
publication of Manifeste du surréalisme. He and his group of mostly male disciples,
prompted by the horrors of World War I, searched for fresh formulas for depicting the
bizarre and inhumane events of the era and for reviving the arts in Europe, notably by
experimenting with innovative practices which included probing the unconscious mind.
Women, if they had a role, were viewed as muses or performed only ancillary
responsibilities in the movement. Their participation was usually in the graphic arts
rather than in literature. However, in later generations, francophone women writers such
as Joyce Mansour and Suzanne Césaire began to develop Surrealist strategies for enacting
their own subjectivity and promoting their political agendas. Aside from casual mention,
no critic has formally investigated the surreal practices of this sizeable company of
francophone women authors. I examine the literary production of seven women from
three geographic regions in order to document the enduring capacity of surrealist practice
to express human experience in the postcolonial and postmodern era.
From the Maghreb I analyze La Grotte éclatée by Yamina Mechakra and
L'amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar, and from Lebanon, L'Excisée by Evelyne Accad.
These novelists represent mental and physical trauma and the fragmentation of
male/female relationships in times of combat. Célanire, cou-coupé by Maryse Condé and
ii
Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle by Simone Schwarz-Bart illustrate how
Antillean literature reflects the oral traditions, supernatural beliefs and the heterogeneous
cultural inheritance of its peoples. Both Jovette Marchessault’s visionary novel, La mère
des herbes, which draws upon her autotchonous heritage and lesbian orientation, and
Anne Hébert’s transgressive Les Enfants du sabbat, poignantly sabotage the paternalistic
domination of the English-speaking Canadian government and the Catholic Church
which relegated women to the role of reproductive automatons. I also examine feminist
collaborative writing in Quebec to understand how it kindled an intellectual revival and a
sophisticated field of literature and literary criticism.
This dissertation charts the evolution of francophone women’s involvement with
Surrealism from its inception, when they played only the passive, objective role of Muse,
to the middle of the Twentieth Century when women writers became active militants for
equal rights while expanding the definition of surreal practice.
iii
Dedicated to
Fred and Marian Roberson
You always told me I could do “... anything I set my mind to.”
Michael A. Harsh, my very patient husband
Now you finally have your kids out of college.
My daughter, Molly Harsh, and my son, Leo J. III
The only regrets you’ll ever have are for the adventures you haven’t taken.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my advisor, Danielle Marx-Scouras, for her fervor and fire, her
zealous scholarship and her confidence and encouragement from the very beginning of
this journey. She has unselfishly shared her excitement, her impeccable judgment and
her animated personality with all of us fortunate enough to have worked with her.
I wish to thank Professor Judith Mayne, who welcomed me to The Ohio State
University ten years ago to begin my M.A. studies, in spite of my greying hair, and
Professor Karlis Racevskis, who continued to reassure all of us “late bloomers” that we
really did belong in academia. I am grateful to have come into contact with perspectives
outside my field in classes taught by Professor Racevskis and Professor Sabra Webber
and for their participation on my committee.
I appreciate Professor John Conteh-Morgan’s and Professor Christiane Laeufer’s
enthusiastic support in their classes and in the preparation of my minor fields of study.
Professor Diane Birckbichler’s wisdom and counsel have widened my experience
and encouraged me to integrate both sound practices and good humor into my teaching.
I wish to thank my Department Chair, Rich Hebein, at Bowling Green State
University and my colleagues for their encouragement while I completed my writing.
My first Surrealism class—Jocelyn Atkins, Cullen Colapietro, Teresa Eyler, Donna
v
Figura, Naomi García, Hannah Neville and Ashley Rearick—have expanded my horizons
and helped me to fine-tune my conclusions.
Finally, I thank my colleague, Oniankpo Akindjo, for a thousand kindnesses.
vi
VITA
December 27, 1946 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Born – Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA
2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . M.A. French, The Ohio State University
1999 – 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Research & Teaching Assistant
The Ohio State University
2001 – 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assistant Director
French Individualized Instruction Center
The Ohio State University
2004 – 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting Instructor of French
Saint Michael’s College
Colchester, Vermont
2005 – 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graduate Teaching Assistant
The Ohio State University
2007 – Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visiting Instructor of French
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio
PUBLICATIONS
Research Publication
1.
"The Grotesque and the Carnivalesque in Roch Carrier's La Guerre, Yes sir!: A
Twentieth-Century Narrative with Renaissance Echoes." Interdisciplinary and CrossCultural Works in North America, eds. Mark Anderson and Rita Blayer. New York:
Peter Lang Publishing, February 2005.
2.
Book Review of Valérie Orlando's Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls.
Research in African Literatures, (Autumn 2004).
vii
3.
Book Review of Mildred Mortimer's Maghrebian Mosiac: A Literature in
Transition. Research in African Literatures 34.2 (Summer 2003).
4.
Online Learning Packets to accompany Invitation au monde francophone to be
used by instructors and students in levels 101.51-103.51 in the French Individualized
Instruction program at the Ohio State University. (Jarvis, Gilbert A. and Thérèse M.
Bonin and Diane Birckbichler. Invitation au monde francophone, 5th ed. Fort Worth:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000.)
Module 6, Chapter 7: "Le temps passe."
Module 7, Chapter 8: "La Pluie et le beau temps"
Module 8, Chapter 9: "Le monde du travail"
Module 9, Chapter 10: "On fait des achats"
Module 10, Chapter 11: "Être bien dans sa peau"
Module 11, Chapter 12: "Des goûts et des couleurs"
Module 12, Chapter 13: "Le passé et les souvenirs"
Module 13, Chapter 14: "Le monde d'aujourd'hui et de demain"
Module 14, Chapter 15: "Les arts et la vie"
5.
Online Learning Packets to accompany Bravo! Communication, Grammaire,
Culture et Littérature to be used by instructors and students in level 104.51 in the French
Individualized Instruction program at the Ohio State University. (Muyskens, Judith A.,
Linda L. Harlow, Michèle Vialet, and Jean-François Brière. Bravo! Communication,
Grammaire, Culture et Littérature, 4th. ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2001.)
Module 16a, Chapter 1: "Heureux de faire votre connaissance"
Module 16b, Chapter 2: "Je t’invite"
Module 17, Chapter 3: "Qui suis-je?"
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field : French
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Vita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Chapters:
1.
The Fathers and (M)Others of Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
A Political and artistic revolution: Surrealistic practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Automatic writing and dream transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Collective and collaborative experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Shocking the public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Genre boundaries, the marvelous: Visual and textual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Shell shock, insanity and altered consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Eroticism and the woman as Muse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Outside the Hexagon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.
Nightmares of War and Dreams of Peace: Traumatized Subjects in the
Maghreb and the Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Introduction to the Maghreb and Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Yamina Mechraka and La Grotte éclatée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Assia Djebar and L’Amour, la fantasia .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Evelyne Accad and L’Excisée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Surrealist Practices for Mechakra, Djebar and Accad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
The Capacity of the written word to “translate” trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Trauma writing and history in L’Amour, la fantasia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Civil and Family War in Lebanon: Evelyne Accad & L’Excisée . . . . . . 80
Psychoses, textual fragmentation and genre irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
A Novel and much more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
French newpaper accounts, letters, theater: Djebar’s history . . . . . . . . . 91
The severed hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Accad’s genre irregularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103
ix
The French language subverted and elaborated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
3.
Resistance to DOM(ination): Maryse Condé’s and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s
magical (Sur)realism and traditional culture in the Caribbean . . . . . . . 114
Geography, history and language in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114
The DOM’s resistance to colonialism and neo-colonialism . . . . . . . . . 117
Négritude and Surrealism in the Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .117
Valorizing orality, writing literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Maryse Condé: Writer, teacher, critic, storyteller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Condé and Célanire, cou-coupé . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Simone Schwarz-Bart: Ethnographer and novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Schwarz-Bart and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Folk proverbs and oral tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Proverbs and storytelling in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle . . . . . . 145
Folk language and storytelling in Célanire, cou-coupé . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Superstition, folk religion and the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Condé’s linguistic treatment of the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Simone Schwarz-Bart and the occult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
The (DOM)inated French Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.
A Not-so-Tranquil Revolution in Quebec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
The French language in the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
A Negative image of Quebecois culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Quebec’s “Grande Noirceur” and the Carnavalesque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Coming out of the darkness: The Automatists and Refus Global . . . . . 187
The Women make a fuss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Nurturing the Quebec imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Anne Hébert, Québécoise de souche, privilégiée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Jovette Marchessault, blue collar, native and lesbian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Hébert’s prisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Psychology and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Jovette Marchessault’s benevolent sorceress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
La misère noire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Nature as redeemer, Grandmother as guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Common ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Surrealists, idealists, feminist outlaws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5.
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Theory and practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
The Maghreb and the Mashrek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
The French Caribbean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
The Province of Quebec .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
x
Bibliography and works cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
xi
CHAPTER 1
THE FATHERS AND (M)OTHERS OF SURREALISM
In her 1999 study of the European Surrealist movement, entitled Surreal Lives:
The Surrealists 1917-1945 (1999) Ruth Brandon notes that the adjective "surreal," which
leaps so readily to mind as a definition of "the disjunctions, the bizarre concatenations,
the dreamlike illogic ..." of the past century, had not found common usage until the
French avant-garde literary and artistic movement headed by André Breton defined it.
Basing their research on a "super-reality" that they believed dwelled in the unconscious
mind and that had been largely unexploited by earlier writers and artists, Breton and his
followers chose the word that Brandon believes "perhaps more than any other, defines
our time" (485).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, with political trouble brewing in
various corners of the world, bizarre events that defied description became everyday
occurrences providing writers with phenomena that required different techniques to
portray than they had previously employed on a regular basis. The emerging field of
psychoanalysis offered fresh approaches for describing and explaining human mental and
physical phenomena. Later, at mid-century, reports of revolutionary wars for
independence in the former French colonies and the ensuing struggles of minority races
and women for human rights in these locales were similarly rife with allusions to the
1
"surreality" of life experience. In this study, we will examine the literary production of
seven women from three geographic regions—the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the
province of Quebec—comparing their concerns and techniques with those of the early
Surrealists, in order to document the enduring capacity of surrealist practice to express
human experience in postcolonial and postmodern eras.
In 1924, Breton officially launched the Surrealist movement in France with the
publication of Manifeste du surréalisme. In the Manifeste, he speculated that the
subconscious mind might comprehend a plethora of creative sources and proclaimed that
he and his associates would search for links between what he called the "two adjoining
realities," the previously untapped subconscious and the realm of conscious thinking:
Si les profondeurs de notre esprit recèlent d’étranges forces capables
d’augmenter celles de la surface ou de lutter victorieusement contre elles,
il y a tout intérêt à les capter, à les capter d’abord, pour les soumettre
ensuite, s’il y a lieu, au contrôle de notre raison (20).
Impressed by Sigmund Freud's work, Breton speculated that psychoanalytic methods
might provide a model for pioneers outside the medical profession—for authors like
himself and for artists—to discover creative and previously unexplored resources within
themselves rather than relying solely upon external inspiration. Brandon terms this
search "the great artistic journey of the ... [twentieth] ... century" (157).
Norbert Bandier's Sociologie du Surréalisme reveals the social and professional
trajectories of the young Surrealists, who philosophically distained "real" work.
However, they managed to become well-enough connected in the Parisian publishing and
art worlds to garner a certain credibility among their peers—if not subsequently to be
2
recognized as either famous or infamous by the general public.1 Throughout the most
productive years of the movement, the period between the two World Wars, personality
conflicts and ideological differences with Breton precipitated rapid turnovers in his
surrounding cast of comrades, although a handful of associates remained loyal to
surrealist principles until his death in 1966. Alain Joubert's Le Mouvement des
Surréalistes ou Le Fin Mot de l'histoire: Mort d'un groupe--Naissance d'un mythe (2001),
tolls the death of Surrealism as a dynamic movement and posits its conversion to the
status of a myth.
However, if we look beyond the chiefly French context of the surrealist current,
we see that it did not so rapidly vanish in other corners of the world as it did in Europe
when its tenets were superceded by other avant-garde movements such as the nouveau
roman, Tel Quel and the feminist movement. The seeds of revolt against reigning
artistic ideologies and literary traditions are often sown at the same time that untenable
social and economic conditions provoke political upheaval. At times of turmoil in
society, literature and the arts transcend their aesthetic bounds, acquiring the role of
documenting struggle as it unfolds, and the artistic elite can be found at the forefront of
political revolution. Such was the situation, in the 1950s and 1960s, when a few subjects
who had been fortunate enough to gain access to a formal education in the French
1
Norbert Bandier, Sociologie du Surréalisme 1924-1929 (Paris: Dispute, 1999).
Bandier's sociological study of the founders of Surrealism is particularly interesting in
that it documents the primarily bourgeois and provincial origins of its members and
points out the various trajectories of the participants in terms of the social and financial
success that each gained. He maintains that André Breton was the only member of the
group to stolidly eschew monetary pursuits. He placed himself in a position from which
he could readily criticize the moneymaking projects of the others, which contributed to
dissention in the group and often undermined its theoretical solidarity.
3
colonies began to foment social and economic change and to document their resistance
against overseas dominance while employing practices heretofore unprecedented in
Francophone literature. They availed themselves of a few of the same practices that the
young French intellectuals who had created the Surrealist movement had utilized in
metropolitan France in the period between the two World Wars.
Until the 1970s, the majority of studies about Surrealism focused solely on the
male French writers and artists of the movement. The earliest feminist critique to appear
was Xavière Gauthier's Surréalisme et sexualité (1971), which has been compared to
Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe in terms of its analysis of the sexual attitudes of
the group and its practice of excluding women from full membership. According to
Susan Rubin Suleiman in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde
(1990):
Whether they idealized the female body and their love of it, as they did
in their poetry, or attacked it and dismembered it, as they did in their
paintings, the male Surrealists, according to Gauthier's analysis, were
essentially using the woman to work out their rebellion against the
Father (18-19).
Two years after Gauthier's study, further scholarly articles highlighting women's
contribution to the Surrealist art movement began to appear. The first was Gloria Feman
Orenstein's "Women of Surrealism" which appeared in Feminist Art Journal in 1973,
although it was not until twenty-four years later that she again took up the subject of "La
Femme Surréaliste" in the periodical Obliques. In 1985, Whitney Chadwick published
Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, which deals primarily with the women
artists associated with the first generation of Surrealists. A decade later, in 1998, she was
responsible for editing Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, the
4
catalog of a traveling art exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which
underscored the partnership roles which a few women played in the inspiration and
production of the first and second generations of Surrealists.
In the meantime, Mary Ann Caws set her course for a career which has spanned
more than two decades when she published an article in Diacritics, entitled "Singing in
Another Key: Surrealism Through the Feminist Eye" in 1984. In a number of other texts
prepared both alone and in conjunction with other scholars, including Surrealism and
Women edited with Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (1991), The Surrealist Look:
An Erotics of Encounter (1997), she has devoted herself to recuperating the artistic and
literary work of a handful of the women who were unofficially connected to the
movement.
The works of the wives or lovers of the first Surrealists gained credence during
the later years of Surrealism. It is Caws's Écritures de femmes: Nouvelles Cartographies
(1996), co-edited with Mary Jean Green, Marianne Hirsch and Ronnie Scharfman, while
it does not speak of the Surrealist movement per se, that does undertake a more expansive
"double revision of the history of 'French' literature of the twentieth century" by
… re-thinking the traditional definition of periods, of genres, and of genius
in order to make them include women, on the one hand, and colonial subjects
on the other ... in order to ... comprehend the radical displacement [of literary
history] from the [geographical] territory of France to the French language (6-7).
I share with Caws, et. al., an interest in focusing attention on women's literature written
in French and the promotion of its more notable examples to their rightful places in the
literary canon. Because a significant percentage of the widely acclaimed fiction of
French expression to appear in the past half century has been written by women who also
5
hail from former French colonies, I believe that it is important that these novels be
"centered" alongside literature written by men, both French and Francophone, so that
neither the designation Francophone nor feminine will continue to carry a stigma. I also
wish to contribute to the venture of amending Francophone literary history through the
project of this dissertation by establishing a link between the surreal practices found in
the work of important Francophone women authors and those of their male precursors
while comparing the motives, methods, and products of the two groups. I will note the
similarities between two bodies of work that, at first glance, seem incompatible because
of the time periods in which they were produced, the geographic origins of their authors,
and the gender politics of their creators.
From the Maghreb I have chosen to analyze La Grotte éclatée (1986) by Yamina
Mechakra and L'amour, la fantasia (1995) by Assia Djebar, and from Lebanon, L'Excisée
(1982) by Evelyne Accad. These authors describe the mental and physical trauma
suffered by victims of wartime violence as well as the fragmentation of male/female
relationships in times of combat. I will examine how the first generation of Surrealists
portrayed post-traumatic stress syndrome and insanity after World War I in France and
compare it with how Mechakra, Djebar, and Accad dealt with mental illness in the
literature of the former French colonies during and after their wars for liberation.
Stepping beyond the pale of wartime trauma, we will scrutinize Accad's sociopolitical theories which also concern themselves with the so-called "gender wars," so
common in regions of the world where fundamentalist hegemony denies equal rights to
women. She compares family and religious battles about the place of women in society
to actual armed conflict. Therefore, in the context of the economic and social changes
6
that accompany the liberation of a nation, it is crucial to examine the resistance put in
motion by women against paternalistic prohibitions that continue to burden them after
their nations become free from French rule. Furthermore, it is significant that both
Djebar's and Accad's theories and fiction attempt to reconcile the victims of past wars as
well as the current generation to the "surreality" of peacetime violence.
From the Caribbean, I have chosen the novels Célanire, cou-coupé (2000) by
Maryse Condé and Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (1980) by Simone Schwarz-Bart.
These works vividly illustrate how Antillean literature draws deeply from the
heterogeneous cultural inheritance of its peoples and resources itself in their oral tradition
and supernatural beliefs. Many of the critically acclaimed authors—past and present,
male and female, Francophone and Anglophone—who have roots in the French
Caribbean départments outre-mer, share an interest with the first generation of French
Surrealists in the central role of the occult and the marvelous in literature. I include these
two works by Condé and Schwarz-Bart from Guadeloupe in this study so as to illustrate
the bridge that oral tradition and religious belief build between the largely illiterate
inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and the literature created by intellectually elite and
politically savvy indigenous authors. The first Surrealists appreciated the folk artifacts
and folklore of so-called "primitive" peoples as representative of a more natural state of
human existence; so, too, do these contemporary female authors value the rapidly
disappearing cultural artifacts of their people for their capacity to encourage solidarity
and anchor regional identity.
As in other regions of the former French empire, women have also waged
personal and public battles through the literary medium in the province of Quebec on the
7
North American continent. Just as the Surrealists attacked the French government for its
complicity in World War I and ridiculed the presence of the Catholic church in everyday
affairs, Anne Hébert and Jovette Marchessault poignantly strike out against the
authorities that denied French-speaking citizens of Quebec entry into the modern world
until the second half of the twentieth century. Their primary targets were the
conservative and paternalistic English-speaking Canadian government that treated
Francophones as second class citizens and the Catholic Church that relegated women to
the role of reproductive automatons. Hébert's protagonist, a sorceress who infiltrates a
novitiate in the novel Les Enfants du sabbat (1975), suggests that the crimes visited upon
women and children by the Catholic Church would delight the Prince of Darkness rather
than the Almighty it professes to serve. As well, Marchessault's visionary literature,
including La mère des herbes (1980), draws upon her autotchonous heritage, creating a
supernatural utopian world of women who encourage one another to create a "Feminist
Renaissance." I will use the theories spelled out by several Quebecois feminists to
examine the works of Hébert and Marchessault and to look at the phenomenon of
feminist collaborative writing and its contribution to the field of literary theory in
Quebec. This movement has given rise to an impressive slate of women authors and
critics whose engagement in literary as well as political issues is unprecedented in any
other region of the French-speaking world.
Before outlining works which illustrate surrealist practice as drawn upon by these
Francophone women novelists—which will be detailed in their historical and social
contexts later in this study—it is essential to become familiar with the genesis of the
Surrealist movement so that we can understand how it continues to influence studies of
8
the unconscious mind as a wellspring of inspiration in artistic creation and how it informs
my investigation of the works chosen for this study.
A POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC REVOLUTION: SURREALISTIC PRACTICES
It is important when documenting an artistic movement to situate it within its
social and historic context. The founders of a new movement generally denounce the
earlier dominant movement, develop their own strategies, advertise their innovative
approach as they denigrate the practices of their predecessors, and move toward an
apogee that provides a point of departure for the movement that will eventually supersede
theirs.
In Surreal Lives Brandon notes, "Surrealism began among poets whose aim it was
to create a revolution, both political and artistic" (3). Their movement set out to
revolutionize the world of literature by making a dramatic break from bourgeois ethics
and esthetics. Serge Gavronsky explains in Écrire l'homme: Surréalisme, Humanisme,
Poétique (1986) that Breton had to define his own movement by denouncing "the grand
paternal traditions of poetry and culture in France" that had guided previous generations:
It is essentially about the tyranny of reason such as the disciples of Descartes
had imposed it and not only in the domain of philosophy, or even positivism,
but also in writing, whether it is about realism or the romantics whose
verbal expression was dominated by the message (38).
Breton poignantly illustrates this rejection of preexisting esthetics in the Manifestes du
surréalisme (1924), "… l’attitude réaliste, inspirée du positivisme … m’a bien l’air
hostile à tout essor intellectuel et moral … faite de médiocrité … ses goûts les plus bas …
la clarté confinant à la sottise, la vie des chiens" (16).
9
Having served his country on the field of battle and in the wards of French mental
hospitals during World War I, where he treated wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, he
vowed to fight a second crucial battle—this time on the literary front:
Le surréalisme, tel que je l’envisage, déclare assez notre non-conformisme
absolu pour qu’il ne puisse être question de le traduire, au procès du monde
réel, comme témoin à décharge. Il ne saurait, au contraire, justifier que
de l’état complet de distraction auquel nous espérons bien parvenir ici-bas (60).
Post-World War I literary historians point out that the first world war had as profound a
psychological effect upon non-combatants as it did on soldiers who carried arms. A
number of future Surrealists who saw combat in the War were as appalled by the socalled "rational" political regime that had led France into it as they were disgusted by the
French people's tolerance of generalized inhumanity and savagery. When they undertook
their revolt, it encompassed not only the renunciation of government policies but also the
rejection of realist, symbolist, and Dada literary principles and practices—in short, a
comprehensive rebellion against the reigning political and artistic status quo. Searching
for a less compromising approach to life and creativity, they mounted “a campaign of
systematic refusal” to conform to society's mores that extended into all domains of life
including philosophy, ethics, mental and physical health, social interaction, politics, and
art. Hédi Abdel-Jouad summarizes some of these refusals in his Fugues de Barbarie: Les
Écrivains maghrébins et le surréalisme (1998):
... l’arsenal de négations qui marquent son écriture: refus de l’orthodoxie,
du statu quo, de la raison raisonnante, du discours langue de bois, …
le refus de tout tabou pour une libération totale de l’éros, le refus de
l’interdit religieux … le refus de toute compartimentation de l’homme
que le rationalisme a écartelé entre Orient et Occident, raison et
imagination, rêve et réalité … de l’une à l’autre s’ouvre, immense,
10
le champ d’expérimentation, du rêve et de l’imagination ….2
Having enunciated these refusals, the Surrealists began to develop a set of positive
practices, including delving into the unconscious mind, which were to dictate the path
that esthetics would take into the future.
AUTOMATIC WRITING AND DREAM TRANSCRIPTION
It is through the practice of automatic writing that the Surrealists first attempted to
coax an individual’s desires from the subconscious into the realm of artistic experience
and the raw material of the dream world into the light of day. Automatic writing was to
function as the poetic link between unconscious and conscious worlds. In their first
attempt at automatic writing, Breton and Philippe Soupault experimented with a variant
of the "speaking cure" that Breton had found effective in treating his shell-shocked and
insane patients during the war. Rather than free-associating aloud, as he had encouraged
his patients to do, he and Soupault decided to write down, as quickly as possible and with
no concern for the organization of their thoughts or the grammar of the results, whatever
came into their minds. The result was a process that Breton describes in Les Manifestes
du surréalisme in this way:
… je pris du papier et un crayon sur la table qui était derrière mon lit.
C’etait comme si une veine se fût brisée en moi, un mot suivait l’autre,
se mettait à sa place, s’adaptait à la situation, les scènes s’accumulaient,
l’action se déroulait, les répliques surgissaient dans mon cerveau, je
jouissait prodigieusement. Les pensées me venaient se rapidement et
continuaient à couler si abondamment que je perdais une foule de détails
délicats, parce que mon crayon ne pouvait pas aller assez vite, et
2
It will be seen later that Abdel-Jouad's study of Surrealism in the Maghreb is pertinent
to my investigation into the novelistic practices of Mediterranean women who wrote
about the trauma of war and their revolt against Islamic male hegemony.
11
cependant je me hâtais, la main toujours en mouvement, je ne perdais
pas une minute. Les phrases continuaient à pousser en moi, j’étais plein
de mon sujet (33).
When the two finally stopped writing, they were elated by the results and surprised that
what they had written was similar on many counts: each man's work revealing
extraordinary energy, an abundance of emotion, some unusual imagery, and a measure of
absurdity. (According to Breton, Soupault was somewhat obsessive about his attempts to
organize certain snatches of thought or to give them a title, while he had felt quite free
from formal literary constraint). The content of this first written experiment was entitled
Les champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields) and was published in 1920. In retrospect, it
is considered to have been the first surrealist literary work.
During the early years of the movement, automatic writing was the first and the
most frequently used practice for probing the subconscious. Until other techniques came
into use, the name of the practice was often conflated with the name of the movement, as
it is here in the first Manifesto:
SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose
d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le
fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout
contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou
morale (36).
It was not until the Surrealists began to experiment with the transcription of dreams that
they made a distinction between the two terms and recognized that automatic writing was
merely one of several practices that would define Surrealism. From these first attempts at
written free association, it is important to emphasize the importance of its evolution into
one of the main practices of the Surrealists as a group as it furnishes us with a
12
background that explains the collective element of many of their beliefs and practices, a
subject which we will discuss more fully in Chapter Four.
Giving credit to Freud for his investigations into the labyrinths of sleep, Breton
asked himself why it was that the workings of the mind during sleep had been relegated
to a status inferior to the workings of reason while an individual was awake. He was
convinced that the free flow of an artist's inspiration was more likely to be sidetracked by
the interferences of everyday life than it would be when he was asleep. He pointed out
that while he was awake, man was "the plaything of his memory" which allowed him
only clumsily to recall the inspiration he perceived while sleeping (21). The experience
would effectively “lose in translation” from one state to another. He also concluded that
the dream state possessed its own logic (or a lack thereof) and that waking broke the
thread of this organization.
Another of the Surrealists, Louis Aragon, in his Traité du style (1928), concurred
with Breton on the importance of the oneiric in artistic inspiration believing that
rationality does not get between reality and the dreamer to censor an experience when
one is asleep, although it does temper one's creative decisions when s/he is awake.
Wondering, "Can't the dream also be applied to the resolution of the fundamental
questions of life?" the Surrealists set out to systematically study it, believing in "the
future resolution of these two states, in appearance so contradictory, as are dream and
reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality ... " (24).
One major inconsistency arises when critics discuss the surrealist practice of
dream transcription. Breton based his theories on the spontaneous reception of
knowledge and inspiration from the nether side of consciousness. Surrealists set out to
13
systematically study the phenomenon, using automatic writing to script the acquired
impulses and information. In an attempt to preserve the most ephemeral of contacts
between the sleeping and the waking worlds, they ended up resorting to a scientific
organization of information obtained through the mechanical process of transcription. In
doing so, a portion of the spontaneity of the experience was lost. In short, the Surrealists
faced a crisis of representation which was similar to that faced by the other esthetic
movements which had preceded theirs when they grappled with the corporeal aspects of
translating surreal experience into the written word.
COLLECTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE EXPERIMENTATION
Band. Cast of characters. Clan. Clique. Crew. Crowd. Flock. Gang. Throng.
Troop. Synonyms for the collective, which privilege group status over individual
achievement, abound in chronicles of the Surrealist movement. From the outset, Breton
and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing points out the propensity for working
together that infused the Surrealist movement. Although the two men recorded separate
experiences, they worked together at the end of the day to analyze collectively what they
had produced, publishing the resulting Champs magnétiques (1920) together.
A typical outing for members of the group consisted of strolling about the streets
of Paris in hopes of stumbling upon an extraordinary incident or of encountering
someone they hadn't expected to meet. Such an afternoon might be followed by an
evening spent together in a café discussing the role of "objective chance" or accident in
providing fodder for creativity. Together, the Surrealists might play "Exquisite Corpse."
This was a game in which four different artists could participate. The first person drew
14
the head, folded the paper over, and passed it along to the next participant whose task it
was to draw the torso. The third person might draw the legs and the last person the feet.
The group then unfolded the paper to study and interpret their collaborative drawing.
Sometimes the group would borrow from the rituals of popular spiritualists of the era and
participate in séances hoping to receive motivation from the "other side." Breton did not
personally believe that it was possible to contact spirits from another sphere, but he
supported spiritualism as a possible means of seeking inspiration. The group also
experimented with "collective sleeping" and hypnotism as means of gathering
information about various sorts of sleep. Despite frequent quarreling, the members of
this movement prized the outcome of combined effort and codified the doctrine of
collaborative production.
SHOCKING THE PUBLIC
Iconoclasm was the watchword of the Surrealist revolt. The movement is
notorious for having deliberately transgressed the social and moral norms of the period,
shocking the public and incurring sharp disapproval by its critics. Breton’s disturbing
goals are publicized in the second Surrealist Manifesto,
... comment veut-on que nous manifestions quelque tendresse, que même
nous usions de tolérance à l’égard d’un appareil de conservation sociale,
quel qu’il soit? ... Tout est à faire, tous les moyens doivent être bons à
employer pour ruiner les idées de famille, de patrie, de religion ... (77).
His calculated statement infuriated all sectors of French society since it attacked family
life, the nation, the government, and the Church in one fell swoop.
15
In La Défense de l'infini (1927), Aragon describes his literary mutiny against the
canonical masters of French literature:
I'm not following the rules of the novel or the rhythm of the poem. I'm
writing and speaking as if Gustave Flaubert had never lived ... Marcel
Proust bores me to death and M. Giraudoux is a rabbit's fart ...When I
think of Honoré [de Balzac] I can understand why people like Paul Valéry
and André Breton pour scorn on their novels. But after all, I'm spitting in
Balzac's face"(269).
An anecdote that illustrates the most blatant of the Surrealists' attacks against literary
tradition concerns the nation’s honored novelist, Anatole France, who had won the 1921
Nobel Prize for literature and was a longtime member of the French Academy and is
described in Bandier's Sociologie du surréalisme (1999) as "... Celui dont le style est
présenté comme modèle de finesse aux étudiants en lettres ..." (130-1). While he lay
dying, the group prepared a brutal pamphlet entitled Un Cadavre in which they unleashed
a tirade of criticism against his work. Joseph Delteuil stated, "Cette perfection formelle
manque de profondeur et de jus," and Aragon added, "Il écrivait bien mal."3 Brandon’s
retelling of their bombastic attack on the previous generation of revered authors includes
the anecdote in which the Surrealists suggested that someone should empty out an old
box of France’s books, put him in it, and throw it into the Seine. In recounting the
incident, she concludes, "... though it caused a tremendous scandal, [it] did not bring
3
Bandier makes an argument that differs from most accounts concerning the Surrealists.
He uses Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach to explain the trajectories of its
adherents during the first five years of the movement. He details the rise of many of the
members from provincial bourgeois backgrounds. For the most part, they were poets at a
time when novelists possessed the most symbolic and financial capital. He presents a
well-documented account of the collective strategies used by the group as its members
strove to unseat the novelists who dominated the literary scene in Paris in the early 1920s
in order to usurp their places. He concludes that, at least in the beginning, their
"revolution" intended to be cultural rather than political.
16
upon its authors the retribution that might have been expected ..." (230-1). What it did
accomplish, however, was to confirm that the Surrealists would stop at nothing to
vanquish both the survivors and the deceased of previous artistic movements.
GENRE BOUNDARIES, THE MARVELOUS: VISUAL AND THE TEXTUAL
Apollinaire, one of the most influential precursors of Surrealism, explained that
his poetry broke the rules of classical form in an attempt to reflect the unexpectedness of
life itself. Since the Surrealists had vowed to forego productive work, in the bourgeois
sense of the word, fantasy, childlike play, exploration, and experimentation occupied
their days. Declaring reason and rationalism irrelevant, the direction of their ventures
was often determined by accident, happenstance, or "objective chance" which was
reflected in poetic forms which defied conventions. They abandoned typical artistic
subjects in favor of everyday topics and found the beautiful in unexpected juxtapositions
of incongruous objects.
Another element of their practice that is very important to this study is the
Surrealists' belief in the marvelous and the supernatural which they saw depicted in
indigenous art and in native myths and folklore. During the founding years, the
Surrealists perceived the so-called "primitive" beliefs of African tribalism, folklore, and
indigenous folk artifacts as reflections of a former time when human art had not yet been
confined within the narrow limits that rational academism dictated. As an antidote to the
positivist view that every happening was explainable by reason and science, they
borrowed inspiration from the artistic practices of the so-called “unspoiled” cultures
which remained in the world. Later on in his career Breton became interested in the
17
influence voodoo might have had on the "surreality" of Caribbean experience and the
literature and artwork that descended from it.
During the earlier Dada period and during the first years of the Surrealist
movement, writers and poets made up the majority of its members. To these were
associated, from time to time, Soupault, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray,
Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, who represented the graphic arts world. By 1928, so
many artists had joined the ranks that Breton published an essay entitled "Surrealism and
Painting." The Surrealists were also particularly intrigued by the rise of the cinema in
France because of its capacity to create bizarre images and to visually attack bourgeois
sensibilities. However, since Surrealists had spoken out against the bourgeois practice of
actually working to earn a sustainable income, moving picture artists such as Dalí and
Luis Buñuel suffered from the dilemma of having to raise the funds they needed to
finance their cinematic projects from members of the same bourgeois society that the
Surrealists disdained. Since their range of interests was so wide and their aversion to
accepting support from wealthy supporters so strong, the mundane problem of financial
subsidies often threatened the ideological basis of "play" as they defined it.
Since the Surrealists were interested in such diverse projects, it is not surprising
that their writing practices would also reflect a wide range of styles. In his first
Manifesto Breton criticized the novelistic genre, particularly in the realist novels of his
predecessors', as incapable of expressing Surrealist innovation:
Chacun y va de sa petite “observation.” ... On ne m’épargne aucune des
hésitations du personnage; sera-t-il blond, comment s’appellera-t-il, ironsnous le prendre en été? ... Et les descriptions! Rien n’est comparable au
néant de celles-ci; ce n’est que superpositions d’images de catalogue, l’auteur
en prend de plus en plus à son aise, il saisit l’occasion de me glisser ses
18
cartes postales... (16-17).
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that he and nearly all of his followers, although
privileging poetry, also indulged in book-length storytelling pursuits at one time or
another. A prime example is that, over the past seventy-five years, literary critics have
classified Breton's own Nadja (1928) as a novel which illustrates all of the practices of
Surrealism—even though its structure does not fit the classic definition, and in spite of
the remonstrations that Breton has raised to the contrary. As with the definitions of
written genres, the Surrealists also rejected commonly-held laws governing the
appearance of works of art. They would spontaneously combine words and images in
their texts and paintings thereby creating hybrid images and new mixed genres: their
films, their paintings and collages—and their literature—all reveal the syncretism of the
visual and the textual.
SHELL SHOCK, INSANITY, AND ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS
As a youth, Breton had studied medicine. During World War I, he worked at the
Val de Grâce hospital in Paris where he first used techniques of psychoanalysis in
treating the mentally ill. According to Brandon in Surreal Lives, he, together with
Soupault,
... discussed these studies and their implications. For with that unerring
instinct for the significant ... Breton had realized that here, in Freud's
writings, lay the route-map for the great artistic journey of the coming
century: the journey to the interior (156-7).
In 1916, he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Dizier where he worked
primarily with shell-shock patients who had returned from the battlefront. These patients
19
presented a variety of neurotic physical symptoms such as blindness, deafness or
paralysis as well as violent bodily tremors and recurrent nightmares. After coming into
contact with these mental cases, Breton began to realize the importance of bringing fears
repressed in the subconscious to the surface in order to alleviate the pain of their trauma.
This is not to say that, later, he and his group did not harbor some objections against
Freudian analysis. Against it, they expressed, " ... une critique explicitement dirigée
contre la sublimation et la banalisation de la sexualité dans les recherches
psychoanalytiques" (Serge Gavronsky, Écrire l'homme: Surréalisme, Humanisme,
Poétique, 1986, 59). Because of their clinical experience with this treatment on mentally
disturbed patients, they theorized that healthy artists might also be able to unlock the
creativity residing in the unconscious and try to funnel its inspiration into their works.
The character of the artwork sometimes produced by the insane population, who
were housed in the asylum alongside shell-shocked patients, also stimulated the interest
of the Surrealists. They became acquainted with the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan, and this
relationship yielded a body of knowledge about paranoia that intrigued the Surrealists
painters, in particular Dalí, and pushed him to "move away from passivity towards the
active harnessing of this paranoiac power" (Surreal Lives 378-80). He was convinced
that graphic artists as well as authors could benefit from what he called his paranoiaccritical method:
I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance
of the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive
states) to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely
the world of reality ("The Rotten Donkey." This Quarter, trans. J. Bronowski.
NP:1932, 378).
20
By simulating the state of insanity, active observers might tap into the artistic reserves
that appeared to lodge in the minds of the insane.
The Surrealists promoted any and all methods of achieving an altered state of
consciousness. Not all of them used illicit drugs, but several in the group used opium and
cocaine, and many were heavy users of alcohol. Using the argument that prohibition in
the United States had not effectively curtailed the use of alcohol, Antonin Artaud, whose
deep depression improved only while he was taking legal anti-anxiety medication, argued
for the suppression of laws forbidding or limiting the use of narcotics in his newspaper
column "Sureté générale." A few starved themselves in order to experience the
lightheadedness that hunger brings, and still others experimented with sleep deprivation
hoping that they could induce a mental ambiance somewhere between the dream state
and waking.
EROTICISM AND THE WOMAN AS MUSE
It is to Katharine Conley's Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in
Surrealism (1996), that I owe the most interesting explanation to date of the role of the
woman within Surrealism's first and second generations. She states that, for the first
generation, a woman's body reflected the male artist's self "usually buried in the
unconscious," and conflated the woman's corps which provided insight with the corpus of
the text in the process of the automatic writing exercise. In short, the Surrealists "used a
woman's body as a metaphor for the automatic text, which is itself also a tangible
'medium' between the poet's conscious and unconscious thoughts" (9). In André Breton:
Naissance de l'aventure surréaliste (1988), Marguerite Bonnet distills this explanation of
21
the role of the woman's body as the object of desire that "... caused the subject to
experience, confusedly, a revelation concerning itself. The object/subject distinction
totters and becomes muddled; an interpenetration occurs" (133).
To balance this blatantly sexist appropriation of the woman's body, it is to her
credit that Conley redeems the concept by comparing it to the French feminist practice, in
the 1970s, of écriture féminine that “...similarly encouraged the practitioner to express
her innermost, uncensored thoughts, with a higher awareness of the body—an awareness
anticipated by the pre-1970 writing of women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and
Unica Zürn," whom she sees as belonging to the post World War II movement (24).
Conley points out the practice of automatic writing as practiced by women members of
the second generation of Surrealism, as a point of encounter between the Surrealist
women and the feminist movement.
The surrealist practice of exploiting woman as a muse is more complicated than
simple sexual desire inspired by physical appearances. It is not surprising, given the
social climate of the times, that the Surrealists, too, would see women as second-class
citizens. Like the bourgeois men they deplored, they didn't consider their female
companions as true equals in their revolt against society's mores. Women, for the most
part, were not to be accepted as equal partners in the household any more than they
would be considered equal partners in business or in intellectual circles. They existed
only to facilitate the lives of men: they typed the proceedings of meetings and
experiments; they cared for their physical needs; and their family wealth often paid living
expenses so that the Surrealists themselves would not have to break their pact of idleness.
Women were also there to be adored and idealized. What is ironic is that this first
22
generation of Surrealists did not comprehend, in spite of their desire to break with
bourgeois ideals, that they envisioned the role of women in exactly the same way as did
the rest of the French male population. Had they accepted women as their equals in an
era when this would have shocked bourgeois society, they might have appeared even
more revolutionary.
What separates the surrealist concept of women from that of classical mythology
is that their doctrine endowed women with erotic images to accompany their mystical and
supernatural symbolic powers. Woman became an icon, the incarnation of amour fou,
the closest man could approach to the mystical without being pulled into the whirlpool of
insanity himself. Furthermore, an insane woman, rather than being marginalized as she
might have been in other circles, was seen to possess a special access to the unconscious.
The most famous example of this, Breton's frequenting of Nadja in his most celebrated
work, is admittedly an attempt on his part to gather information and inspiration from her
because of her special status as intermediary between the worlds of sanity and insanity.
Although Breton criticized the institutional treatment of the insane in Nadja, his callous
abandonment of his muse to the insane asylum can hardly be read as an act of kindness.
Surrealist art depicts an enormous amount of cruelty toward women. While
Conley asserts that the visual slicing and dicing of female bodies so often seen in
paintings by Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Hans Bellmer was both an acting out of the
men's worst nightmares and an exercise pursued primarily for its shock value, la femme
chez-d'oeuvre is a frightening rendition of woman (21). Fortunately, as Suleiman points
out in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1997), the second
generation Surrealist women who maintained relationships with these
23
artists—Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, and Zürn—were able to establish
artistic dialogues with the works of their partners. She suggests,
… that such internal dialogue is to be found in not only in the work of
women directly involved with male Surrealists to whose work they
were specifically responding, but was a general strategy adopted, in
individual ways, by [other] women wishing to insert themselves as subjects
into Surrealism (27).
Both Conley and Suleiman emphasize the ability of a select group of women poets and
artists to prevail despite the overt misogyny of the earlier years of the movement.
OUTSIDE THE HEXAGON
Now that we have surveyed the social and cultural scene which gave rise to the
movement of Surrealism and followed its evolution through two generations in France, it
is time to turn our attention to the regional sites from which the works of our authors
originate in order to survey the development of a third generation of Surrealists who
were, in the second half of the twentieth century, more likely to welcome women artists
and authors into their midst. By retracing the paths of others who have employed
Surrealist practice, we will come to a better understanding of what it has meant and still
means to live in a surreal world.
In Fugues de Barbarie: Les Écrivains maghrébins et le surréalisme (1998), Hédi
Abdel-Jouad examines the influence of the Surrealist literary movement and the Sufist
religious movement on a few of the earliest male authors from the Maghreb. He quotes
the Algerian poet Habib Tengour: "Le Maghrébin a été longtemps surréaliste sans le
24
savoir"(5).4 In particular, Abdel-Jouad studies the literary pursuits of Tengour, Jean
Amrouche, Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, Nabil Farès, Mouloud Feraoun, Tahar Ben
Jelloun, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Abdellatif Laâbi, Farid Lariby, and Youcef Sebti—all male
writers, well-recognized in the literary tradition of this region—whose careers began
either during the struggle for independence or in the immediate aftermath of liberation
from France. In the course of my study, this is the group that we will classify as the third
generation of Surrealists. Their first wave of literature deals with the wretchedness and
confusion of life and the psychological alienation of the Algerian, Tunisian, and
Moroccan peoples held powerless and voiceless under French occupation. A second
cycle of writing is rife with the disillusionment that resulted when citizens realized that
their new sovereign nations did not provide them with the freedom from oppression they
had expected (5).
Only a few pages of Adbel-Jouad's analysis are devoted to Nina Bouraoui's La
Voyeuse interdite, and further inclusion of women authors from the North Africa whose
works demonstrate surreal practice is limited to brief mentions of Assia Djebar, Leïla
Sebbar, and Joyce Mansour. To be fair to Abdel-Jouad, his argument traces the
"filiation" and affilation of the male writers with such male precursors as Arthur
Rimbaud and Gérard Nerval and the first generation of male French Surrealists.
However, his extensive investigation of the relationships of North African writers with
their French predecessors does not include a similar study of the most familiar women
4
Hédi Abdel-Jouad uses the historic term Barbarie to encompass the present nations of
Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria and the word fugue in two ways: one to denote the artistic
content of poetry and literature as being akin to music; and the other, as a flight from the
physical present and conscious thought.
25
writers whose works demonstrate a "filliation" with Surrealism and which followed the
men's work by a few years. Chapter Two of this dissertation will examine the surreal
practices of three of these female writers, Yamina Mechakra and Assia Djebar from
Algeria, and Evelyne Accad from Lebanon, in the context of the psychological and
physical effects of civil war and domestic conflict on their work.
Michael Richardson's Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean
(1996), details the support that the first generation of French Surrealists gave black
students from the Caribbean who later became leaders in both the Surrealist movements
in their homelands and in the ensuing Negritude movement. He describes "a unique
series of encounters" between 1931 and 1946 " [which] took place between Francophone
Caribbean writers and French Surrealists that constitute an important moment in the anticolonial struggle in the French-speaking world" (1). These elite black students
established or contributed to journals with political bents leaning toward Marxism and
anti-colonialism and with a literary content infused by revolutionary surrealist tendencies.
In 1931, Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyote, both École Normale Supérieure
students from Martinique, published the first and only issue of Légitime Défense, a
journal which questioned the foundations of European culture from the perspective of
blacks. Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique, and Léon Damas
from Guyana who were also students at the École Normale during this period may have
read this fledgling periodical. In 1934, they collaborated to publish L'Étudiant Noir,
which laid the foundations of the Négritude movement, although it was criticized for
approaching problems in the overseas departments from the perspective of the French and
for imitating French Surrealist and Marxist models of writing rather than creating
26
revolutionary models reflecting the indigenous black identity of its authors. In 1937,
Damas published Pigments, a collection of poetry introduced by the French Surrealist
Robert Desnos, which was decidedly Surrealist in style and a prime example of black
pride in content. In 1939, at twenty-six years of age, Césaire published the epic poem
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. In it, he documents his journey as a youngster raised
in Martinique under French rule and sensitized to his blackness in France, where he came
to realize that the important cultural foundations of African tradition and Martinician
identity had being erased by the French colonial policy of assimilation. He returns to his
homeland with a mission to improve its cultural and political landscape. Richardson
writes that the Cahier "... helped to define a specifically black Caribbean sensibility, but
also announced a changed relation between black and white in the French colonies: no
longer would assimilation be taken for granted as the destiny of the colonized" (6).
Breton would later praise Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, in his preface to the
1947 edition under the title of “Un grand poète noir,” as "... rien moins que le plus grand
monument lyrique de ce temps” (81). During his visits to Martinique and Haïti, he
encouraged the adoption of Surrealism by people of color because, as he wrote in What is
Surrealism, edited and translated by Franklin Rosemont in 1978:
... in considering race and other barriers that must before all else be
corrected by other means, I think that Surrealism aims and is alone in
aiming systematically at the abolition of these barriers [of difference
between people]. You know that in Surrealism the accent has always
been on displacing the ego, always more or less despotic, by the id, held
in common by all ... Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first because
it has always taken their side against all forms of imperialism and white
banditry [ ...] and secondly because of the profound affinities that exist
between Surrealism and so-called 'primitive' thought, both of which seek
the abolition of the conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of
revelatory emotion (258-61).
27
In the context of recent social and literary theory, these comments are disturbing because
they seem to relegate the black race to a "primitive" access to the unconscious. However
it may be criticized, Surrealism opened up new opportunities for black people in the arts
and in politics.
In Negritude Women (2002), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting breaks new ground by
insisting that a few black women also made significant contributions to the literary and
political pursuits of the Negritude movement although,
… the masculinist geneology constructed by the founding poets and shored
up by literary historians, critics, and Africanist philosophers continues to
elide and minimize the presence and contributions of French-speaking black
women to Negritude's evolution (14).
In 1931, Paulette Nardal co-founded La Revue du monde noir while her sister Jane
published poetry about Africa and the Antilles and wrote essays on black humanism and
pan-Africanism. Sharpley-Whiting claims that the efforts of these sisters were the basis
upon which Senghor later built his theories of race and global consciousness. The Nardal
sisters kept a literary salon in Paris, that according to Senghor, was a place "where
African Negroes, West Indians, and American Negroes used to get together" (Lillian
Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, Rev. ed., 1991). The author also maintains that
Suzanne Césaire has always been portrayed as walking in the shadow of her husband,
dwarfed by his lyricism and his political connections to Marxism and the Negritude
movement, while her Surrealist bent seems to have taken second place to her duties as
homemaker.
Just as women had first been considered as marginal to the Surrealist movement
and their participation required re-evalution in ensuing years, Sharpley-Whiting claims
28
that several women of West Indian origin should also be considered as more central to
the Negritude movement. In Chapter Three of this dissertation I go a step further than
either Richardson or Sharpley-Whiting by discussing Maryse Condé and Simone
Schwarz-Bart's contributions to mainstream Caribbean literature—a literature infused, as
were Négritude and Surrealism, with the magic of voodoo, the (sur)reality of magical
realism, and the orality of the Creole tradition. I show not only how their contributions to
the literary canon can be traced back through a community of male participants in the
Surrealist and Magical Realist movements and the Césaires, (both Madame and
Monsieur) but also how Condé’s and Schwarz-Bart’s authorial practices have surpassed
both movements.
Each Francophone region, however unlike the others it may be in geographic
location or natural environment, shares the common bond of its historic and existing ties
with France, just as the authors from each region share some version of the French
language as a medium of expression. As we have already seen, in spite of Surrealism's
revolutionary influence on literature and the arts in the Caribbean during the first half of
the twentieth century, Martinique and Guadeloupe remain in a "neo-colonial" relationship
with France as evidenced by continued economic dependence and their departmental
political status.
By contrast, Quebec—which France established as la Nouvelle France four
centuries ago and then lost to the English a century later—is three hundred years removed
from French domination. However, the province has been forced to deal with a set of
postcolonial issues resulting from its lengthy domination by Great Britain, the
overwhelming cultural paternalism of anglophone Canada, and the cultural and economic
29
dominance of its superpower neighbor the United States. Terminating the dominance of
the Catholic church while continuing to promote the use of French in social and
economic situations has taken a route that is, surprisingly, quite similar to other
Francophone regions where persons of color have employed Surrealist practice in the arts
to counteract oppression.
In 1948, a group of Quebecois artists denouncing the values of the Catholic
church and the stifling conservatism of the Duplessis government signed a manifesto
entitled “Refus global” which reiterated in many ways the refusals enumerated in the
Surrealist Manifesto which had preceded it by twenty-four years. In Les femmes du
Refus Global (1998) Patricia Smart explains this revolutionary act by the fifteen artists
surrounding Paul-Émile Borduas as the result of
… sept années de discussions et d’expérimentation, en lisant Marx et Freud, en
écoutant la musique moderne de Stravinski et de Varèse, du jazz et des rythmes
vaudou, et en créant au théâtre, en poésie et en danse des productions d’avantgarde qui ont scandalisé les critiques et le public bien-pensant. Si un mouvement
a exercé une influence prédominante sur leurs idées et leur esthétique, c’est le
surréalisme, par son insistance sur l’interdépendance de l’art, de la libération de
l’inconscient et de la transformation sociale (9-10).
This group was known as the Automatists and was immediately distinguishable from the
Surrealists by the fact that they dedicated a larger portion of their attention to the
techniques of automatic writing and painting than did Breton's group. Another difference
that is particularly salient to our argument is the fact that seven active women artists
signed the Refus global along with eight of their male associates. The greater visibility
and equality of women as signitaries distinguished the Automatists from the Surrealists in
a very significant way.
30
With its origin within this small team of artists, a vigorous spirit of intellectual
rebellion began to spread throughout the Canadian province of Quebec. Side by side
with men, women contested the power of the Church in their private lives, the domination
of the English language in business, and the influence of the United States on many
aspects of their culture and their natural environment. The Quiet Revolution evolved
from this movement, and poetry was once again put to the service of politics.
In Chapter Four of this dissertation I will analyze Anne Hébert's Les enfants du
sabbat and Jovette Marchessault's La Mère des herbes, whose preoccupations with the
occult and the surreal at specific moments in their careers link their work to the novels of
Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart and the movements of Magical Realism and
Surrealism in the southern hemisphere of the American continents. These feminists were
pioneers in depicting the psychological conflicts that women experienced in Quebec
because of their second-class status. For almost forty years Hébert wrote about her
homeland with an uncanny clarity from self-exile in Paris. Marchessault embarked upon
an artistic journey that began as singular and personal and evolved, over time, into theater
pieces in which multiple characters—and multiple creators—interacted. Her later works
are particularly marked by the collaborative aspect of writing that proved so fruitful for
Canadian women authors. I will use the theoretical works of Nicole Brossard, Patricia
Smart, Madeleine Gagnon, Lise Gauvin, and France Théoret to chart the trajectory of
women’s writing in Quebec from Hébert through Marchessault toward the collaborative
phenomenon which continues to distinguish a portion of Quebec’s feminist writing from
the francophone literature of other regions.
31
Aside from casual mention, no critic has formally linked the surreal elements
found in the work of a sizable percentage of francophone women authors in the last half
of the twentieth century with those of their male precursors. It is my project to fill this
critical void by closely examining the surreal components present in the novels of
Mechakra and Djebar from the Maghreb, of Accad from the Mashrek, of Condé and
Schwarz-Bart from the Caribbean, and of Hébert and Marchessault from Quebec.
In all of the Francophone regions surveyed, one surrealist tenet holds constant,
which will be discussed in Chapter Five: the premise that the private and political spheres
are always/already inseparable in the works of Francophone women in the second half of
the twentieth century. What combination of postcolonial and postmodern conditions in
these geographically and historically diverse zones has stimulated women to choose
authorial practices that resemble those promulgated by the first generation of male
Surrealists? Have the subjugation and revolt, the anguish of mental illness, the dreams
and nightmares of social disintegration, war and exile obliged women authors to venture
beyond conscious experience and realist writing in order to exorcize the humiliation and
horror of their reality? It is the project of this dissertation to document how feminist
Francophone authors, either consciously or unconsciously, have described the (sur)reality
of life in their particular regions while narrating the coming to subjectivity of their
protagonists who must reconcile the trajectories of their lives with both their tumultuous
pasts and their yet unexplored futures.
32
CHAPTER 2
NIGHTMARES OF WAR AND DREAMS OF PEACE:
TRAUMATIZED SUBJECTS IN THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK
Comment imaginer, rêver, inventer quand la vie vous est un
cauchemar de chaque instant rythmé par l'assassinat de tous vos
amis, la peur, les cris, les larmes, le sang? (Hayat, La Nuit, 7)
INTRODUCTION TO THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK
This chapter will examine how Yamina Mechakra in La Grotte Éclatée (1979),
Assia Djebar in L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) and Evelyne Accad in L'Excisée (1982)
narrate traumatic events and how the creation of each of these tales represents a
transgressive political act intended to document the escape of North African and Middle
Eastern women from colonial and gender subjugation. These authors describe the
violence of war and its attendant traumatic effects, women’s post-independence and postnationalist efforts to extricate themselves from traditional gender roles, and the reshaping
of male/female relationships during their respective conflicts.
I am interested in studying the surrealist practices used by francophone women
writers in the last half of the twentieth century and charting their development from
techniques that originated in the French Surrealist movement led by André Breton in the
1920s. To make this connection, I will relate how the first Surrealist movement’s
exploration of madness and post-traumatic stress syndrome was adapted by a significant
33
circle of male writers from the Maghreb during Algeria’s war for independence, and
ultimately how Mechakra, Djebar, and Accad have depicted psychosis and trauma in their
fiction.
As was previously mentioned, the founder of the Surrealist movement studied
medicine as a young man. During World War I, he and Philippe Soupault worked at the
Val de Grâce hospital in Paris where they first used techniques of psychoanalysis in
treating the mentally ill. They discovered implications of Freud’s work for artists and
writers that went beyond its clinical use with soldiers returning from the front and other
victims of psychosis in the civilian population. They came to realize that healthy artists
might also unlock the unconscious in order to take advantage of whatever aesthetic
inspiration might be hidden there.
It is the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1950s that provides the most significant link
between the first Surrealist generation’s interest in trauma victims and insanity and the
predilection for re-telling trauma that is evident in the novels of postcolonial authors of
the second half of the century. It is his study, in the 1940s and 1950s, of the divergent
reactions of European and North African patients to psychological testing that expands
our understanding of how an individual’s imagination is culturally bound by his/her
surroundings. It is also his documentation of the change in family relations that occurred
during the Algerian war for independence that forms a basis for the questions these
authors raise in their novels.
Fanon had been trained in France to explore the logic of the European imaginary
life, but his work with psychiatric patients in Blida, Algeria, taught him that he would
34
also have to become familiar with the North African subconscious if he hoped to treat
patients coming from very different cultural backgrounds successfully:
The imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life; the concrete
and objective worlds constantly feed, permit, legitimate and found the
imaginary. The imaginary consciousness is obviously unreal, but it feeds
the concrete world. The imagination and the imaginary are possible only
to the extent that the real world belongs to us.5
Regrettably, Fanon did not have long to learn more about Algerian customs and tradition
nor to adjust his methods of treatment for the mentally ill before his medical work was
disrupted by the outbreak of the Algerian war and he became more involved as a political
activist for the Front de Libération Nationale. Nevertheless, it is his theorization (as
opposed to Freud) of the culture-boundedness of the imaginary that allows us to propose
a link between the two historic artistic currents which we are considering here: the first
generation of French Surrealists and future generations of men and women whose
aesthetic inspiration originates in the unconscious, is filtered by one’s belonging to a
particular society, and whose artistic practices can be studied in the light of a surrealist
approach to the unconscious. It is a valuable step—in the context of mental health, which
was Fanon’s primary concern—and in the sphere of artistic creativity, which is mine in
this work—to affirm his discovery that a subject's imagination is inextricably linked to
his/her society.
5
Frantz Fanon and C. Geronimi. "Le TAT chez les femmes musulmanes: sociologie de la
perception de l'imagination" Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et
des pays de langue française. LIVe Session: Bordeaux, 1956, 367-8. Translated by
David Macey in Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2001) 234-5. Only the
portion of the original document that is reprinted in translation in Macey’s biography of
Fanon appears to be available at this time.
35
On first inspection, my use of the concepts of a radical male theorist to make vital
connections between a male-oriented movement such as Surrealism and a trio of women
authors—none of whom would challenge the designation “feminist”—may seem
surprising. After all, Fanon preceded the feminist movement by at least two decades, and
his essays which touch upon the role of women during revolution are among the least
known of his political works. “L’Algérie se dévoile” in Sociologie d’une révolution:
L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959) has been more frequently discussed and
contested in feminist circles than “La famille algérienne,” which also forms a integral
part of his study. Although feminists have taken issue with his depiction, in the first
chapter of L’an V, of how Algerian women became active revolutionaries, I find the third
chapter describing the effects of the war on the Algerian family and the redistribution of
rights and responsibilities of spouses who participated in the war effort unusually modern
for his time and decidedly humanist (100). Its tone is more documentary of the
behavioral changes that occurred in Algerian households as a result of the participation of
both spouses in armed conflict than it is polemic.
In “La Famille algérienne,” Fanon sums up the contribution of women to the war
effort by writing that, "Il y a surgissement simultané et effervescent du citoyen, du
patriote et d’un époux moderne," the latter applying to both the wife and the husband (83106). Contrary to what his critics allege, he never intended to provide a prescriptive
proposal for societal change in this chapter. He simply recognized that the exigencies of
war had caused profound and revolutionary changes in the structure of the Algerian
family as well as in the Algerian nation as a whole. Fanon described a reality that
prevailed, according to his timeline, between 1955 until his death in 1961, and even then
36
his depiction applied to only a few thousand Algerian women.6 He also predicted that
more couples would become equal partners in a revised family structure that might
provide a foundation and a model for post-war Algerian society. It may come as a
surprise to his detractors that Fanon shared the same dreams for the future that were
cherished by the women who actively participated in the revolution. Unfortunately, these
desires were not to be so easily or quickly realized, nor were the changes in family
structure that occurred during the revolution to endure the politics of nationalism and the
onslaught of an even stricter post-war turn to fundamentalism. Fanon’s theories
concerning the culture-boundedness of the imagination and his documentation of societal
changes in Algeria form a sound platform for my examination of the elaboration of
surrealist literary practices by women authors.
Hédi Abdel-Jouad has studied the phenomenon of surrealist practice in the texts
of several male authors in his Fugues de Barbarie: Les Écrivains maghrébins et le
surréalisme. However, he has allotted only a passing mention to a few women whose
work shows evidence of these same practices. In his introduction, Abdel-Jouad situates
the emergence of surrealist texts in North Africa a generation later than the French
movement. This was primarily due to the lack of formal education of colonial subjects.
For much of the time that France ruled Algeria, it had been unwilling to support or even
allow intellectual pursuits by the indigenous population under its tutelage. He describes
the appearance and growth, in the 1950s, of Maghrebian literature as "[une] manifestation
6
Djamila Amrane puts the figure at 10,949 for women who were registered by the
Ministry of War Veterans. However, she concedes that the number of female participants
in the war is most likely underreported, because a veteran had to care to validate it and
then be literate or have help to file the forms requested to document combat status.
37
d’une volonté de désaliénation et tentative de recouvrement d’un inconscient mutilé par
le fait colonial" (5). Therefore, growth in the arts in Algeria coincided with the
emergence of its first small cadre of indigenous intellectuals and the intensification of
their involvement in revolutionary activities.
In the days directly following independence, the Surrealist bent was discouraged
by the Algerian nationalists who were "…peu enclins à tolérer l’indépendance de la
pensée…" and who found it expedient to dictate traditional limits for burgeoning artistic
endeavors (5). Nevertheless, a few militant writers continued to find the practices of
Surrealism servicable in their pursuit of dissidence. Disposed to refuse both the ethics of
a rising bourgeoisie and any literary models that glorified nationalist ideals (just as the
first Surrealists had done), they strived to create an original literature which neither
mimicked French models nor conformed to the demands of the ruling regime. AbdelJouad explains that the Maghrebian writer,
... semble donner au social et à l’historique une dimension esthétique
qui rend le fond (de sa littérature) d’autant plus percutant ... il est d’autant
plus dans une société qui a vécu le drame colonial et a dû subir des dislocations
politiques, sociales et psychologiques majeures. En ce sens, le surréalisme
maghrébin est plus violent et plus militant que le surréalisme français. De
même, sur le plan ontologique, la subversion surréaliste maghrébine est
souvent occulte et profonde: en l’absence de démocratie, la transparence
pourrait être un risque mortel! (7)
I find it interesting that just as the European Surrealist movement, born in the
post-World War I era, was gasping its last breath, its revolutionary potential would be
grasped by recently educated French colonial subjects and re-deployed to express the
historic and psychological wounds inflicted upon them during 130 years of subjugation.
These Maghrebian writers would reject the status quo of colonial reverence for French
38
literature and search for intellectual creativity in the collective imagination of their own
people. They would embrace the Surrealist movement only to remold it for their own
purposes just as they would refashion the French language in order to turn it against their
oppressors. Notable among these first generation Maghrebian authors were Mohammed
Dib and Kateb Yacine whose works are examined in Abdel-Jouad’s Fugues de Barbarie.
Mohammed Dib’s novel Qui se souvient de la mer (1962) is regularly cited as the
foremost model of surrealistic influence in North African literature. So unusual was its
style that the author found it necessary to add a postface to the novel in which he posed
the problem of communication to his readers: How was one to recreate the immeasurable
horror of this war without using predictably realistic and descriptive techniques that
would liken it to every prior battle?
... chaque lecteur pourrait légitimement se poser: pourquoi, dans ce roman,
le drame algérien m’a poussé à prendre pareil ton et à mettre ces grandes
années de malheur dans un cadre terrible et légendaire, je ne sais trop
aujourd’hui que répondre. Pourquoi Picasso a-t-il peint Guernica comme
il l’a fait, et non comme une reconstitution historique? À la vérité, il est
difficile d’expliquer tout à fait une manière d’écrire qui est moins la mise
en application d’une théorie préconçue que le résultat d’une intuition d’un
besoin qui n’avaient ni forme ni nom avant que le livre ne fût commencé (189).
Believing that the Guernica painting belonged to a uniquely European collective memory
of the haunting nightmares of war, Dib was searching for a way to write an equally
apocalyptic history of the Algerian revolution, “une expérience profondément vécue, un
engagement, un affrontement total” (190). Rather than penning an historical document,
he attempted something anti-realistic:
L’autre versant des choses que j’ai voulu explorer ressemble fort au mariage
du paradis et de l’enfer, et il n’est pas possible de rendre ce qui ressemble
tantôt au paradis, tantôt à l’enfer, et souvent aux deux à la fois, que par des
images, des visions oniriques et apocalyptiques (190).
39
What resulted was a work that not only obliges the reader to confront war through the
author’s imagination but also to understand how writing other (and reading otherwise)
require one to embrace his/her subconscious impulses.
As Charles Bonn notes in an article entitled “Le Dépassement de la réalité dans
L’Incendie et Qui se souvient de la mer” in Lecture présente de Mohammed Dib (1988):
... Souvenance de la mer, l’écriture—et c’est encore une des significations
du titre qui contient, on l’a vu, l’écriture entière du roman—est donc ce
mouvement, cette tension-désir qui amène l’écrivain et le lecteur au seuil
du grand saut, face au vide fascinant nocturne que l’on vient de décrire.
Elle est le seuil, elle est le pas. Elle est le lieu du tremblement (24).
Antonin Artaud, a member of the first generation of Surrealists, recommended in Le
Théâtre et son double (1938) that writing should “... bouscule le repos des sens, libère
l’inconscient comprimé ...” and lead to spasmodic and convulsive paroxysme (40). Both
Bonn’s and Artaud’s descriptions of the threshold of surreal experience resemble
Breton’s “leap” in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) by means of “... une
descente vertigineuse en nous” (86), or his final words in the 1964 version of Nadja, “La
beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas” (190).
It is Kateb Yacine’s novel Nedjma (1956)—whose title curiously resembles that
of Breton’s Nadja—which leads us to a fuller understanding of the characteristics of
Maghrebian literature that have been identified as surrealist. In an interview published in
L’Action (28 April 1958, 146) Kateb stated: “Nedjma n’est pas ce qu’on appelle un
roman ... Actuellement, je poursuis cette tentative pour faire éclater les limites matérielles
qui emprisonnent la littérature” (16-17). The outbreak of the Algerian war is cited as
40
responsible for Nedjma’s rapid publication. Bernard Aresu points out in his introduction
to Richard Howard’s translation of the novel (1991):
... Nedjma would never have been published that early without the war.
Because up to that point ... In the mind of French people, Albert Camus was
Algerian literature and under the best circumstances, Algerian writers were
remote provincial cousins ... With the first ambushes and France started to
lose her children, Algeria became commercialized, turned into something
in which publishers were interested ... And the book was a success to the extent
that intended it to be a novel that would show French people, in their language,
that Algeria was not French (xxxi).
Unlike Camus’s writing, the novel’s narrative techniques, its rhythm and the involution
of its plot demonstrate a uniquely indigenous sense of time and history. As well, it bears
witness to a sociocultural context and explosive political message markedly akin to Dib’s
Qui se souvient de la mer.
In addition, the influence of the first generation of Surrealists and the
experimental movement of post-1950 fiction writers in French can surely be seen in the
uncanny terminology of turmoil which Aresu uses to describe Kateb’s milieu and his
artistic style:
... the years 1956-57 were characterized by convulsive politics, terrorist
activities, and counterterrorist reprisals that not only brought the repulsive,
graphic reality of the conflict home to France and the world at large but
set the Algerian revolution on the irreversible course of its ultimate success.
The spasms of nightmarish violence that shook the Algerian landscape at
that time provided the specific context in which so poetic and political a
narrative as Nedjma took root and from which it derived its political
relevance. No survey of the sociocultural context of Nedjma can fail to
recall the decade of the 1950s as an era of explosive fictional creativity.
The humanist novel of ideas, whose discursive form had so brilliantly
dominated French letters from the thirties to the fifties, was in decline.
Fictional innovation was not an unprecedented adventure of course[;]
Proust, Gide, and surrealism had left indelible marks on the creative
consciousness of the writers whose production would mature from the
mid-fifties onward (xxvii-xxx).
41
This is a topic that Abdel-Jouad has spent years researching. However, it is the very fact
that his study barely mentions similar contributions by women authors to this body of
literature that has stimulated my interest from the onset. It is from the point where he
leaves off that I begin to investigate the Surrealists’ influence on later generations of
women’s writing.
Because a significant percentage of the fiction of French expression to appear in
the past half century has been written by women who hail from former French colonies, I
believe that it is important that these novels be studied alongside literature written by
men, both French and francophone, so that neither the designation francophone nor
feminine will continue to carry a stigma. I also wish to contribute to the venture of
amending francophone literary history by establishing a link between the surreal practices
found in the work of important francophone women authors and those of their male
precursors by comparing the motives, methods, and products of the two groups. I will
scrutinize two bodies of work which appear to be dissimilar and point out how a number
of the practices used by their authors are alike.
First, let us take a biographical glance at the authors whose work will be analyzed
below. My purpose will be to determine how each woman came to writing and what
each one has to say about the forces that impel her to write in the manner that she does
about violence, trauma, and human rights. Following each brief biography, the reader
will find a concise summary of the plot developed in each novel.
42
YAMINA MECHAKRA and LA GROTTE ÉCLATÉE
Yamina Mechakra was born in the Meskiana region of Algeria in 1949 and
studied medicine in Constantine, becoming a psychiatrist in 1973. It is interesting to note
that she completed her first novel, La Grotte éclatée, at the same time that she was
winding up her psychiatric studies at the Faculté d'Alger. The novel was published in
1979, but it was to be another twenty-one years before her next book appeared—years in
which she emphasizes that writing was essential to her but that publishing what she wrote
was not. She chose the theme of child mothers and abandoned children for the focus of
her second novel, Arris (2001), from experiences told to her by patients she had treated.
Imagine experiencing one's first anatomy lesson in the laboratory of the streets by
stumbling upon a pile of eviscerated bodies. Such was Mechakra's introduction to human
physiology and to the trauma of war when, at the age of four, she came upon the
mutilated bodies of several local maquisards.7 Practicing psychological warfare, the
French troops had intentionally disposed of the corpses on the village square in order to
dissuade villagers from “sympathizing” with the rebels among them who were
participating in the revolt. Later, Mechakra personally witnessed the torture and murder
of her father at the hands of the French. At the age of nine, she began to exorcise these
haunting memories by keeping a journal. She is said to have penned her first novel at the
age of twelve.
7
A maquisard is generally considered to be a freedom fighter. S/he generally leaves
her/his home and fights against the established government from a remote location,
making surprise incursions into home territory or government strongholds as the battle
plan dictates.
43
Rachid Mokhtari very appropriately evokes a military image when he describes
Mechakra's venue à l'écriture and her struggle to use the French language—not her native
Tamazigh—in an essay in Algeria’s Le Matin as "an incessant hand to hand combat"
(“Sur la trace de ses écrits,”3 December 2001). As an adult, she has continued to wage
that battle against her cruel heritage by writing and by putting to use what she has learned
about the human mind while practicing psychiatric medicine. Mechakra situates her
narratives at the intersection of the torture and nightmares of the patients that she treats
and her own memories as a child during the Algerian war for independence.
In La Grotte éclatée Mechakra describes the life of a female maquisarde, the
soldiers she cares for as a nurse during the Algerian war, her fall into insanity, and the
other women alongside whom she recuperates after her discharge from a mental hospital.
The protagonist is an orphan who is shuffled, as a child, from Catholic to Jewish to
Muslim caretakers, with no hope of developing an integrated identity nor a sense of
where she belongs in the world. Existing on the outer margins of rigidly established and
conflicting cultures in Algeria, she finally finds a way to fit in as an “outlaw” among
other outlaws when she joins a group of guerrillas in the Aurès mountains in order to
provide them with medical treatment. In the course of her resistance activities, she
experiences years of nightmarish frontline horrors which culminate in the explosion of
the cave in which she has been living with the soldiers she has come to consider as her
family. In essence, her world explodes, and although she has often come close to
madness before, the effect of the physical as well as the mental trauma of the blast finally
causes her to lose complete touch with reality. Mildred Mortimer describes her as "... a
survivor ... haunted by the nightmare of atrocities ... forced to grapple with impending
44
madness" in an article entitled "Women and War: La Grotte éclatée by Yamina
Mechakra" (Revue Celfan 1987-88, 6). As the narrator ultimately emerges from an
asylum, she relates her story so as to come to terms with personal memories and losses
but also to ensure that the nightmare endured by other freedom fighters does not go
undocumented.
ASSIA DJEBAR and L’AMOUR LA FANTASIA
Assia Djebar was born Fatma Zohra Imalayène in Cherchell, Algeria, in 1936,
and attended the French colonial school where her father was the only indigenous
teacher. From him, she learned to love reading and Algerian history. From her mother,
she appears to have inherited a fierce pride in her ancestors who had resisted the French
in nineteenth-century Algeria. She was the only Muslim girl in her class at the Collège
de Blida between 1946 and 1953, and passed the baccalaureate there before doing
advanced work in Alger and Paris where she studied history. Instead of sitting for her
exams, she joined the Algerian students’ strike against France’s tactics in putting down
the revolution in her homeland and wrote her first novel instead. La Soif (1957) caused a
controversy that convinced her to choose the pen name that she still uses today in order to
protect her family and her reputation at school. She pursued journalism, working for
several months with Frantz Fanon at El Moujahid, and by 1959, returned to her studies
and settled upon research in Algerian history and university teaching at the Université
d’Alger until 1965 when all studies in her field were required to arabize. During this
period she also authored Les Alouettes naïves (not published until 1967), Les Impatients
(1958), and Les Enfants du nouveau monde (1962). A long period of retreat from
45
publishing followed in which Djebar pondered how to make women’s narratives
available to a wider audience of her countrywomen, most of whom were illiterate.
During these years she experimented with film and produced La Nouba des femmes du
Mont Chenoua (1979) and La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli (1979). In 1980, the
collection of short stories, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement announced her return
to a prolific writing career which has since included L’amour, la fantasia (1985), Ombre
Sultane (1987), Loin de Médine (1991), Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1994), Vaste est la
prison (1995), Le Blanc d’Algérie(1996), Oran, langue mort (1997), Ces voix qui
m'assiègent (1999), the drama, Filles d´Ismaël dans le vent et la tempête, (2000), La
Femme sans sépulture (2002), and La Disparition de la langue française (2003). Her
newest collection of stories, entitled The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry has just
become available.
Not only is she a revered novelist, scholar, poet, and filmmaker, but Djebar has
received many honors including election to the Belgian Royal Academy of French
Language and Literature, the Médaille Vermeil de la francophonie awarded by the
Académie Française in 1999, the Prix de la Paix of the German Book Trade in 2000, the
Neustadt Prize for Contributions to World Literature in 1996, and in 2006, she became
the first Muslim to be elected into the prestigious Académie française. She directed the
Francophone Studies Center at the University of Louisiana in Baton Rouge from1995
until 2001 and is currently a Silver Professor of Francophone literature and civilization at
New York University.
46
Djebar is so well known in the academic world that one might wonder what more
could be added to the volumes that have already been written about her life and work.
However, I believe that by analyzing L’amour, la fantasia (1985) through a surrealist
perspective we can gain yet another interpretation of her historical and literary efforts.
Foremost, her venue à l'écriture was much gentler than Mechakra's. Instead of losing a
father to the war, hers was a teacher in the colonial school system who took her to school
with him so that she might receive the same education as the boys he taught. She was
one of the first indigenous Algerian girls to accede to a higher education and the first
Algerian woman to be accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. However, we
will see that her gentler introduction to writing has not precluded her from researching
and re-writing accounts of war equally as vivid as Mechakra's. Just as Mechakra's
writing reflects her own tragic experience and her training as a psychiatrist, Djebar’s texts
reveal her training as an historian and a student of Algerian culture.
The Autumn 1996 issue of World Literature Today celebrated Djebar’s
acceptance of the Neustadt Award. In his introduction to the journal, Hafid Gafaiti
asserted that Djebar’s writing achieved an unprecedented state of maturity and
engagement with the appearance of L’amour, la fantasia. Combined personal
introspection and historical research brought her to a place where “… through writing,
conceived as a junction between the individual and the community … she feels
committed as an Algerian to re-visit the history of her country and as a woman to rewrite
it from a feminine point of view, with and for all women” (“The Blood of Writing: Assia
Djebar’s Unveiling of Women and History” 813). Djebar’s own comments made in a
1988 interview with Mildred Mortimer second Gafaiti’s opinion:
47
Au cours des années 80, je me suis rendu compte que j’avais
longtemps été professeur d’histoire, que j’avais un rapport avec l’histoire
que j’avais jusque là écarté de mon travail romanesque. Du coup, en
réintégrant cette dimension historique (je pense que c’est grâce à mes
films, car les deux films ont un rapport avec l’histoire), je me suis rendu
compte que je gagnais un regard plus ample sur l’avenir, avec des
interrogations plus justes sur le présent (“Entretien avec Assia Djebar,
écrivain algérien” RAL 19:2 200-1).
In L'amour, la fantasia, Djebar chronicles the French colonization of her
homeland and Algeria's struggle for liberation from an indigenous prospective while
simultaneously weaving her personal story into the narrative. She deftly glides back and
forth between the historical and autobiographical levels of the novel producing a counternarrative which effectively contradicts the European version of Algerian history while at
the same time it also indicts the phallocentric customs of her own country which exclude
women from official history and public life.
Maturity convinced Djebar that Algerians themselves had to take responsibility
for the post-revolutionary violence and socio-economic chaos that followed the 132-year
course of cultural and political sacking of the country by the French. Placing herself
within the community of Algerian women (and men), she recognized and accepted her
responsibility for improving Algeria’s future by using her formation as an historian to
document Algerian history from the point of view of its own people, and to particularly
highlight the roles women had played—to counterbalance the acutely unjust toll
subjugation had placed upon them.
In this novel three plots are intertwined. The first strand is the author’s reiteration
of “official” history that had been reported and written by Europeans recounting their
version of the story from a vanquishers perspective. The second element incorporates the
48
testimonies of the Algerians from their point of view. It includes previously unwritten
testimonies from the men and women whose tales have survived orally over the course of
several generations and are being incorporated for the first time into a written narrative.
The final element is the author’s autobiography which demonstrates the structural and
creative decisions she has made in crafting the novel by privileging certain accounts,
suppressing others, and imagining even a third set of events. It requires a rather
complicated “architectural” structure to interweave the three vastly different strands of
history with which Djebar is dealing.
In spite of the immense attention her work has received, I find that the practices
used in L’amour, la fantasia, which resemble those employed by authors whose works
are typically classified as surrealist, merit further study. In contrast to the conventional
literary patterns of her region, the author refuses to accept the status quo of the maledominated discipline of History, and she creates a new reality from the surreal fragments
of past and present Algerian life. Her novelistic production since 1985 has brought
readers untold pleasure and scholars an abundance of material for discussion, while it has
also brought the political situation in her country and the plight of its women to the
attention of the world. Djebar’s accessibility to researchers throughout the years has been
particularly generous, and she has granted them an abundance of interviews in which she
has freely discussed her work.
49
EVELYNE ACCAD and L’EXCISÉE
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1943, Accad received her primary and secondary
education in Beirut and spent two years at the Beirut College for Women (now the
Lebanese American University) before coming to the United States in 1964 to earn a
B.A. in English Literature from Anderson College in Indiana in 1967, an M.A. in French
from Ball State University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana
University in 1973. Accad can be compared to both Mechakra and Djebar in that her
project entails writing in the stead of those who cannot about day-to-day problems that
women in her homeland experience because of the political choices made by the men
who surround them and oppress them. She is a poet, a novelist, a literary critic, a social
analyst, an environmental activist, a "femihumanist," a breast cancer survivor, a pacifist,
a university professor and a composer and performer of her own songs. Having grown up
in Lebanon, she experienced first hand the emotional and physical trauma of surviving in
a politically divided and war-torn land. In an essay entitled “Guns and Roses” she
explains that she fled her homeland at the age of twenty-two because of the oppressive
attitudes and regulations regarding women held by the seventeen political and religious
factions at war with one another in her country: " ... laws, rites, practices, psychological
and sexual pressures aim[ed] at keeping their women exclusively for the men of their
community" (2).
Accad’s critical works include a plethora of essays and the sociological study,
Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Modern Fiction of North Africa and the Arab
World (1978). Her literary studies include two volumes, Sexuality, War and the
Literature of the Middle East (1989) and Des Femmes, des hommes, et la guerre: Fiction
50
et Réalité au Proche-Orient (1993). In an interview with Elizabeth A. Zahnd published
in The South Carolina Modern Language Review (2003), she characterizes governmental
handling of "... nature and the environment as well as dealing with politics, always
aggressively and violently ...” as a path that leads “... to inevitable destruction, oppression
and victimization rather than harmony and the respect of others" (3). Her theories are
based upon the argument that the physical and psychological relations between men and
women have more weight in social, economic and political situations than most people,
especially the male segment of the population, are willing to admit. Therefore, she
advises that "... unless a sexual revolution is incorporated into political revolution, there
will be no real transformation of social relations" (“Guns and Roses” 2). Her literary
efforts, including many poems, songs, short stories and her three novels, L'Excisée
(1982), Coquelicot du massacre (1988), and Blessures des Mots: Journal de Tunisie
(1993), all deal with the question of exploitation and oppression of women both in public
and private venues. Her latest work, The Wounded Breast: Intimate Journeys through
Cancer (2001), is both a personal narrative and a political study of the phenomenon of
cancer as a metaphor for the ills of modern society.
In L’Excisée, Accad tells the story of an adolescent Lebanese girl, whose name is
represented by the letter E. Looking for a modicum of freedom from an intensely
controlling father who embodies the Christian evangelical sector of Lebanese society, she
yearns to escape Beirut which has been torn apart by years of factional wars, and where
further violence has the potential of exploding at any moment. She falls in love with a
young Palestinian teacher and accompanies him to a traditional village in the wilderness
where they dream of “changing the world.” Within days, however, she learns that she
51
will not share in his social schemes, since she is expected to assume a conventionally
subordinate position in life which includes wearing traditional clothing and remaining
sequestered at home, interacting only with neighboring women. After witnessing the
excision of several pre-pubescent village girls, E. rebels and decides to escape this second
repressive situation, taking one of the little village girls with her. Her imminent suicide
points to the impossibility she feels of finding a solution to centuries of subjugation in a
land where men struggle for political power in much the same way that they strive to
dominate the female sector of society. As Valerie Orlando so deftly explains in Of
Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls, this protagonist has “engaged the void of
madness” (185). Incapable of coping with what life might bring, E. slides into the sea
taking her own life and that of her unborn child.
SURREALIST PRACTICES FOR MECHAKRA, DJEBAR AND ACCAD
Let us reiterate the three practices that we are investigating which link the work of
these authors to the techniques used by the first generation of Surrealists. Since a high
percentage of illiteracy was a fact of life among Arab women, vocal exchanges dominate
their communication, and a gathering of indigenous women is likely to be characterized
by a high degree of performative entertainment in the forms of storytelling, song and
dance. So, how does a writer bridge the gap between illiteracy and literacy in order to
“translate” the lives of her academically-challenged sisters to her readers? Furthermore,
how can an author whose maternal languages are Tamazight or Arabic expect to
articulate mental and physical trauma in her adopted French language? It is apparent that
52
conventional and realistic prose may not be flexible enough to bridge the gap, and that
innovative writing techniques may be required.
Secondly, the investigation of a collection of unusual writing practices will lead
us to conclude that the literature we are studying is made up of kaleidoscopic fragmentary
texts and an assortment of genres fused into novel-length volumes that do not readily
conform to traditional cataloging. We will be looking at several works that have been
classified as “novels” although their contents are similar to the “anti-novels” created by
the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s and experiments in the “New Novel” conducted in
France in the 1950s.
Thirdly, we will be reading works in which the personal memories of the authors
are partnered with historical happenings and with lurid imaginary tales. We must
discover how authors whose lifeworks encompass psychoanalysis, history, and social
science interweave their autobiographies with those of the women they feel challenged to
speak for in order to understand how history, economics and aesthetics can join hands to
create a very different sort of novel. The introspection, the "exploding" of realistic
description, the demolition of genre constraints, and the melding of personal with
political issues parallels and perhaps even surpasses what Breton and his collaborators
wished to characterize when they employed the term "surreal."
THE CAPACITY OF THE WRITTEN WORD TO “TRANSLATE” TRAUMA
André Breton and his followers and successive generations of eminent
francophone writers emerge from widely divergent literary eras and from far-flung
geographical regions to concur that surreal practices possess the capacity to convey the
53
trauma of war better than any other approach to literature. In La Grotte éclatée,
Mechakra employs both realist and surrealist narrative techniques and borrows equally
from the traditions of orality and literacy to communicate the experience of the Algerian
people under French colonial rule and during their struggle for independence.
In 1987, the Maghreb literature scholar Mildred Mortimer pointed out that
Mechakra's La Grotte éclatée links the Surrealist tradition with a new generation of
feminine authors:
Yamina Mechakra’s first novel, La Grotte éclatée (1973), a fictitious
autobiography that recounts the experiences of a young woman in wartorn Algeria, combines realism, expressed as témoignage, the eyewitness account, with surrealism, poetic images characteristic of an
apocalyptic vision (“Women and War: La grotte éclatée by Yamina
Mechakra” Revue Celfan 14).
In his preface to her novel, Kateb Yacine comments on Mechakra’s unusually traumatic
life: "…ayant pratiqué la médicine sociale et la psychiatrie, elle a écrit ce livre au milieu
d'une vie cruelle et tourmentée" (8). He compares Mechakra to the ancient Kahina, nom
de guerre of the tribal heroine who participated in the establishment of the Algerian
nation and who also had a gift for words. Let us look in depth at the practices this author
uses, both realistic and surrealistic, to narrate a survivor's tale that is symbolic of the
collective struggle for autonomy of the Algerian people. We can associate her
introspective investigation of the suitability of the written word to translate tremendous
mental and physical torture and immeasurable loss with the techniques of the founding
generation of Surrealists in a text that aptly reflects the shattered disorder of the
protagonist's tortured mind.
54
Mechakra’s introductory page to La Grotte éclatée begins with a rhetorical
paragraph of prose-poetry which interrogates the significance of language in her culture.
She asks how women who cannot write—illiterate peasants—manage to signify love,
happiness and laughter. Echoing Fanon's theory about the inextricable link between a
subject's imagination and his or her cultural milieu, her answer is that in a traditional
society where the majority of women do not write, they symbolically inscribe their
experiences on material everyday objects. They channel their energies into the
embellishment of the utilitarian articles they fashion to nourish and to protect their
families. They knead their love into the daily bread they bake. They weave their hopes
and dreams into the comforters they make to warm their children at night and the carpets
they fashion to cover the floors. They use gestures and the spoken word to transmit ageold traditions through dance, song and storytelling. These non-literary manifestations go
beyond the linguistic and delve into the creative imagination in ways that even the most
accomplished author has difficulty committing to paper.
As an author, Mechakra assumes the responsibility of folding her countrywomen's
more performative expressions of disaster and love into her personal narrative of the
revolution. She incorporates the speaking body into the written language she uses to
relate her story. The subconscious and surreal aspects of human experience creep into
the gaps between the lines. Her war narrative demonstrates the “… possibility of writing
otherwise…” that Marx-Scouras discusses in her 1993 essay “Muffled Screams/Stifled
Voices” (Yale French Studies 82.1). While their male counterparts glorify the hatred,
revenge and violence associated with war, women manage to use their culturallyconditioned productivity to fashion a more positive sort of narrative which celebrates the
55
life, hope and passion that exist alongside (and in spite of) war. By “unmask[ing] the
fiction of war,” female trailblazers on the Maghrebian literary scene provide readers with
an antidote to the traditional male veneration of brutality and power (181). Their
practices draw upon women’s traditionally cultivated and gendered orality and
physicality which developed through centuries of sequestration. These releases are
perhaps among the few compensations that they enjoy for having been isolated from the
outside world: their communications go beyond the written word. Mechakra equates the
act of writing, as other feminists since Hélène Cixous have, with the very physical and
emotional labor of giving birth: "J'écris avec mon coeur, mes viscères; mes textes en
gestation, sont des accouchements" (Rachid Mokhtari interview, Algerian Le Matin 2
February 2004).
The woman who has been to war attempts to bring the haunting elements of the
experience to an end by writing about them. She gives birth to the text which is a
tangible testimony of her survival. Perhaps that written work will resemble a bastard
child born of a hasty union in which the mother and father seek solace in one another
from the horrors that surround them. Perhaps the child will be born deformed by the lack
of nourishment, the mental and physical stress endured by its mother and the noxious
chemicals to which the parents have been subjected. The resulting offspring will be like
no other; nor is the manuscript that testifies to such a union.
A number of early postcolonial novels resemble the documents of catharsis that
medical professionals encourage survivors of a traumatic event to write in order to
exorcize lasting anxiety. Mechakra herself discovered this practice as a child and has
continued to employ it in the creation of her two novels—the first, which we consider
56
here, and her later novel Arris which speaks to the violence visited upon children and to
the power of childhood memory. They reveal alienated personalities, tortured minds and
maimed bodies resulting from a long history of colonial domination and gender
subordination followed by frontline experiences in national wars for independence.
I have also found Elaine Scarry’s study, The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World (1985), of great assistance in understanding the untranslatability
of corporeal pain into words. One of the most difficult issues for readers of survivor
narratives to grasp is the fact that since one cannot physically share another’s pain, one’s
intellectual knowledge of it is always tinged with a hint of disbelief. Scarry explains that
when a victim’s suffering becomes severe enough, her portrayal of it deteriorates from
such descriptors as “searing,” “throbbing,” “pinching,” or “shooting” to nearly inhuman
cries and screams. Whether the pain inhabits the patient’s body or the patient’s mind, it
burrows into the core of her being, hiding itself from revelation—it is no longer an
expression on “the tip of one’s tongue.”
Though the total number of words may be meager, though they may be
hurled into the air unattached to any framing sentence, something can be
learned from these verbal fragments not only about pain but about the
human capacity for word-making. To witness the moment when pain
causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness
the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person
moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into
speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of
language itself (5).
So, it is in La Grotte éclatée that the reader is present at the “death” of language as the
protagonist’s insanity destroys her interaction with life. The author describes a few of the
events leading to her breakdown realistically and represents other painful experiences
57
surrealistically. When she finally recovers mentally, the author also allows her to reclaim
the power of speech.
In politics, and especially in war, soldiers and politicians confuse pain with
power, believing that the opponent who inflicts the most pain must be the most powerful.
A military unit which scores more “kills” than its adversary is deemed the victor. A
“truth squad” dominates the prisoners it interrogates by submitting them to torture. The
enemy steals a captive’s independence as well as his ability to talk about his confinement,
because the post-traumatic stress that develops in the wake of torture often renders a
victim incapable of verbally reconstructing the events that befell him. The creative
power of the unconscious holds the promise of conveying the horror as well as healing
the traumatic after-effects of pain. An author or artist whose stock-in-trade is pain
renders a service to society, mediating between the sufferer and the non-sufferer, by
using pain’s surreal aspects and pre-linguistic reactions to portray a “reality of pain.”
The writer accepts the responsibility to purloin the power of the oppressor and restore it
to its rightful owner. S/he uses her/his skills to inscribe the translatable as well as the
virtually untranslatable events of the survivor’s experience. In the pages that follow I
will analyze episodes from the novel which illustrate Mechakra’s investigation of the
effectiveness of the written word for translating alienation and mental and physical
torture.
In the years leading up to her involvement in the revolution, the protagonist of La
Grotte éclatée, through no fault of her own, existed as an outcast. Every nurturing source
with which she came into contact rejected her. As a “serial” pariah, she speaks from the
outer margins of her own society; the author “others” her and yet immortalizes her
58
remarkable story by putting it into print. Writing gives the story legitimacy, and of
particular interest in this novel are the number of incidents into which the author
introduces the question of literacy.
In a noteworthy episode, the narrator recounts the rape that resulted in her
conception and seems to have set a precedent for her own alienation. Her mother had
violated tradition by falling in love with a married man and was abandoned by her family.
After having his way with her, the rapist threw her out and proceeded to boast of his
prowess with his cronies. After a night of reveling, he goes home, spits on his wife and
tells her "Tais-toi fille de chien; il y a dans le souk cent fatma" (51). The narrator
conflates her own experiences with those of her mother and her lover's wife when she
comments, “Toute une vie s’était écoulée ainsi. Dans sa chair et dans sa révolte
intérieure tout un roman étouffé, qui se confondait dans ses souvenirs avec le cri de la
matrone le jour de sa naissance—Malédiction!” (51) However, she considers the plight
of a peasant woman like her mother worthy of a novel. The story the author tells about
an ordinary woman represents the repressed condition of millions of women—the female
condition in a male-dominated society that bases women's subordination on possession
and human cruelty. The author accepts the responsibility to relate such stories because
she is among the minority of women who can write.
At the age of fourteen, the protagonist becomes a victim of the Catholic nuns who
manage the orphanage where she has been living. Rather than providing a healthy
environment in which she can grow up, they spy on her and discover that she has written
in her personal journal about an earthly hunger—a hunger inspired by André Gide's Les
Nourritures Terrestres. Due to her interest in this book that, ironically, she has borrowed
59
from one of the sisters, they fear that she might be dangerous to their society, so they
strip her of the Christian name they had given her when she arrived and turn her out into
the street. This episode demonstrates how women, who are generally credited with
transmitting the positive traditions (and the language) of a culture, can be as destructive
as men in implementing punishment when they fear an outsider might upset the power
structure already in place.
The question of self expression reappears in a later episode when, after her
discharge from the mental hospital, the narrator meets Rima, a generous older woman
who seems to survive by nurturing those around her at the refugee camp. Their
relationship—sometimes as surrogate mother and child and other times as sisters in
solidarity—illustrates two contrasting conditions of Algerian women at the time of the
revolution. Illiterate and powerless to change her situation, the older woman chooses
intrinsically traditional and feminine forms of expression to relate her life. The first is in
song: "On la maria mais Rima amoureuse de sa chanson laissait les jours couler et pensait
au paradis" (160). Song is one of her sanctuaries, and the weaving of functional textiles
for her children provides her with a second creative outlet. She weaves her story into a
coverlet for a yet-unborn child:
En face de son métier à tisser Rima écrivait de son fil tous ses espoirs pour
couvrir l’enfant qui allait naître de toutes les couleurs de son jardin ... Les
années venaient et Rima ne les sentait pas passer. Son corps s’asséchait et
se ridait; Rima n’en souffrait pas. Le fil racontant sa vie … (161).
When Mechakra writes of Rima's youth, and later, her physical beauty shrouded by age
and by years of marriage to a man she didn't love and the bearing of nine children, the old
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woman seems to regain her youthfulness. The author incorporates Rima’s songs—their
rhythm and their form—into her written narrative.
Later, in a women's meeting, Rima laments that if she knew how to write she
could send letters of support to one of her sons imprisoned in Tunis. In a life she
describes as self-fulfilled, Rima still senses a void that might have been filled differently
had she been literate—and the reader cannot help but sympathize with her plight.
Women’s want of education in traditional societies is frequently a topic of
discussion in feminist discourse, but one also needs to understand that, at the time of the
Algerian revolution, not very many lower class males had learned to read or write under
the colonial system either. Therefore, when the narrator weaves issues of literacy into the
novel, she is revealing the frustrations of some of her uneducated male companions as
well as those of peasant women.
The bulk of foot soldiers involved in guerilla activities during the Algerian
revolution were peasants. Thus, a debate over the merits of literacy develops in La
Grotte éclatée in the unlikely setting of the cave between Kouider, the old wanderer, and
Salah, a young boy who has lost his legs. Both cherished members of the protagonist's
surrogate family, they argue about the value of literacy. Salah longed to "belong" to the
privileged group of boys who went off to school every day, but he was destined to spend
his days alone in the hills with only his sheep for companions. By contrast, Kouider
replies, "Faut s’en foutre de l’école ... L’écriture n’est qu’un piquet. L’apprendre c’est se
retrouver une corde au cou. Les livres? du maraboutisme intellectuel. Ils te disent tout
de toi sauf ce que tu veux en connaïtre" (46). We are surprised that Salah does not wish,
above all, to be able to walk and play like other boys his age, but instead regrets not
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having the opportunity to go to school. He knows that literacy represents more than
simply learning to read and write:
Tu mens. L’écriture est belle. À cause d’elle je suis malheureux. Ceux
qui la savent ont un autre regard, une autre pensée que les tiens, les miens.
Ils sont heureux à cause d’elle. Quand je les vois passer le matin, j’ai
l’impression d’être un étranger. Ils ont les doigts très beaux qui tiennent
un porte-plume. Moi, mes doigts sont gros et tout fissurés. Ils n’ont tenu
que le bâton et la flûte (46).
Listening to their dispute, the narrator seizes upon the fact that Salah plays the flute. To
comfort him, she explains that music is sometimes more powerful than writing: "Tu t’y
tailleras une flûte, tu y souffleras ta musique; c’est une écriture qui parle. Elle a la force
de plusieurs écritures" (46). Again, Mechakra valorizes the communicative capacity of
traditional music and compares Salah’s flute songs with the power of literacy. By
creating a literate protagonist, Mechakra is able to express the worth of both traditional
and modern art forms as functional means of communicating a full range of human
emotion.
Near the end of the novel, the protagonist contemplates how she will relate her
life and her role in the revolution to her son who was blinded during the explosion of the
cave. She has used cathartic writing as a means of recovering from the trauma and
insanity of war, but ironically she realizes that her son will never be able to read what she
has written. She realizes that deficiencies exist in both the written and spoken word:
Les mots sont usés, mon amour, comme les lois qui régissent ce monde.
Nous ne saurons inventer que ce qui a été dit.
Aujourd’hui, je suis neuve. Il me faut trouver d’autres mots, mon
amour, pour te redire, me redire.
J’ai chanté une vieille chanson au bout de laquelle flottait une rivière
rouge qui venait du fond des révoltes encore chaudes dans ma mémoire et
dans mon coeur de mère et d’orpheline, une chanson oubliée de tous et qui
venait de l’avenir d’hier et de l’avenir d’aujourd’hui, mon amour (141).
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Her difficulty in finding le mot juste to express terror, revulsion, suffering, insanity,
death, love and patriotism illustrates the limits that written as well as oral language
present to those who retell and create.
By juxtaposing physical mediums of expression, such as orality, dance and music
with writing, Mechakra points out the deficiencies of each and takes advantage of a
synthesis of traditional and modern, non-literate and literate practices to relate her story.
Her introspective investigation of the suitability of language in any form to translate life
is a wide-spread authorial activity, but we see that it brings her to atypical conclusions
insofar as her own practices are concerned.
We have learned so far of the author’s (and her protagonist’s) regard for literacy
and how Mechakra has, since her youth, invested the act of writing with the power to
exorcize horrific memories and help victims recover from trauma. We have seen, that in
a land where a large percentage of the citizens are illiterate, the responsibility for
recounting survivor testimonies is shifted to the literate—the few who dare, in spite of
political oppression and under penalty of death, to speak up and publish the tales they
have to recount. What we have not yet seen, are the specific tales that Mechakra has
created in La Grotte éclatée which explain her protagonist’s descent into insanity. Let us
now, scrutinize a selection of these tales in which her practices surpass realism and
illustrate and expand upon those utilized by earlier generations of Surrealist authors to
make the horror of real and fictional wartime happenings accessible to the reader.
As several reviewers have mentioned, Mechakra deftly weaves realist and
surrealist practices, which in their own right are as shocking as the brutality of war, into
her novel in order to portray experiences that eclipse the reality of most "normal" readers.
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Of course, one can always argue that war itself is not a “normal” way of life. When
Mechakra crafted La Grotte éclatée, she created a saga that goes beyond the majority of
war narratives because it is narrated from the point of view of a woman who is also a
moudjahidat—a nurse and a witness to the carnage. The protagonist’s former
experiences alone, as an outcast from society, could have provided the material for a
novel about personality alienation—before she ever stepped onto the battlefield.
However, we see that by surviving battlefield conditions she experiences "belonging" for
the first time in her life. In this manner, the author portrays both the protagonist and the
revolutionary Algerian colony as orphans striving to build a future. The author's and her
protagonist's personal stories of violence, disfigurement, loss of family and insanity
parallel their homeland's history.
In the early pages of the work, the author creates luridly realistic scenes and
incidents which are bound to surpass the everyday experiences of her readers. Isolated
from other maquisards by the French and fleeing for their lives, a superior compels the
protagonist to drink warm blood directly from a jackal’s slashed throat in order to
survive. Her mission is to tend the wounds of others, a task which she will not be able to
fulfill if she cannot muster the strength to go on. Another soldier encourages her to do as
her leader commands:
Ça fait du bien. Il faut le faire. Il s’en ira le mauvais jour … au bout de
notre chemin, il y a des frères qui nous attendent. Il nous faut la force
d’arriver jusqu’à eux; et puis là-haut sur nos monts, nous serons nombreux
à aimer la liberté, nombreux aussi à la défendre (17).
As one of the first scenes in the novel, this incident points to the unthinkable deeds that
war forces upon soldiers and the lengths to which they must go in order to survive. A
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combatant may appear to forget his worst experiences, but what happens more frequently
is that these memories file themselves away in his subconscious and later resurface as the
nightmares, the mental debilitation and the insanity of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
In a subsequent episode the protagonist recognizes, after operating on maimed
bodies, including the amputation of a young boy’s legs, that she is at the end of her
reserve and on the edge of her nerves. In an interior monologue she acknowledges her
responsibility to the insurgency and attempts to summon up just a bit more courage:
… Tout comptaient sur moi. Je me contractai pour débarrasser mon
corps d’une émotion qui le ramollissait et me mit à l’oeuvre. Je traçai
de mes doigts trempés dans la cendre les lignes que devaient scier mes
aides … Fermer les yeux en faisant crisser ses dents, rougir puis cesser
de respirer et déverser à flots sa douleur par des yeux brillants de fièvre.
L’Algérie avait besoin d’eux (22).
When the operating session ends, she surveys the carnage that surrounds her, including
an amputated arm tattooed with a beautiful palm tree. Comparing the destruction of lives
in her revolution to that of World War II, she alludes to the fact that Hitler's Nazis would
have used the skin from that arm to craft a lampshade. She laughs hysterically at the idea
which symbolizes one of the past century’s ugliest examples of man’s inhumanity toward
others. Not long thereafter, she realizes that her preoccupation with death is driving her
crazy, and that madness might actually provide a welcome release from the insanity of
her post: "J’étais proche de la folie et réclamais la folie pour remède" (37).
In Modern Clinical Psychiatry (1958), Arthur P. Noyes and Lawrence C. Kolb
describe the mental illness which has more recently come to be known as post-traumatic
stress syndrome:
There is no such thing as "getting used to combat"... Each moment of
combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct
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relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure ... psychiatric
casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in modern
warfare... (151).
Our protagonist is not the only soldier on the brink; she comes into daily contact with
other rebels suffering from battle fatigue. A few of her comrades, sitting around the fire,
describe a particularly heroic veteran combatant, Ali, in admiring terms while admitting
that he is crazy and should be admitted to a psychiatric hospital:
Il est fou … Il a bien servi la Révolution. Il est légendaire à l’Ouest. Il a
fait l’Indochine. C’est un as ... Il faut le voir les arroser de sa mitraillette.
C’est à en pleurer de plaisir. On doit le faire interner à la Manouba. Il n’est
pas à abattre; il servira encore (34-5).8
In fact, Ali’s state of mind is not so different from that of his admirers whose haunting
faces belie classic symptoms of battle fatigue:
[I]l y en avait qui pleuraient … Nous regardions le feu en silence et recevions
sa chaleur sans en être pénétrés. J’essayai vainement de deviner quelque
expression sur ces visages impassibles, mal rasés, aux yeux allumés comme
des chandelles par les flammes dansantes qui s’y reflétaient … Leurs
paupières tiquaient, leurs mains tremblaient (38).
The date "Été 1955" is affixed to this section of the protagonist's journal, but it not until
October of 1958 that her cave explodes. If we are to trust the chronological placement of
dated headings on her diary entries, she is to endure more than three years of this
unmitigated stress before she breaks down completely.
Miraculously, our heroine survives the explosion of her cave, but she has to be
hospitalized in the Psychiatric Centre of Manouba for both mental and physical injuries.
She has lost an arm, and at least temporarily, her mind. Her two closest comrades, Salah
and Kouider have been killed. Her two month-old son has been blinded by napalm and
8
Manouba was an Tunisian psychiatric hospital operated by French physicians such as
Franz Fanon that treated both the Algerians and the French during the revolution.
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has lost his legs. Upon her commitment to the asylum, the protagonist’s narration ceases
to be realistic. During her internment, what she portrays in her journal takes on patently
surreal characteristics. Because her reality is impossible to bear, she is unable to discern
fantasy from reality, and she invents or becomes the victim of a fictional existence. Her
doctor draws her attention to the physical reality of her scars in order to help her discern
what is real from what she has made up. She protests:
Inventées. Mon fils inventé–La grotte, inventée–l’orphelinat,
inventé–Moi, inventée–Vous, inventé–La guerre, inventée … J’aimais
une statue. Elle dominait le vide de Constantine. C’était ma liberté. Puis,
un jour, on me l’a blessée; elle refusait le couvre-feu. Elle saignait, vous
n’avez pas pu la sauver. Ma statue est morte. Son cadavre? Un caillou.
… Alors j’ai pris le cadavre-caillou de ma statue et m’en allai. Je le
gardai longtemps dans ma poche puis un jour je l’ai perdu dans la Souika.
J’ai parcouru les ruelles en pleurant mon caillou perdu.
… La nuit je rêvai que j’émergais à la surface d’un monde plat et
vide au bout duquel ma statue pleurait, la tête dans les mains (98-9).
From the depth of her subconscious is born a nightmare through which she attempts to
explain the course of history, since what she has experienced is infathomable. She says
that reality is all “invented,” because someone who had not lived through it could not
possibly believe what had transpired.
Over a year later, the protagonist is released from the hospital and promoted to the
rank of lieutenant. Ironically, the two stars on her epaulette must be worn above an
empty sleeve. It is while recuperating in Tunis that she remembers all that she has lost
and begins to yearn for her homeland. The dried-out olive tree that stood outside the
cave where she spent the majority of her combat years becomes a symbol for her of the
indestructibility of Algeria, and she longs to return and bury Kouider's coffin beside it.
Her hope for the future returns when she reclaims her son even though he is unable to
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recognize her after more than a year of separation. She has named her son “Arris” after
his father and her homeland, and from this point on, she intertwines and conflates the
three in the poetry and prose of her journal. She addresses them directly:
Arris
Peuple de va-nu pieds
Fils amputé de mon sein
Je me multiplierai
Nous nous multiplierons
Et de notre multitude mon amour
la terre renaîtra (102).
Marx-Scouras asserts that, “response to life in the war zone...” for women who write
about war, “is not rooted in hatred and revenge but rather in passion and hope” (Muffled
Screams 181). The narrator’s dreams for the future of both her son and her nation begin
to overshadow the pain and the violence of the past. Demonstrating how women’s
writing about war differs from that of men, she is capable in the end, of unmasking the
fiction of war by celebrating life and the future through her love poems to her son and her
emerging nation.
Mechakra has created a heroine who balances on the brink between pure fiction
and myth. Temporarily destroyed, she rises from the ashes of her cave and from her
commitment to a mental hospital to found the race that will build the new nation of
Algeria. As Fawzi Rouzeik remarks in an essay in Liberté:
Le mythe prétexte à parler du vécu même s’il frise le fantastique, voire
l’irréel, et c’est la raison pour laquelle des écrivains comme Yamina
Mechakra s’investissent dans ce type d’énonciation pour mieux approcher,
saisir, interpréter la réalité humaine (“Le mythe dans l'écriture algérienne:
L'exemple Yamina Mechakra,” 4 June 2003).
He adds that this brand of narration results in a “fantastic” story in which the related facts
surpass all possible realism: "Il est l’expression prodigieuse du rêve et de l’imaginaire,
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mais il est aussi un mode singulièrement expressif par lequel le vécu se dit et se perpétue"
(np). Mechakra explains in the Mokhtari interview that the pathology which her
protagonist escapes is an example of the "... états psychotiques de l’identité ... " that mark
all Algerian literature (2 February 2004). As a novelist she uses this medical expertise to
fuse realistic and surrealistic styles and subject her readers to a disorientation similar to
the confusion of a psychotic patient who experiences lucid moments followed by periods
of insanity.
TRAUMA WRITING AND HISTORY IN L’AMOUR, LA FANTASIA
In the previous pages we have seen how Mechakra has used her novel to
interrogate the capacity of the written word for recounting trauma and how she has relied
upon her psychiatric training and a plethora of narrative techniques to go beyond a simple
retelling of painful wartime events. Now, I will look at how Djebar’s training as an
historian has affected her orientation toward literature. I will examine how the political,
economic and cultural climates in post-colonial Algeria brought compelling forces to
bear on the ways in which Djebar would depict upheaval and trauma and how she would
portray tragic events and personalities. We will also see that using French involved
political issues for her, even though it was the only language in which she was capable of
writing. Particularly disturbing to postcolonial Algerian authors were the contentious
political factions that outlasted the revolution and the rise of a fundamentalist element
which was responsible for the assassination of numerous intellectuals and journalists.
These groups attempted to silence the remaining writers who were politically active and
had not yet fled the country and prevent them from continuing to write in French—the
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language of their former oppressors, a language that was now labeled dissident or
reactionary. Therefore, Algerian authors such as Djebar became political pariahs in their
own country. If they remained in their homeland, their lives were in danger, and they
would have to grapple with life-defining political and artistic questions before they could
ever choose their subject matter. They had to ask themselves, first, “Why write at all?”
before they raised the question, “In which language should I write?”
Since language is such a fundamental element of culture, an author's choice and
use of a particular language expresses a vital connection between his/her personal
creative life and his/her more public political stances. One of the most exciting
characteristics of postcolonial Francophone literature is the point to which its intrepid
non-native French-speaking writers and theorists have been able to enhance the French
language, to demolish previous genre boundaries, and to create innovative models of
engagement and representation. Djebar's work, especially in L'amour, la fantasia,
exhibits several of the many ways in which first generation Maghrebian authors have
investigated the capacity of the French language to articulate historic collective and
personal trauma through the creation of texts that conform neither to Western ideas of the
novel nor to Algerian political policies that discourage dissent and promulgate the use of
classical Arabic for all official communication.
As a student of her nation’s past, Djebar believes that when French historians
wrote about the conquest of Algeria and its occupation, including the rise of the popular
revolution in the 1950s, they portrayed only the events that were politically useful or
appealing to a French audience. In a similar manner, male Algerian historians portrayed
their past in a chauvinistic fashion emphasizing their own struggles and anxieties. She
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believes that both groups have told a particular history and have, for the most part,
neglected what feminists would describe as herstory. Speaking about her research for
Loin de Médine in a 1993 interview with Clarisse Zimra published in Callaloo (16.1),
Djebar reiterates that what was missing even in pre-colonial Algerian history prompted
her to probe deeper: "I had noticed 'blanks' in the text of those historians who happened
to write later, long after the birth of Islam, particularly regarding the role of women”
("When the Past Answers Our Present: Assia Djebar Talks About Loin de Médine" 122).
She believes that it is her mission to compile the accounts that survived by word of mouth
alone as generations of grandmothers and aunts passed down their experiences and to
create from them a written history that includes all of her ancestors. She explained this
task as she accepted the "Peace Prize" from Deutschen Buchhandels in 2000:
Avec ou malgré la langue dite "étrangère," j’avais à poser, sur mon
pays, toutes les questions, décidai-je! Sur son histoire, sur son identité, sur
ses plaies, sur ses tabous, sur ses richesses cachées et sur la dépossession
coloniale de tout un siècle—et il ne s’agissait ni de protestations ni de
réquisitoires. L’indépendance, nous l’avions et payée au prix fort! Il ne
s’agissait que de mémoire, que de tatouages de la révolte et du combat,
rendus ineffaçables dans nos cœurs et jusque dans l’éclat de notre regard,
à devoir inscrire, à conserver, même en lettres françaises et alphabet latin!9
Thus, Djebar’s story transforms the dominant male plot structure of French and Algerian
history and portrays the traumatic events of resistance, war, and daily life from a
woman’s perspective. She takes the genuine folk narratives of her female ancestors and
finds a way to translate them into written French. Djebar, the historian, intertwines her
personal imaginary with the recollections of the Algerian people, especially its women, to
9
Assia Djebar, "Idiome de l'exil et langue de l'irréductibilité" acceptance speech given
upon her reception of the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandles in 2000, variously
reprinted in Le Monde and in La Revue ETUDES, and now available online at
http://www.remue.net/cont/Djebar01.html
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create a revision of canonical history which can truly be appreciated from the perspective
of a surrealist literary critique. We have to ask ourselves: “Is what she has done reliable
or even acceptable? Have her techniques ‘contaminated’ history? Has a single historian
the ‘right’ to upset the status quo?”
Hayden White theorizes that History should always be open to revision, and that a
particular version of history acts as a story that explains life to people until it is no longer
capable of furnishing a plausible explanation. This is especially salient in regards to
Djebar’s re-writing of the history of her fellow citizens’ resistance to colonization—from
a feminine perspective and doing so in the form of a novel. One might ask where fact
ends and fiction begins in such a representation. However, White suggests in Tropics of
Discourse (1978) that,
… historians and philosophers of history have failed to take notice of the
essentially provisional and contingent nature of historical representations
and of their susceptibility to infinite revision in the light of new evidence
or more sophisticated conceptualization of problems (82).
He also confronts how literary critics have looked at history and what historians think
about the so-called historical novel:
… in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as
what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as
much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with
their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences (82).
He observes that “… most historical sequences can be depicted in a number of different
ways, so as to provide different interpretations of those events and endow them with
different meanings…,” and that historians have done exactly that for one reason or
another for centuries (85).
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White also compares the privileging of a particular interpretation of history to
what happens in psychotherapy:
The sets of events in the patient’s past which are the presumed cause of
his distress, manifested in the neurotic syndrome, have been defamiliarized,
rendered strange, mysterious, and threatening and have assumed a meaning
that he can neither accept nor effectively reject … the patient has overemplotted
these events, has charged them with a meaning so intense that, whether real
or merely imagined, they continue to shape both his perceptions and his
responses to the world long after they should have become “past history.”
… The problem is to get the patient to “reemplot” his whole life history in
such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their
significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his
life. As thus envisaged, the therapeutic process is an exercise in the
refamiliarization of events that have been defamiliarized, rendered alienated
from the patient’s life-history, by virtue of their overdetermination as causal
forces (87).
To summarize, he supports a thoughtful revision of history which facilitates a more
contemporary explanation of past events. In fact, he sees it as both necessary and
beneficial, especially in cases where the histories to be retold have a particularly
traumatic effect upon the people who have experienced them.
For a Djebar student, her Ces voix qui m'assiègent (1999) provides a particularly
useful instrument for exploring her motivation in other texts. The poem which introduces
Ces voix … delivers an incredibly lyric synthesis of the issues we intend to discuss
concerning Djebar's use of practices that resemble those of the Surrealists: the question of
the suitability of written language to transmit troubling thoughts and the choice of a
language in which to write. Djebar outlines the history behind the languages spoken in
Algeria and points out the social and political questions that the usage of each one entails.
For the sake of the trauma visited upon her colonized brothers and sisters, she finds it
necessary to usurp the power that the French language wielded in Algeria during the
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colonial period and turn it against colonial rhetoric renaming it "...the language of
murder, blood and gore—the language of war" (Callaloo 128). The following passage
deals with her choice of language:
N'aie-je pas dit, écrit dans L'amour, la fantasia que:
Chez nous, toute femme a quatre langues
celle du roc, la plus ancienne,
disons de Jugurtha, la <<libyque>> appelait-on cette berbère ...
la seconde, celle du Livre et des prières cinq fois par jour ...
la troisième serait la langue des maîtres d'hier ...
Trois langues auxquelles s’accouple un quatrième langage: celui du
corps avec ses danses, ses transes, ses suffocations,
parfois son asphyxie, et son délire …
Écrire donc d’un versant d’une langue
Vers l’abri noir de l’autre
Vers la tragédie de la troisième
Dites-moi, quelle serait-elle, cette troisième?
Tangage des langages, certes…
Le désastre, depuis hier, a commencé.
... le temps des cavalcades est revenue
le passé sanguinolent
le passé vif vivant
Écrire est une route à ouvrir
écrire est un long silence qui écoute
un silence de toute une vie (14-17).
She comes to understand that the use of French, highly inflected with Berber and Arabic,
can temper the more instinctual influences of the language of the body therefore making
her ancestors’ gestures, performative sequences, and orality more comprehensible to a
contemporary literary audience.
One of the lyric descriptions she uses to explain how certain selections on love
and war came to her while writing L'amour, la fantasia recalls Breton’s declaration at the
close of Nadja: “La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas” (Nadja 190):
... l’écriture qui surgit, qui s’inscrit, qui court sur le sable, la soie, le
parchemin ou les tablettes, sur le papier ou sur l’écran allumé, s’anime
en effet, prend vie, gagne vitesse et même galope, mais toujours comme
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une mise en écho, dans un besoin compulsif de garder trace des voix,
tout amour, qui s’envolent et s’assèchent (Ces voix 26).
She must record the images and the history she has researched or imagined which force
themselves upon her in a fantasia—the significant title word that can be variously
translated, each definition holding some relevance to the work she is undertaking: (1) a
free usually instrumental composition not in strict form, (2) a cavalry attack, (3) a
regional cultural celebration resembling a mounted attack, (4) a work in which the
author’s fancy roves unrestricted, unbridled, or (5) something possessing grotesque,
bizarre, or unreal qualities. We can imagine various connections among these meanings
and how they may have informed her choice of title, and we can also consider the
etymologically-related term “fancy” and how it connotes the idea of a text with
“baroque,” non-conformist qualities, any of which might link this work to the role of the
fantastic in the production of the Surrealists.
Like Mechakra, Djebar valorizes the language of the body and of traditional
folkways—trances, dances and vociferations—used by women to express the history,
suffocation, and insanity of their domination—as an alternative to written language: “je
m’emmèle dans l’écheveau des langues tressées—celle qui se dit et ne s’écrit pas, celle
qui se parle et fuit l’enflure des discours …” (20). She does not minimize the challenge
of "translating" the vigor of physical expression into a scriptural form. However, she
reiterates that the time to resist has arrived and must be met with any "tangage des
langages" that possesses the energy to express the bloody past as well as a hope for the
future. She sees writing as the way to terminate official and unofficial policies of
colonial and gender domination and to set the historical record straight.
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Let us look at a particularly noteworthy example in L’Amour, la fantasia of how
Djebar seizes an episode from Bosquet’s account of the fall of Algiers in 1830 and gives
it an entirely different “spin.” From the trilogy of "trances, dances, and vociferations"
(14) that Djebar describes as the language of the body belonging to traditional forms of
expression used by pre-literate North African women, it is the perhaps their vocal
practice of ululation that historically struck the most fear into the hearts of colonial forces
in North Africa. Male European writers from both the early colonial period and from the
revolutionary period have commented upon the uneasiness, if not the fear, it triggered
among European invaders. Nada Elia speaks about disruptive forms of subaltern
expression in her essay on Djebar’s concept of the “fourth language” in Trances, Danses
and Vociferations (2001), a book that borrows its title from Djebar’s poem. She defines
these pre-linguistic utterances as a “...collective voice [that] operates against the very
distinctions the French sought to impose in the attempt to divide and rule, for it expresses
the outrage of all colonized women, regardless of the social and ethnic distinctions the
occupier sought to manipulate” (12). Djebar contrasts the written stories of battles that
flowed so easily from the pens of the French with the strident cries emanating from the
throats of the Algerian women behind their men, inciting their fervor:
Les femmes, par leur hululement funèbre, improvisent, en direction de
l’autre sexe, comme une étrange parlerie de guerre. Inhumanité certes de
ces cris, stridulation du chant qui lancine, hiéroglyphes de la voix
collective et sauvage: nos écrivains sont hantés par cette rumeur (Amour 68).
It is interesting that this discordant clamor, collective and dissident, pre-literate but also
essentially pre-linguistic in its utterance, should have had such profound though
dissimilar effects on the combatants for whom it was intended and on the enemy who
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overheard it. Djebar records several other incidents of this practice in L’Amour, la
fantasia which illustrate that, even from the beginning, the Other’s women were not
merely a silent entity but a unified voice, albeit one that was not yet capable of
communicating its story in writing.
Djebar continues to describe other types of vociferation, such as the Algerian
people's wails of protest against colonization:
Ce monde étranger, qu’ils pénètraient quasiment sur le mode sexuel, ce
monde hurla continûment vingt ou vingt-cinq années durant, après la prise
de la Ville Inprenable … Et ces officiers modernes, ces cavaliers aristocrates
si efficacement armés, à la tête des milliers de fantassins de tous bords,
ces croisés du siècle colonial submergé par tant de clameurs, se repaissent
de cette épaisseur sonore. Y pénètrent comme une défloration. L’Afrique
est prise malgré le refus qu’elle ne peut étouffer (70).
What strikes her most is that civilized even aristocratic officers could rationalize such
savage despoilment. They seemed to justify their inhumanity toward the enemy by
referring to stories of their ancestors' crusades across North Africa. It comes as a surprise
to Djebar that, "Les femmes françaises parcourent la correspondance des vainqueurs,
quasiment les mains jointes; et cette dévotion familiale auréole le mouvement de
séduction censé se dérouler de l’autre côté de la Méditerranée (70). She would have
thought that these European women might have disapproved of the violent actions
recounted by their sons and husbands and would have protested.
A event unfolds in the chapter of L'amour, la fantasia entitled "FEMMES,
ENFANTS, BOEUFS COUCHÉS DANS LES GROTTES" which speaks to how even a
story that is meant to be stifled ultimately escapes. It bears more than a passing
resemblance to Mechakra's tragic tale of the explosion of her cave in La Grotte éclatée.
It takes place in June of 1845, when Berber tribes are wreaking havoc against French
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forces in the west central portion of the countryside. Colonel Pélissier was given the task
of bringing these interior tribes under control. For centuries, after each foray, these tribes
had taken refuge along with their women and children and their flocks and munitions in a
vast system of caves and inaccessible gorges. Pélissier's superior Bugeaud sent the order:
"Si ces gredins se retirent dans leurs grottes … imitez Cavaignac aux Sbéah, enfumez-les
à outrance, comme des renards" (78)! Using the term enfumer, usually reserved for
smoking out “vermin,” Pélissier had ordered his troops to treat the opposition as animals.
They began scouring the landscape and plugging up any openings from which the enemy
might escape, and then they began cutting towering piles of wood. All day and all night,
the fires were fueled and stirred up to a height of sixty meters by a change of wind that
forced most of the smoke underground. Djebar reports that "Bugeaud l’a écrit; Pélissier a
obéi, mais, devant le scandale qui éclatera à Paris, il ne divulguera pas l’ordre. C’est un
véritable officier: il possède l’esprit de corps, le sens du devoir, il respecte la loi du
silence" (83). Days later, he sent only an abbreviated report to his superiors.
When she retells the story, Djebar draws upon the words of an anonymous soldier
writing home to his family expressing the horror of what he had seen:
Quelle plume saurait rendre ce tableau? Voir, au milieu de la nuit,
à la faveur de la lune, un corps de troupes françaises occupé à entretenir un
feu infernal! Entendre les sourds gémissements des hommes, des femmes,
des enfants et des animaux, le craquement des roches calcinées s’écroulant,
et les continuelles détonations des armes" (84)!
Another soldier who was ordered to enter the cave after it had cooled down wrote:
J’ai vu un homme mort, le genou à terre, la main crispée sur la corne d’un
boeuf. Devant lui était une femme tenant son enfant dans ses bras. Cet
homme, il était facile de le reconnaître, avait été asphyxié, ainsi que la
femme, l’enfant et le boeuf, au moment où il cherchait à preserver sa
famille de la rage de cet animal (86-7).
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In the course of twenty-four hours, over 1500 Algerian men, women, children and their
livestock were either burned alive or suffocated in the massive tomb that their cave had
become. The only sounds that came from the grave were their cries of agony preceding
death.
In an unexpected turn of authorial privilege, Djebar provides the reader with an
alternative perspective of the enfumade. Beginning, as she does several times in the
novel with, "J’imagine ... " (84), she invents a corollary tale to accompany one of the few
recorded in European history. She speaks of the effect of the massacre on the French
troops as well as on the surrounding tribes as six hundred of the bodies were carried from
the cave and buried without ceremony in a common grave. In a personal letter to his
brother, Péllisier could not restrain himself from bragging: "J’ai fait hermétiquement
boucher toutes les issues et je fais un vaste cimetière. La terre couvrira à jamais les
cadavres de ces fanatiques ... J’ai fait mon devoir de chef" (90). In the end, after reading
the report in Paris, even the politicians decried its too realistic description of the
massacre. Djebar fleshes out the official history by providing details that were never
aired in Paris either because the leaders felt them inconsequential or found it
"inconvenient" to report the disaster of women interred alive with their babies at the
breast. In fact, she thanks Pélissier, for at least having recorded the horror so that she
could pick up where he left off and retell it, re-inscribing it from another point of view.
The voices of the conquered lead Djebar to translate their stories into a language
that escapes the cloistered walls of the grandmothers and can be appreciated by a wider
audience. The author expresses a full range of communication from the phenomenon of
ululation to the expression of cries of terror, pain and grief, coming finally to tales
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preserved in the collective memory of Algerian women. Their recounted tales become a
primary source, equal in poignancy to the earlier written chronicles created by men, for
her retelling of history. However, other professional historians decry what they call
revisionary history and see it as an attempt to undermine the "authority" of a certain
version of events past.
CIVIL AND FAMILY WAR IN LEBANON—EVELYNE ACCAD AND L'EXCISÉE
Accad's work encompasses the specific—Lebanon, her homeland—the regional,
including the Middle East and the Maghreb, where religious and cultural prohibitions
prevent women's accession to equal subjectivity with men—and the universal condition
of Woman. She theorizes that women around the world have more in common than their
geographical and social differences might belie. Like Mechakra and Djebar, she deals,
through writing, with the trauma of war and the violence committed against women. She
is less likely than Mechakra or Djebar to interrogate the capacity of written language to
“represent” traumatic experience or disturbing nightmares and visions within the content
of her novels, but discusses it openly in her theoretical works and personal interviews.
Thus, her double role as novelist and critical theorist permits the scholar a rare
opportunity to study her fiction supported by the large body of feminist and political
discourse that she has also produced.
Accad explains, in her introduction to Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the
Middle East (1990), that "War creates such conditions of despair that writing becomes a
necessity, an outlet and a catharsis. It helps heal the wounds. It offers an alternative to
fighting and destruction. It can become one form of the active nonviolent struggles" (680
7). Speaking with Elizabeth Zahnd in 2001 about The Wounded Breast, she reiterates the
positive outcomes of literature for her, personally: "Writing has always been cathartic for
me. It helped me dig into myself and find out the disturbing upsetting elements of my
past and present life, and project new hopes for the future" (“Exorcising my Pain” 7)..
But what role can this “cathartic” brand of writing play in the aesthetic definition of
“literature”? As we have already seen in Mechakra’s work, trauma writing has the
potential to gain acceptance as a formal genre.
As early as 1989, in the introduction to Sexuality and War, Professor Accad asked
herself a number of questions about the scope of literature:
Is literature an adequate field to understand political and social realities?
Can novels be used as social, anthropological and political documents?
What about imagination, the fantasy of the author? What about his or her
'distortions' (4)?
And she has decided that not only do historical fiction, survivor narratives, and personal
diaries qualify as literature, but that for some purposes,
... creative works are more appropriate than other works. They give us
the "total" picture because they not only include all the various fields—
social, political, anthropological, religious and cultural—but they also
allow us to enter into the imaginary and the unconscious of the author.
In expressing his or her own individual vision, an author also suggests
links to the collective "imagination." ... The tension between individual
and collective imagination adds complexities and subtleties not found
in more direct scientific documents (4-5).
Like La Grotte éclatée, the intrigue of L’Excisée (1982) takes place in a war-torn
setting—Lebanon in the 1960s. Just as the first Surrealists had reacted to the inhumanity
of World War I, the citizens of Beirut were compelled to endure the unrelenting stress of
living in a partitioned city. At the beginning of the novel, an all-pervading pall of anxiety
hangs in the air similar to the smoke from the daily bomb explosions:
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L’été a été chaud, un été de poussière et de folie, un été de rage, humide
comme les pleurs de l’enfant endolori, amer comme la noisette verte.
Partout des bandes armés ont assiégé Beyrouth, remuant les haines,
semant la peur, brisant les confiances, cassant l’euphorie (7).
Not a pretty picture! A teenage girl needs to grow up in a more secure environment than
this. The narrator proceeds to sketch the perplexing political circumstances surrounding
the city: the President is calling for representatives from the warring factions to call a
cease fire so that they can sit down and resolve their differences; the American Sixth
Fleet is poised offshore in the Mediterranean. As an indication of the standoffs created
by the Cold War, nearby Russia is unhappy about American intervention in the war, and
the United Nations Security Council has demanded a cease fire. Heads of each faction
welcome a cease fire if only to take advantage of the opportunity to bury their dead and
re-arm for the next battle. No one is seriously considering peace.
Just as Beirut is a city at war, the family of the main character is also involved in
prickly family politics. On the morning of the cease fire, E. is on her way to a new
school. The previous year she had attended a French school across town, but this year,
her parents have decided to send her to the American school to protect her from having to
cross a city where the buildings are riddled by bullets and the streets are dotted with
stone-throwing partisans. She attempts to come to terms with the two major dilemmas in
her life: her father is a Christian evangelical fanatic who tries to control her life, and she
is haunted by the daily specter of war that permeates her existence. She reflects:
Il y a eu trop de cris rebondissant sur des murs érigés par la peur. Il y a eu
trop de sexes mutilés, de femmes violées et d’enfants écartélées dans une nuit
sans fin. Il y a trop d’injustices et de souffrances inutiles acceptées à genoux.
Comment accepter des solutions faciles devant tant de misères (16)?
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From our very first encounter with the girl we are convinced that she is suffering from
post-traumatic stress syndrome. Her personality has been fragmented by continual
exposure to violence at home and in the street: the spiritual war her father wages as he
tries to convince his followers that religion can save both their souls and the nation and
the civil war in her homeland.
Only twice in the novel is the power of language in the possession of men who
would subdue women mentioned. The first occurs in a fragment of poetry which
expresses the protagonist’s fear for herself and her nation:
La terre éclate dans un grand holocauste atomique
La terre est battue par les forces meurtrières de l’Homme
Elle se plie sous le Savoir et le Phallus-Langage
La terre meurt étranglée par l’Homme...(41-2).
It is apt that this poetic passage, with its reference to the Phallus-Langage, encapsulates
better than any other, the obligation of women’s submission to men—the precepts of two
similar passages of scripture quoted from the Bible and the Coran which appear nearly
thirty pages earlier in the text. Their analogous verses promote doctrines that oppress and
subjugate women in both Christian and Islamic societies. The Coran condemns wives to
submission before their husbands and to wearing the veil: “Femmes, soyez de même
soumises à vos maris ... Ayez, non cette parure extérieure ... mais la parure intérieure et
cachée dans le coeur ... Qu’elles rabattent leurs voiles sur leurs gorges” (13-4). Subject to
similar teachings, it is astonishing how much the Christian women who participate in the
evangelist’s rally resemble their Muslim counterparts: "Elles ont toutes la tête couverte et
le regard humble et soumis" (19). When the protagonist recognizes pure submission to
male domination in the body language of the crowd of women who drag themselves
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wearily to the front of her father’s tent to be “saved,” she rebels. It is this rebellion that
carries her away from the daily spectre of the Lebanese civil war and the authoritarian
commands of her father and into another equally dangerous situation.
PSYCHOSES, TEXTUAL FRAGMENTATION AND GENRE IRREGULARITIES
Breton seems to have harbored a proprietary attitude toward the practices that he
and his followers had developed, but Annette Shandler Levitt describes their legacy as a
broader and more productive body of processes which continued to attract participants
throughout the twentieth century (The Genres and Genders of Surrealism 1999). She
credits later generations of writers and subsequent literary movements with productively
recycling surrealist conventions—especially those that privileged structural irregularities
in the text—and surpassing the Surrealists’ original intents:
Recognizing the fragmentation of life leading into and growing out of World
War I, Surrealists and Modernists alike work to represent the fragmentation
itself—in internal and external worlds, in subject and/or form. Surrealism is
not a cultural anomaly but an integral part of the arts of the twentieth century
art of Modernism, a movement of breadth and inclusivity rather than—as it has
recently been characterized and as Breton himself seems to desire—a narrow
elitist movement (8).
She feels that Surrealism, as an approach, encapsulates the fragmentation and apparent
meaninglessness of life for post-World War I Westerners. What Levitt does not attempt,
however, is an analysis of Surrealism as a line of attack that postcolonial writers who had
endured the intense fragmentation of their worlds and their psyches could employ to
forge a reversal of the psychological, spiritual and political predicaments of their lives.
Students of North African literature understand that the genres codified by the
Western literary canon are far too rigid to guide the investigation of many non-western
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texts, particularly those ostensibly written to testify to traumatic historical events. In
these works, dreams and nightmares flow unobstructed from the unconscious, for it is not
the nature of insanity to manifest itself in an ordered or logical manner. Even the
disconnected appearance of the texts reflects the patchy, postcolonial experience of its
artists as rational and intuitive narration co-exist. As a pertinent example, Levitt notes
that the “... visual disruption of the text mirrors the disruption of the novel’s overall
coherence,” in Breton’s Nadja, and the “... fragmentation of human relationships is
underscored by fragmentation of form ...”(59). In the pages to follow, I will examine a
number of passages in which the fragmentation and topographical appearance of the text
support this observation.
A NOVEL AND MUCH MORE
First, let us look at textual organization issues as they apply to Mechakra’s La
Grotte éclatée. In this work, the reader becomes aware of a level of graphic
fragmentation that extends beyond its division into chapter-like units. The "chapters" are
often broken into smaller elements by icons composed of three asterisks placed between
breaks in the text. Many of these components, headed by dates, appear, at first glance, to
be chronological entries. Because they are dated, they resemble inscriptions in a diary.
--Octobre 1958 – Mort des compagnons. Éclatement d’une grotte.
--Octobre 1958 – je mourus.
--Octobre 1958 – le napalm m’arracha Salah.
--Février 1958 – Des petits écoliers assassinés n’avaient pas encore compris qu’ils
étaient morts.
--Octobre 1958 – Kouider sauva mon corps de l’oubli.
--Octobre 1958 – Kouider sentait la chair brûlée.
--Octobre 1958 – j’avais souhaité perdre la mémoire (La Grotte éclatée 95).
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The chronology of October is broken by a flashback to a particularly dreadful date in
February which confirms the narrator’s desire to escape reality.
From a structural analysis, many clauses in the text lack the essentials of complete
sentences; they are fragmentary and telegraphic. Mechakra resorts to staccato phrases
that give the portrait of the heroine a shattered appearance: "Âge: 19 ans. Situation:
Enceinte" (74). While she is a patient at the Psychiatric Center at Manouba the
protagonist's sentences remain either quite brief or fragmentary reflecting her alienation
from the world:
… Je n’admettais pas de monde vivant. Je réclammai la folie. Je
voulais me libérer des autres, de moi, du souvenir.
On me ramena le corps de mon fils:
Age: deux mois.
Victime du napalm.
Mon fils vivant, aveugle et sans jambes. Mon fils brûlé (96).
It is not until she leaves the asylum, escaping the prison of her insanity, that the
simplicity—and the wholeness—of her sentences begins to reflect her return to reality
and hope:
Sous la terre dort mon enfance
Au coeur de mes fils que je laboure
Poussent la vigne et le grenadier
Je me nourrirai pour vivre encore (126).
So it is that as the heroine's sanity returns and her memories flood to the surface,
her journal reflects a sort of schizophrenic combination of genres. In the section to
follow, we will analyze the structure of La Grotte éclatée to see how genre definitions are
demolished in it in much the same way that the author has blurred the distinctions
between sanity and insanity and reality and surreality in her text.
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Song acts as a link between the oral "telling" of the story and the process of
writing in La Grotte éclatée. As we have already noted, the translation of orality through
the inclusion of transcribed song often plays a role in literature from regions where a
large percentage of the population is illiterate. As well, although some critics would
prefer to rule out the writing of personal journals as a legitimate literary genre, feminists
fight to have it accepted, since it often represents the initial step that formerly unschooled
women take toward written self-expression.
Poetry plays preeminent visual as well as communicative roles in this narrative,
and a symbiotic relationship between poetry and prose dominates the text. Random
glances through the novel verify that poetry occupies a significant portion of the whole.
However, upon closer examination, large selections of text that appear to be prose are
also of a poetic nature, and parallel renderings of the text into poetic and prose versions
of one another often occupy adjacent pages. The selections that most resemble poetry are
italicized.
The poem serving as an introduction to the narrative announces a literature which
admits the liaison of two traditional genres while at the same time, enumerates the topics
to be tackled:
Tu es venu tête folle
Les cheveux rêvant de soleils inconnus
Ton âge chemin égaré en mon ventre s’est ouvert
De ta colline oubliée ont chanté les roseaux
Du sable cassé de Frontières
Tes pas ont violé les lois insensées (11).
In this lyrical prologue, the author proposes to write about the insanity which preoccupies
her personally and dominates the political situation in Algeria. The country has been
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violated by colonization, which has caused it to lose sight of its destiny. It is from within
herself (the woman and the land), that new generations of hope will spring. She may
have been lost, but dreams of the future will be rebuilt upon the traditions of the past.
The extent to which the narrator represents other subaltern populations is made
evident later, when she speaks not only for her homeland but for women worldwide in a
multi-national cry for liberty. Her first appeal is poetic:
Par l’étoile et le croissant
Par la hâche déterrée
Par la squaw exterminée
Par le burnous et le poncho
Par la rizière fécondée et le blé soulevé
Par la flûte et la corde vocale
Par la pique et la béquille
Par le poing menaçant
… Nous briserons vos canons,
Nous cisaillerons vos avions,
Nous mâcherons vos frontières (135).
She refers to oppression in the former Soviet Union, in the United States, in Latin
America, in the Orient and, of course, in Africa. On the next page, a paragraph of prose
reiterates the words of her poetic battle cry and resituates it squarely in her native land
where action has begun to lead to hope:
L’indépendance de l’Algérie, un espoir vivifié aux torrents de voix et de
poings levés de tous les coins du pays, un espoir gonflé à la canonnade
de nos coeurs battant la marche irréversible d’un peuple qui tirait la terre
à lui pour lui infliger la forme de ses seins, de ses dents, de sa langue, de
son ventre, de son bourgeon génital, de ses mains. Notre marbre rose et
notre marbre blanc avaient durci. Mosaïques futures pour les jardins de
nos aouleds (136).
By mentioning “the voice … the raised fists … the beating of our hearts … the form of
our breasts, our teeth, our tongue, our womb, our penis, our hands …” she highlights the
sheer physicality of the struggle for freedom as compared to a reasoned political attack.
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A nation is in the making, and she is an unlikely scribe, responsible for noting down the
trials and desires of her people, both male and female. She speaks of the violence of war
but also of the hope to follow.
Near the close of the novel, the author chooses poetry and reiterates her message
in prose to relate the life of the protagonist's son which parallels the rise of the Algerian
nation. Bereft of nearly everything she loves, the narrator begins to find the words to
express the haunting moments of her war years. The poetry comes first:
Fils brûlé au feu de l’exil
Sur ton berceau fendu
Ta plainte m’a caché l’Horizon
Pendant que ton souvenir dormait sur mon genou
Pendant que je dormais
Un enfant est venu
Sur ses pas une chaîne a claqué
Sur tes menottes blessées mon amour
La neige a fondu (143).
In the following prose, she addresses Arris—not coincidentally the name of her lover and
her homeland as well as the name she has chosen for the son who was mutilated when the
cave exploded:10
Je murmurai ta chanson, Arris, à notre fils quand il aura tes yeux pour me
comprendre et mes lèvres pour te nommer … Je veillerai, mon amour, à l’ombre
de ta mémoire et sur chaque ride jaillissant de mon corps, j’inscrirai ton nom et
ma jeunesse ... Arris, mon amour, aujourd’hui charogne puante et que j’aime,
demain terre riche en phosphore où danse un feu follet … Mon amour au regard
bleu, demain je t’offrirai mon corps simplement nu, je le mêlerai au tien pour que
les feux follets dansent plus vite sur une frontière … Un vagabond solitaire nous
rencontrera peut-être et se mettra à chanter … Et tous les soirs, nous danserons
follement pour l’écouter nous chanter … Il nous dira une vallée où pousse le blé
et où les marguerites règnent sur le coeur des enfants (144-5).
10
This is also the title she chooses for her second novel.
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The pure corporality of her vocabulary choices translates her peoples’ protest into a
political discourse strongly marked by traditional fantasy and musicality.
Dialogue also plays an important role in La Grotte éclatée suggesting the
exchanges commonly found at the theater. In one instance, while the protagonist
prepares herself to "... become the butcher of her companions" (37) by performing
surgery, she equates their pain with the torture endured by other Algerians under French
reprisals. Her interior mono/dialogue reflects her personal trauma and the plight of her
brothers and sisters in other battles at other times:
--L’Algérie entière coulait par la blessure.
--Villa Susini: des jeunes filles nues sont noyées dans des baignoires.
--Villa Gras: des hommes sont étouffés.
--La gégène et le loup.
--Un corps imbibé d’essence brûle.
--Des flammes de chalumeau ouvrent des poitrines et des bras.
--On entaille des corps entiers.
--Des mains servent d’enclume au manche des haches.
--On étrangle.
--L’Algérie entière criait sous la torture (38).
Not all of her conversations are introspective. Other characters discuss the tragedy of
their existences. In one episode the protagonist and the young boy whose legs she has
had to amputate, are trapped in a cold cave with many suffering soldiers. They have very
little to eat and are afraid to burn the wood necessary to get warm enough to sleep for fear
of being discovered by the enemy. They express their reality and their dreams to one
another. Salah says:
--Moi, je sais que les autres enfants s’amusent. Ils ont leurs jambes. Ils
vont à l’école, ils n’ont pas froid, ils mangent des plats chauds. Hier soir
j’avais si froid que je n’arrivais pas à dormir; j’ai prié Allah pour qu’il
transforme la grotte en une immense cheminée.
--Et alors?
--Tu as mis ta main sur mon épaule, cela m’a fait beaucoup du bien et j’ai dormi.
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--Tu as rêvé?
--Un tas de choses.
--C’était beau?
--Je ne sais plus; il y avait toi … moi … je ne sais plus.
--Moi, j’ai rêvé, au grand silence de la nuit, au repos, au vrai repos. J’ai
rêvé aussi d’une cheminée où flamboyait un bon feu (45).
Their exchange relates the simple pleasures that soldiers cannot take for granted, and
foreshadows the moment when the cave will become an inferno that engulfs everyone.
Viewed globally, one can theorize that Kateb Yacine's rather famous
characterization of Mechakra’s text as "Ce n'est pas un roman, et c'est beaucoup mieux:
un long poème en prose qui peut se lire comme un roman" (Preface 8), may have
provided a rather conservative description of this "exploded" text. Is it possible that
when the heroine speaks of revolutionary forces “breaking up the enemy’s cannons” that
the author was playing upon the use of the word canon to refer to the traditional canons
of literary genre as well (135)?
FRENCH NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS, LETTERS, THEATER: DJEBAR’S HISTORY
Assia Djebar has spoken out to and for the women of her homeland who have had
little or no access to the public forum due either to their illiteracy or to a reigning
atmosphere of gender oppression, by investigating the stories and legends of strong
women who defended their nation against invaders. Others have already considered how
she rationalizes writing in French in a nation where classical Arabic has been restored as
the official language, and the language of the Berber population has been marginalized.
By weaving together the disciplines of history, linguistics and anthropology and the
genres of the short story, the novel, poetry and song, we will extend those critics’
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interpretations to justify how certain elements of L'amour, la fantasia can be critiqued
from a surrealist perspective. In particular, we will see how she plays with the French
language, composing a polyphonic fantasia that is punctuated and fragmented by the
songs of the "grandmothers" of Algerian society, the Tamazight spoken by her ancestors,
and the rhythms of informal Arabic spoken by cloistered women at home.
Although Djebar's venue à l'écriture was much less violent than Mechakra's, we
will see that a gentler introduction to writing did not preclude her from researching and
re-writing accounts of war that were equally dramatic. During her university years, she
researched the annals of European history in order to establish exactly how the first
incursions of the French empire into North Africa in the 1830s had been portrayed.
Many of the texts that she discovered glorified the violence and savagery of war. She
found that media “vulture culture” was a phenomenon that existed long before the advent
of television news coverage and “imbedded” foreign correspondents.
She tells us in L’Amour, la fantasia that the French were so anxious to record the
first battle of Algiers that their flotilla of ships carried not only soldiers and sailors but
also novelists, four painters, five artists, ten engravers, and one journalist with a printing
press who planned to set up the first newspaper in the conquered territory (16). By
contrast, she found that the participation of the indigenous population had been preserved
throughout the intervening years primarily by word of mouth. She reviewed French
accounts of colonial history from such diverse sources as the daily log kept by the captain
of a warship, newpaper articles from the front, and letters that soldiers had written home
to their superiors and loved ones. Next, she collected the memories that Algerian women
had guarded and passed down over the generations. Finally, she expanded upon the
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anecdotes available from outside sources by weaving an imagined narrative of her own
among the other elements so as to retell “history” from the perspective of women who
might have been present at the siege of "the Invincible City":
... que se disent les femmes de la ville, quels rêves s’allument en elles, ou
s’éteignent à jamais, tandis qu’elles contemplent la flotte royale qui dessine
les figures d’une choréographie mystérieuse? … Je rêve à cette brève trève
de tous les commencements; je m’insinue, visiteuse importune, dans le
vestibule de ce proche passé, enlevant mes sandales selon le rite habituel,
suspendant mon souffle pour tenter de tout réentendre … (16).
In the poetic turn of the phrase, "... Je rêve à cette brève trêve de tous les commencements
...," the author admits that her supplemental anecdotes are fiction which seeks to provide
a counter-narrative to the foreigner's version of events. She predicts: "… le silence de
cette matinée souveraine précède le cortège de cris et de meurtres, qui vont emplir les
décennies suivantes" (17).
By incorporating the written stories of the French conquerors, the author does
more than indict the savagery of their "rape" of Algeria. She sadly reveals that the
faintest glimmer of respect occasionally shows through their mostly obtuse disinterest in
the Algerian people. She compares how their rare day-to-day correspondence "... qui part
des bivouacs, offre une analogie avec des lettres d’amour … ces lettres, dans le fond,
d’une Algérie-femme impossible à apprivoiser," and she speaks of their obsession with
the rape and suffering of the country, saying that, "Ces guerriers me deviennent, au
milieu des cris que leur style élégant ne peut atténuer, les amants funèbres de mon
Algérie" (69).
It is through the chronicle of Amable Matterer that Djebar highlights a conflation
that many male war historians make between the language of making love and the
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language of making war. Matterer was second captain of the ship City of Marseille who
soberly wrote his account of the first day's confrontation on June 13, 1830. Forty
thousand soldiers and thirty thousand marines faced off against the white cliffs and villas
of what had previously been called the "Invincible City." He romanticizes war as he
describes the virginal landscape as "waiting to be taken," and likens the hand-to-hand
skirmishes in battle to embraces.
From a twentieth-century perspective, it becomes clear that the intended audience
for these early nineteenth-century reports was in Paris, where the government was
attempting to put down a revolution. On the morning of June 20, a battalion chief named
Langlois, who was also a painter, stopped to draw "… des Turcs morts ‘la rage de la
bravoure’ imprimée encore sur leur visage…" and soldiers "…trouvés un poignard dans
la main droite et enfoncé dans la poitrine" (27). Dealing with armed conflict both at
home and abroad, those in power in Paris published these boastful communiqués as proof
of the strength and unity of French forces. Reporters asserted that the battles were being
won because of the superiority of their artillery and the harmony among the French
commanders in the face of the dissent evidenced by the Algerian chiefs.
Another writer, Baron Barchou, seemed particularly intrigued by the brutality of
the indigenous women:
Des femmes, qui se trouvent toujours en grand nombre à la suite des
tribus arabes, avaient montré le plus d’ardeur à ces mutilations. L’une
d’elles gisait à côté d’un cadavre français dont elle avait arraché le coeur.
Une autre s’enfuyait, tenant un enfant dans ses bras; blessée d’un coup de
feu, elle écrasa avec une pierre la tête de l’enfant … comme une grenade
printanière … pour l’empêcher de tomber vivant dans nos mains (29).
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In response to this incident, Djebar incorporates the first woman, grasping the heart of a
Frenchman in her bloody hand, and the second, who "fractured the skull of her child like
a spring pomegranate" into her imagined history, inventing motivations to explain their
actions and valorizing their bravery instead of showing shock at their savagery. She
heralds them as "two brave women heroines" (29). Not to be outdone by Barchou's
sensationalism, her choice of the word grenade with its double (triple) meanings of
"pomegranate" and "grenade" and “amazon” (as depicted by the Amazon warriors) is not
lost on the reader. Cassell’s dictionary defines grenadier as an amazon or a “real
trooper.” Images of war, flowing blood and dismembered body parts, such as the hand,
dominate much of her text, translating the trauma of 132 years of foreign domination.
J. T. Merle, the Frenchman who hoped to establish the first French newspaper in
Algeria, reports the explosion of Fort l'Empereur, and Djebar folds his account into hers,
all the while criticizing his personal lack of involvement in the actual battle. As director
of the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin, she points out that he was wont to emphasize the
drama of events as he impatiently awaited the unloading of his printing press so that he
could publish his accounts. Unlike ordinary foreign correspondents, he kept himself far
from the fray on the safer margins of the city. She mocks his anecdotes which dwell on
the kindness of the French toward their captives and his references to them as wounded
and uncivilized animals or sub-humans. Djebar wittily contradicts J.T. Merle's selfproclaimed status as a journalist:
… notre directeur de théâtre qui ne se trouve jamais sur le théâtre des
opérations, nous communique son étonnement, ses émotions et compassion
depuis le jour du débarquement (la seule fois où il est en première ligne)
jusqu’à la fin des hostilités, ce 4 juillet (34).
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She concludes that the personal reactions of correspondents who lack actual involvement
in the realities of battle are naturally reflected in the war stories they write. The resulting
romanticizing of violence and dramatizing of the images of battle distort the picture of
the actual battle passed along to the reader. By contrast, even though she is drawing upon
memories handed down over several generations, she concedes from the onset that her
own depiction of events is fictional. As White would say, so too are the accounts told by
the male chroniclers of each battle since they chose to emphasize the most
sensationalized events and to leave others untold.
Just as the accounts of the French incursion onto North African soil in the 1830s
illustrate the personal and political biases of their tellers, the work of most historians of
the Algerian revolution in the 1950s and 1960s reports events from a European
perspective. One such western historian is Alistair Horne whose A Savage War of Peace:
Algeria 1954-1962 (1977) tends to minimize the trauma visited upon the Algerian
population by France's violent repression of the insurgency. Basing his revision of
history quite heavily on Courrière’s earlier three volume library, he states that "…with a
little more magnanimity, a little more trust, moderation and compassion—the worst
might have been avoided." He admits that his written history lacks the perspective that
the distance of years might have given it and that, "I would have been helped still more
had I had recourse to those—especially on the Algerian side—who are no longer alive, or
... simply 'unavailable' " (14-6).
Horne concedes that his work was hindered by the "…shortage of written source
material and also by a reluctance, both private and official, to talk ..." complicated by the
fact that since the Algerian defense most often involved guerrilla tactics, the "men" who
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could write had little opportunity to keep a diary or to write home to their families (16).
It appears that his history is flawed on many counts: it was written from the French
perspective assigning anonymity to the bulk of Algerians; it lacks a basic understanding
of guerrilla tactics and tends to classify them as "savage" by contrast with Western
concepts of acceptable combat.
What is even more important to our study is that A Savage War seldom mentions
the roles of women from either side of the Mediterranean in the war, and when it does,
Horne paints the Algerian maquisardes as "girls" and "whores" rather than as valiant
freedom fighters; and, finally, it never admits women writers, even those who
experienced the war firsthand, into the "brotherhood" of historians who could have
informed his research. This is obviously a grievance that deserves to be redressed.
Fortunately, a few women have since undertaken the task of speaking out for the illiterate
sisters who shared revolutionary responsibilities.
The early pages of Horne's history dwell on the characterization of Saadi Yacef,
leader of the Algiers network, as an unsavory character who took advantage of a few
"presentable" young women to carry out his terrorist activities. Gillo Pontecorvo,
director of the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, found it necessary, only a few years
following the close of the war, to commit "… himself to redefining a reality which had
been falsified and misrepresented" by western historians” (Introduction to the screenplay
ix). It is safe to say that Saadi was immortalized not only by his real-life deeds but by
playing himself in that film so soon after his participation in the actual revolution. But
most of all, the bravery of the women who worked with him also deserves to be
recognized.
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In her article entitled " 'Yacef's Girls,' " in Maghreb Review (21.3-4, 1996),
Marx-Scouras writes indignantly of the characterization by male historians in general and
by Horne, in particular, of the young women involved in Saadi's organization as
promiscuous young girls carrying out exciting adventures because they were enamored
with their male leaders:
To reduce these courageous militants who would undergo imprisonment
and torture to minors incapable of autonomous action, or worse, to possessions
of Saadi is disturbing in the least ... The protagonists of the Battle of Algiers
are continually characterized as pimps and prostitutes by Horne, Courrière,
and other European male historians ... historians end up by condemning the
struggle for self-determination—be it terrorist or not—and the women who
worked with [Ali-la-Pointe] who were certainly not sexually promiscuous
women (259).
Marx-Scouras speaks forcefully of the involvement of women in the Algerian conflict,
not only in their romanticized and glamorized roles as "bomb carriers" but as essential
contributors to the everyday support system of the revolution as nurses, cooks, and
laundresses. It was not only the attractive young "terrorists" able to circulate freely under
the noses of the desiring French troops because of their appearance, but the mothers,
aunts and sisters of the rebels who, veiled or not, tended to the more mundane daily needs
of the insurgency.
Marx-Scouras cites numerous women who were educated after the war, among
them some of the principal protagonists themselves, who later attested to the ordinary
woman's service to her country, and concludes with a comment about the combined
literarity and orality of Djebar's novel:
If Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia opens on the written word that records
the conquest of Algeria, how fitting that it closes with the oral testimonies of
the poor, uneducated women who participated in the liberation of Algeria in
whatever way they could (260).
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It is this project of recuperation, accomplished by the weaving together of the testimonies
of many of the minor participants—and her own imagined heroines—into a novel of
literary merit, that characterizes Djebar's contribution to the history of the Algerian
conflict. She creates a harmonious score from the dissident voices and affidavits she has
collected.
THE SEVERED HAND
As Djebar takes the elements of various tales and molds them into a credible
narrative, she also “traffics” in fragments where they serve the purpose of her novel. A
curious aspect of this practice is the remarkable image of the human hand that she
projects across L’Amour, la fantasia. When we speak of metonymy as an element that
frequently occurs in twentieth-century literature, it is also important to note that the
image of the hand is everpresent in surrealist texts and artwork. In The Genres and
Genders of Surrealism, Levitt describes it as “...the mystical symbol of multiplicity in
unity favored by the Surrealists” (57). It was, perhaps, the most conspicuous of many
“fragments” of the female anatomy to which they blithely did violence in their artwork
and literature. They used the hand to denote “woman,” the object of desire who acted as
a muse for their introspection and the source of their inspiration. Djebar, too, projects the
image of the hand onto her work, but we would have little evidence to offer if we were to
claim simply that its presence linked her to her predecessors. However, I believe that my
work goes beyond that of other Djebar scholars when I examine this metonymic image.
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The hand that flashes before the reader over fifty times in L'amour, la fantasia is
often, like those of the Surrealists, a dissected hand that represents, for women and to
women, the impossibility of being whole while enduring the unspeakable horrors that
accompany war and colonization. These hands shape a subliminal theme that unites the
physical presence of women previously unaccounted for in history with Djebar's act of
taking pen in hand and documenting their participation. We shall see how this author's
use of the hand is vastly different from that of the first generation of male Surrealist
painters and authors who gave no thought to dismembering the female body, slicing it,
dicing it and choosing a particularly juicy morsel to focus upon. Taking into account
gender stereotypes in early twentieth-century French society, women played only minor
roles in the artistic movements, except as the objects—the muses and support
systems—of their men's creativity, so if an artist fetishized a female limb, women would
have been unlikely to object. Not unlike those of the male Surrealists, some of Djebar’s
severed hands represent women rendered passive or helpless by male domination, while
others restore vigor and pro-activeness to women who search for their own delivrance.
In Djebar's earlier anecdotes, the recurrent appearance of the hand emphasizes the
physicality of women's existence as opposed to the intellectual life with open horizons
that was more readily available to men. This motif takes on greater significance as
Djebar inserts women into active rather than passive roles: the metonymic "hand that
rocks the cradle" develops into a hand that brandishes a weapon. The objectified hand
(and woman) become(s) a powerful subject.
The earliest image of the hand appears at the very beginning of L'amour, la
fantasia when the author describes her introduction to the French colonial educational
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system: "Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l'école, un matin d'automne, main
dans la main du père" (11). Her father, who was the only indigenous teacher at the
school, resolved that his daughter would have a different life than the other girls in the
community. She would not be sequestered behind the veils and walls of traditional Arab
society. She would read and write; she would not live, invisible and illiterate, in the
shadow of the men in her life. Speaking of how her recollections of the first day of
school have led her to recount the lives of a myriad of women who would have otherwise
remained "voiceless," Djebar concludes the first chapter, speaking as her mature self, led
by the hand of the child she once was, toward her future: "Ma fillette me tenant la main,
je suis partie à l'aube" (13). No longer a passive child gripping her father’s hand, the
woman has learned about the world through her research and has emerged into the world,
a fitting subject for her own writing.
Near the conclusion of L'amour, la fantasia, Djebar attempts to recuperate several
historic events that are inconceivable and untellable from a certain point of view but
which are significant from her perspective. Again, the image of a severed hand plays an
important role. She recounts a story about Eugène Fromentin finding the putrifying hand
of a woman in the dessert:
En juin 1853, lorsqu’il quitte le Sahel pour une descente aux portes
du désert, il visite Laghouat occupée après un terrible siège. Il évoque alors
un détail sinistre; au sortir de l’oasis que le massacre, six mois après, empuantit,
Fromentin ramasse, dans la poussière, une main coupée d’Algérienne anonyme.
Il la jette ensuite sur son chemin (255).
Literally, it is the hand of an unknown woman "celle d’une inconnue qu’il n’a jamais pu
dessiner" (255). Marx-Scouras suggests the following significance of this hand:
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This amputated hand symbolizes Algeria, mutilated by a history written at
the hands of others (French historians, writers, artists) but, perhaps more
importantly for Djebar, it also represents Algerian women amputated in
their desire to write or express themselves. The dominant image of the
novel—abduction and rape—sexualize the representation of Algeria, which
becomes, in the final analysis, the female body (“Muffled Screams...” 180).
I believe that this analysis can be taken a step further. It may have been that Fromentin
saw nothing more than a decomposing body part that would have held no significance for
him at all had it not been the hand of a woman, and therefore somehow intriguing in a
voyeuristic way.
From Djebar’s perspective, by throwing down the hand, Fromentin essentially
discarded the thread of history belonging to half of humanity. Does he deem it too
offensive and unimportant to comment upon? Or is he frankly unable to describe the
horror of it? No matter the reply, he experiences a crisis of representation. He is either
unwilling or unable to pick up the story it might have offered him. Fortunately, Djebar
had the vision to imagine that Fromentin was holding out the hand to her: "[il] me tend
une main inattendue." Figuratively, he "gives her an unexpected hand." It is the memory
of this severed hand that Djebar picks up, over a century later, and uses as a guiding
image in her "war stories" about the female population and their long unheralded
participation in the defense of their country. By bringing these stories to light, the author
hopes to empower women to keep a firm hold on the freedoms they enjoy and encourages
them to continue to wage war against anyone who would seek to oppress them.
Rather than regarding the hand (and the woman it may once have belonged to) as
a fetishized object of desire, as the Surrealists did, Djebar has projected the image of an
object recognizable for its activity before us again and again. As a part of the body that
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“does something,” the hand relays a sense of responsibility and participation. It translates
womens’ struggle from object to subject.
ACCAD’S GENRE IRREGULARITIES
Accad not only questions the forms that feminist literature should take, but
chooses to write in a mixture of styles and genres which she discusses freely with her
students and readers. Speaking of the maturation of Arab texts during the past half
century, she approaches the question of special genres that authors sometimes adopt
because of the exigencies of war. In Sexuality and War she discloses that, "Short poems,
often surrealistic (since they are more difficult to decode), will be a form often used," and
she continues "... war novels include a blend of poetry and prose, realism and symbolism,
but they delight in surrealism, in the absurd, in extreme irony" (7). She compares the
Arab novel, whether it is written in Arabic or French, with other Third World literature,
and then contrasts this so-called “marginal” literature with Western literature. For
example, she cites Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native
Land) as an example of a regional stylistic pastiche, frequently present in the non-western
mixture of genre, temporal organization, symbols and imagery, that often distinguishes it
from its Western counterparts. In her role as literary critic, Accad has been quick to note
that much Arab literature is infused by these same surreal qualities. In fact, she has not
only commented upon the surrealist elements in the literature of other Arab writers, but
she has also incorporated these same elements into her own novels, in particular, into
L'Excisée.
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Accad situates her own writing in several traditions. When she was battling
cancer, at the time she created The Wounded Breast, she spoke about the ways in which
she wanted to include comments from the readers of her first manuscripts into the
margins of the text when it was later published:
Editors are not used to this kind of writing, except Feminist ones ... therefore
they do not know how to format a book with such comments. If you see the
original of my manuscript, I used a different format for different voices and
I would have liked to even print them with different fonts and in various
places on the page. It is a post-modern way of writing. Students in my class
on "L'Écriture Féministe" would remember that Feminist writers like such
"deconstructions" in their writing. I like to claim myself within that movement
(“Exorcising my Pain” 2).
Concerning her practice of combining genres, she reveals, "I don't consider my work to
be an 'autobiography' per se ... but rather a mixture of many genres: autobiography,
anthropology of the disease, fiction, poetry/prose, etc” (2).
It is also because of her attitude toward the imaginary and the unconscious, both
personal and collective, that Accad's work most resembles that of the earlier male
Surrealists and her sisters Yamina Mechakra and Assia Djebar. Her similar attitudes and
practices are at the heart of this study of L'Excisée, making it very interesting to examine
through the looking glass of her own critical work. The novel describes the flight of her
idealistic protagonist, E., from a Christian family dominated by a tyrannical father toward
what she imagines will be an exciting future with a young Palestinian Muslim. Almost
immediately she discovers that the world they plan to improve together is, in fact, ruled
by a fundamentalist tradition which replicates the oppression from which she has just
escaped. Her leap of faith toward liberty is closely followed by a fall into despondency
as she realizes the hopelessness of her new situation.
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Early in the novel, the fragmentation of Accad’s writing style reflects the
disjointed condition of E.’s mind. Scraps of other modes of imaginative writing interrupt
the course of the prose narrative depicting E.’s life. Her fantastic tale unfolds throughout
the novel, sometimes in prose and at other times in free verse. Excerpts from both
Christian and Islamic scripture which seem to have been torn directly from the pages of
religious tracts are pasted into the narrative to explain each religion’s particular
fundamentalist beliefs. It is difficult to determine whether poetry, prose or song
dominate as the reader becomes acquainted with E.’s state of mind. The reader cannot
determine whether the protagonist is conscious or hallucinating several events. We are
not sure if she is dreaming or if she is awake.
E. is severely troubled by her terror of asphyxiation and the irrational fear that the
heat, sand and solitude of the desert will climb up under her garments. She also dreams
that planet Earth is being strangled by the evils of man and that a monster/dragon/snake is
pursuing her. Even so, distress triggered by her real-life circumstances is sometimes
more poignant than her mental delusions. The living conditions in the wilderness village
are primitive at best, and she has no hope of altering them. All contact with her lover is
confrontational rather than tender. An array of genuine and imaginary forces vie for the
authority to express E.’s being in the same way that political and religious factions in
Beirut struggle to dominate the lives of the Lebanese people.
Her fears of asphyxiation surface during the couple’s voyage at sea when her
lover’s demeanor changes, and he becomes silent and impassive. Near the end of the
crossing, he discloses that he expects her to change into traditional clothing before they
leave the ship so that his important role as a teacher in the new community won’t be
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jeopardized by her Western appearance. Judging from the description of the women she
meets in the village, P.’s brothers have probably brought along a jelbab and a burqa for
her to put on. The long, black loose-fitting robes would cover her body from shoulder to
toes, and the burqa would conceal her hair and face except for the eyes and extend down
over her shoulders to mid-torso. Her instinct is to refuse the request, because putting on
Islamic garments would force her to submit to her husband in exactly the same way she
had to her domineering father: “Elle a peur de suffoquer, de mourir asphyxiée" (112).
This particular phobia reminds the reader of Djebar’s comments on asphyxiation in Ces
voix qui m’assiègent when she mentions that the language of the body is the only
language that illiterate women have access to besides their mother tongue for selfexpression. She couples this language, “…celui du corps avec ses dances, ses transes, ses
suffocations, parfois son asphyxie...” (14), with the mental and physical suffocation and
suffering of women held in bondage by their traditional societies. They don’t share the
liberty of expression, the freedom to come and go as they please, nor an access to the
world outside their homes that the men of their societies enjoy. We can also compare
E.’s sense of asphyxiation to the women suffocated in the enfumades by the French in
L’Amour, la fantasia.
Living veiled in the Palestinian village, E. suffers a number of experiences that
fuel her sense of alienation. Disallusioned because she had believed that she would share
her husband’s life and goals, she only wants to accompany and understand him. She
comes to realize that her own dreams for the future do not matter in a patriarcal society
where women are forever pitted against men. Before she had donned traditional clothing,
she was intrigued by the Muslim women she had seen behind veils, because they could
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see outside without being seen. As it turns out, the only comfort she seems to derive
from dressing like them derives from their similar apparel.
Considering Accad's frank approach to the thesis that sexuality and political
conflict are always related, it is not surprising that she approaches the sexuality of the
protagonist and her husband very candidly. Of all the women of the village, E. is the
only one capable of sexual pleasure because she has not been excised, but P. has no
concern for her. He is only interested in his own release and his desire for a son. Their
nights together resemble the war of the factions that they left behind in Beirut:
Il faut qu’elle lutte. Il faut quelle lui fasse comprendre qu’il y a autre
chose en elle que des enfants, qu’il y a une force créatrice qui cherche
à s’échapper, qu’il y a tout un langage qu’elle aimerait lui dessiner, lui
tisser, lui sculpter, pour qu’ensemble ils puissent reprendre les lignes
une à une et bâtir le monde qu’ils avaient désiré, qu’elle pensait qu’ils
avaient souhaité ensemble (118).
She is literally and figuratively fighting for her life and for the future she had imagined.
It is during E.’s pregnancy and confinement in the women’s compound that the
effect of Accad’s venue à l'écriture, as outlined by feminist theory, begins to merge with
the surreal aspects of her style. The sensory expression of a collective feminine
(re)creative act strongly reflects the kind of literature that Abdel-Jouad describes in
Fugues de Barbarie:
Voir, c’est entendre, c’est toucher, c’est retirer le voile qui sépare l’essentiel
de l’apparent. Souvent, ce qu’on voit est trompeur: les écrivains d’Amérique
latine, des Antilles ou du monde arabe ont inventé un univers où le réel est
simplement fantastique, traversé de folie et d’audace (18).
For the female author, the act of creating a work of literature represents a physical
birthing which can no more be separated from bodily experience than the delivery of a
child. The author personifies the heat, the sand, and the solitude her protagonist endures
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in these scenes, as she imagines that they are creeping up under her robes and invading
her body just as P.’s semen did when she became pregnant. She harbors one last
fantasy—that the child she is carrying might grow up and protest against the injustice,
lies, and bondage that women endure in the world. She wonders if the other veiled
women would rally behind her child's cry and drop their veils: "Et que toutes ces mains et
toutes ces voix prennent l’épée et la transforment en rose, en terre et en jardin" (118).
Would they follow a leader dedicated to freeing them?
What she experiences next makes her realize that life in the backcountry is
hopeless for one who has experience beyond it and that a paternalistic status quo will
continue to rule women’s lives there. She witnesses the primitive rite of excision
practiced on several little girls from the village. For her, the ceremony is all the more
revolting because each girl's circumcision is performed by the midwife of the compound
who is assisted by the child's female relatives. The ritual songs of the adult women
attempt to muffle the girls' screams, and the excised sexual organs are thrown into a
bowl. When all the procedures are complete, the women form a procession, carrying the
bowl of discarded sexual organs to the river while singing purifying verses from the
Coran. How can these women tolerate and facilitate the mutilation of their progeny?
The question of excision, or for that matter, any form of female circumcision, is
certain to divide social critics. Nearly all Western feminists are hostile toward the
practice. In fact, it is a custom which Accad stands squarely against as she has against
honor killings and as she has against other policies that limit women’s freedom of
expression and their right to equal pleasures in life with their male counterparts. How is
it, then, that women in traditional Islamic societies continue to tolerate the practice and
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even participate in perpetuating it? The answer is found in their understanding of the
term “community.”
Westerners tend to value individuality, while women in closed communities
derive their identity from the group. According to Esther K. Hicks in Infibulation:
Female Mutilation in Islamic Northeastern Africa,
Circumcision constitutes a rite of passing for female children. It initiates
them into womanhood and makes them eligible for marriage. (The only status
position open to women in these societies.) ... Individual social identity is
based on infibulation—on all women being infibulated ... Infibulation is not
so much a marker of feminine gender as an affirmation of reproductive license
in the specific context of marriage . . . After the initial operation, the issue
is [both literally and figuratively] closed (221).11
How is it, then, that Accad has determined to (re)open the issue to social and literary
scrutiny in her novel?
In a chapter she contributed to Through the Prism of Difference: Readings on Sex
and Gender (1996) entitled “Sexuality and Sexual Politics: Conflicts and Contradictions
for Contemporary Women in the Middle East,” Accad states:
... I would like to argue that sexuality is much more central to social and
political problems in the Middle East than previously thought, and that
unless a sexual revolution is incorporated into political revolution, there
will be no real transformation of social relations (221).
She is convinced that the war in Lebanon is “… closely connected with the way people
perceive and act out their sense of love and power…” (228), whether it be with their
spouses or within society as a whole. In a culture where men dominate women and think
of them only in terms of possession, this aggression spills over as desire to dominate
Evelyne Accad, “Sexuality and Sexual Politics: Conflicts and Contradictions for
Contemporary Women in the Middle East” in Through the Prism of Difference: Readings
on Sex and Gender, ed. Maxine Bacca Zinn, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Michael
A. Messner ( Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996) 221.
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11
territory as well. She feels that it is necessary to figuratively “lift the veil of silence” and
combine both feminist and nationalist discourses to effect change at both a family and
national level. She concludes the chapter with her personal hope: “… that sexuality—the
right to sexual pleasure, the emotional relationship between two persons ... will grow to
be recognized as an important element, as serious as and as essential as food, shelter,
jobs, and development in the struggles for revolutionary change” (23). It is clear that she
supports the feminist view that the personal is political, and that she combines political
and social activism in both her critical and literary efforts.
After witnessing the women of the village throwing their daughters’ excised
organs of pleasure into the river like so many scraps trimmed from a carcass, E. prepares
to take action. The horror and surreality of the excision ceremony haunt her. She has
become friends with Nour, a young girl who has not yet been excised, and she resolves to
escape, taking Nour with her, in the hope of saving at least one victim from excision.
At this point in the novel, the impressions provided by the poetic elements of
L'Excisée are as essential to the narrative as the prose passages. Together, they support
one another; without one or the other, the novel could convey only a fraction of the tale.
Through the rhythm and fantasy of the poetry, the reader sees below the surface of the
narrative into the depths of the protagonist’s unconscious and recognizes that the poetic,
nightmarish elements of the dragon/serpent dreams are no longer just tangent to the
protagonist’s reality, but have paralleled it for a while and are finally merging with it.
The same nightmare has tracked E. each time as she has fled an awful restraint in her life:
Le serpent siffle
La femme gratte le mur avec ses ongles, avec ses paumes
elle frappe et elle frappe
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seul l’écho lui répond
Elle veut voir la mer, elle veut tromper l’issue
Le serpent est tout près de la tête de l’enfant
L’enfant pleure et la femme le soulève
et le cache dans son voile et sa robe déchirés
Ses mains et ses ongles sont en sang, ses pieds meurtris
Le serpent siffle le long du mur
Et la femme a peur (107-8).
Having fled her demon and rescued Nour, E. takes responsibility for her own
destiny, even though it will be expressed in suicide. As Valerie Orlando points out in Of
Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls, it is inevitable that a certain percentage of women
will be unable to cope with their altered lives. Their leaps will exceed their capacities to
rebound. They will succumb to the madness that trauma and violence have forced upon
them. When E. sees her reflection in the river, she knows exactly who she is for the first
time: “Sans la moindre hésitation, elle a avancé dans son image qui l’attendait. Elle a
avancé dans l’eau qui s’est refermée sur elle. Elle est allée vers le repos (162).
The protagonist’s attraction to the sea in the final moments of her life reflects her
first memories of it, when she and P. went to the beach in Beirut to plan their future:
mer toujours recommencée
mer léchant les cailloux de sang
mer d'espoir et de retour
mer arrosée de larmes et de désirs
mer qui remonte le temps
mer qui porte en elle les corps fatigués et déchus (39).
This sea with its many personalities carries the liberated Nour from a traditional culture
to a new life. It shuttles the Egyptian woman back and forth between two cultures.
Finally, it enfolds E.'s exhausted body and soul. She knows that she doesn't have the
strength to go on, and she steps willingly into it to seek her death.
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It is through E.’s allegorical journey that Accad connects a fictional saga to a
political statement that belies her commitment to both feminist and peace issues. Her
style is punctuated by elements characteristic of those employed by authors whose works
are placed within the Surrealist movement. Punctuated by rebellion against religious
prohibition of all kinds, and rejection of any taboo in subject matter, she has brought an
oppressive sexual practice protected by Muslim fundamentalists under scrutiny. Her
imaginative inscription of dreams and fantasy has facilitated the testimony of the
emotional and physical abuse experienced by women from societies where they are held
in bondage. Her narrative is marked by a fluidity that traverses the commonly accepted
boundaries between prose, poetry and song. Her message extends from the
particular—the feminist struggle for autonomy—to the universal—war and its effects
upon those who wage it. By associating art and political engagement in L' Excisée,
Evelyne Accad brandishes a literary sword against violence and tyranny in any form.
THE FRENCH LANGUAGE SUBVERTED AND ELABORATED
From the perspective of a Surrealist critique, we have examined how Mechakra in
La Grotte Éclatée, Djebar in L'Amour, la fantasia and Accad in L'Excisée have narrated
traumatic events in the lives of their women protagonists in novels situated in the former
French colonies during and after their wars for liberation. They have subverted, fractured,
refashioned and elaborated the French language, finding innovative ways for it to
describe the moments of life that defy representation. They have evaluated its
possibilities for conveying peace and healing as well as violence and trauma.
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The authors have expanded Surrealist practice just as they have enhanced the
French language from a feminine perspective, discovering positive strategies for bringing
an individual's subconscious into the conscious world in order to heal the wounds caused
by imprisonment within personal insanities and restrictive societies.
Centuries-old oral tradition, prudently guarded by the wise old women of the
Maghreb has finally been translated into the written word to be preserved for future
generations. The recuperation of versions of history heretofore unknown and unimagined
has helped to restore dignity and freedom to those from which it had been stolen. We
have seen how the creation of each of these literary documents has embodied a series of
transgressive political acts intended to record the coming to subjectivity of women from
the Maghreb and the Mashrek as they have revolted against colonial and gender
subjugation. If the social and political theories they advocate were to ultimately result in
the admittedly utopic restructuring of male/female relationships, they might be
responsible for a step toward peace in a region that has historically been devastated by
factional strife.
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CHAPTER 3
RESISTANCE TO DOM(INATION): MARYSE CONDÉ AND
SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART'S MAGICAL (SUR)REALISM
AND TRADITIONAL CULTURE IN THE CARIBBEAN
Toute l’exigence du surréalisme se reconnaît dans cette anecdote:
alliance magique du conscient et de l’inconscient dans et par le
langage.
Hédi Abdel-Jouad in Fugues de Barbarie (11)
I believe the possibility exists for us to become involved in
perspectives of renascence which can bring into play a figurative
meaning beyond an apparently real world or prison of history—I
believe a philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of
the imagination.
Wilson Harris in History, Fable and Myth (89)
GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND LANGUAGE IN THE CARIBBEAN
No francophone region of the world, however much it differs in geographic
location, natural environment or its current relationship with France from another, can
either avoid nor deny the influence its prior colonial association with the Empire has
engendered. History has been especially harsh to the inhabitants of the Caribbean who
were—or still are—under French rule. In particular, in the French overseas departments
(Départements d’outre mer) of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the institution of slavery
which prevailed for two hundred years has left an indelible stain upon the French colonial
“civilizing” mandate. Just as many of the most traumatic moments in the history of
North Africa and Lebanon were the result of the invasion of their lands by foreign
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governments, the people who were wrenched from African homelands by slave traders
and re-situated in the West Indies have suffered for centuries at the hands of those who
oppressed and dehumanized them. Hundreds of years of subjugation and mistrust have
not been easy for the population of color in the islands to forget, nor have their resulting
grave social, economic and cultural problems been simple to solve. The DOM status of
Martinique and Guadeloupe, adopted at the close of WWII, has yet to furnish effective
solutions to the distress of its people or to be replaced by more independent and
functional political and economic relationships with France and other nations.
Any analysis of the complex personal and public connections that exist today in
the Caribbean must hark back to the historic subjugation of the population of color, if not
even further back to the extermination of the original inhabitants of the islands when the
region was first being colonized. French landowners, so outnumbered by the slaves that
were imported to support their plantation economy, found it imperative to prevent
personal and group bonds from forming among Blacks which might undermine their own
safety or their absolute power. To this end, they made every effort to erase lingering
remnants of the beliefs and customs that the slaves had brought with them from their
former lands. The ruling class also felt it expedient to thwart the establishment of family
ties, forbid social gatherings, and above all, to prohibit their workers from becoming
educated.
During the colonial era, white plantation owners saw themselves as proprietors of
both the land and the people whom they obliged to work it. With this absolute control
over “property” came their assumed entitlement to sexual relations with the women they
fancied and the power to tear apart couples and disperse families at will. Maryse Condé
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describes the social climate in the former slave society of Guadeloupe: "C’est la structure
sociale d’un pays dominé, l’exploitation dont les Nègres sont victimes qui ne permettent
pas le bonheur des êtres, et détruisent les couples (La parole des femmes 35).
Because of the tangled bloodlines that resulted from several generations of the
violation of female slaves by their ''masters,'' a system of classes ordered by skin color
evolved which persists to this day in the Caribbean. Furthermore, because black men had
little opportunity or encouragement to maintain lasting relationships with their sexual
partners or the children they fathered, the burden of childrearing fell almost entirely to
the female sector of the population. The cultural practice of two-parent family relations
has taken several generations to evolve, and it is still not the norm at all levels of society
in this region. The emotional wounds of the slavery system have healed slowly,
inhibiting the development of social bonds in which respect between the sexes has just
begun to develop.
Beyond the family, a dependency upon the French metropole pervades nearly
every aspect of a Martiniquian’s or Guadeloupean’s existence. In terms of education,
every author who hails from this region has come under the influence of the French
system of education, and thus employs some version of the French language as his or her
medium of written expression—in spite of the fact that the Creole language is the native
tongue of most. Their artistic production is still subject to a "neo-colonial" relationship
with the French literary establishment, depending upon it for publication and even
moreso for a wider reading audience than exists at home. Fortunately, it does not
necessarily follow that the imaginary and creative resources of these artists have been
equally subject to outside influences. In fact, many critically acclaimed francophone
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authors—from the 1950s to the present—have called the French Caribbean home and
have created a fascinating body of literature, full of a diversity that characterizes the
region’s history and culture and is truly representative of the collective imagination of its
people.
DOM'S RESISTANCE TO COLONIALISM AND NEO-COLONIALISM
In the context of this study, it is primarily the recovery of a collective past for
generations of individuals whose lives were destroyed by slavery and the tenuous nature
of relationships between men and women in the ensuing postcolonial or neo-colonial
society that interests us. Because we intend to explore some of the authorial conventions
used by female Guadeloupean novelists Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart which
have a footing in the tenets and practices of Surrealism, let us take a moment to trace the
careers of a number of black Caribbean authors whose higher education in Paris during
the first half of the twentieth century brought them into contact with primarily white
avant-garde movements, intellectually preparing the way for later Caribbean writers to
eschew the mainstream practices of the French authors they had previously been
encouraged to replicate and encouraging them to undertake other vanguard artistic
projects.
NEGRITUDE AND SURREALISM IN THE CARIBBEAN
Michael Richardson's Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean
(1996) details the support that the first generation of French Surrealists gave black
students from the Caribbean who later became leaders in both the Surrealist movements
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in their homelands and in the ensuing Negritude movement. He describes "a unique
series of encounters" between 1931 and 1946 which "... took place between Francophone
Caribbean writers and French Surrealists that constitute an important moment in the anticolonial struggle in the French-speaking world" (1). These elite black students
established or contributed to literary journals with political bents leaning toward Marxism
and anti-colonialism and with a literary content that was often infused with revolutionary
surrealist tendencies.
Jules Monnerot and Pierre Yoyote, École Normale Supérieure students from
Martinique, published only one issue of Légitime Défense (1931), a journal which
questioned the ''given'' of European cultural superiority from the perspective of its black
population. Other West Indian contributors to the magazine, whether their interests
leaned more toward Marxism or toward Surrealism, were Étienne Lero, Thelus Lero,
Réné Ménil, Michel Pilotin, Maurice Sabbat, and Pierre Thésée. In The Black
Surrealists, Jean-Claude Michel speaks about what the publication of Légitime Défense
meant to these students who were soon to lose their government subsidized academic
support because of their revolutionary involvement with the journal:
The determining factor which conferred to the redactors of Légitime Défense all
this prestige and credibility among black students in Paris, lies undoubtedly in the
rejection of the European borrowed personality and the self-recognition of their
negritude ... These young blacks realized that despite their education, they were
different from the Europeans with whom their forefathers so eagerly tried to be
assimilated ... Those young rebels perceived racial and cultural difference not as a
handicap but rather as a fruitful promise. This reversal of values was proposed
by young idealistic intellectuals who were themselves the product of the
Martinician bourgeoisie they so bitterly criticized (21-22).
Absent evidence to the contrary, and although they are said to have frequented different
circles, one can assume that Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from
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Martinique, and Léon Damas from Guyana, who were also students at the École Normale
Supérieure during this period, must have read this early periodical and been impressed by
its fledgling appeals for equality.
In 1934, Senghor, Césaire and Damas collaborated to publish L'Étudiant Noir.
Even these authors, who are so well known nowadays as the founders of the Negritude
movement, were criticized in more militant black circles for approaching problems in the
overseas departments from the perspective of the French rather than the black population
and for imitating French Surrealist and Marxist writing techniques rather than creating
revolutionary new models reflecting their own racial identity. In 1937, Damas published
Pigments, a collection of poetry exhibiting an unconventional revolutionary model of
black pride which has since been heralded as decidedly Surrealist in style, and for which
the introduction was written by the French Surrealist Robert Desnos.
In 1939, at twenty-six years of age, Césaire published the epic poem Cahier d'un
retour au pays natal / Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. In it he documents his
journey as a young man raised in Martinique under French colonial rule and sensitized to
his blackness in France and his subsequent realization that important cultural foundations
of African tradition and Martinician identity had been erased by the French colonial
policy of assimilation. The protagonist returns to his homeland with a resolve to reform
its cultural and political landscape. Richardson writes that the Notebook "... helped to
define a specifically black Caribbean sensibility, but also announced a changed relation
between black and white in the French colonies: no longer would assimilation be taken
for granted as the destiny of the colonized" (Refusal of the Shadow 6).
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Back in Martinique, in 1941, guided by the doctrines of Surrealism, Aimé and
Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil collaborated in the creation of a literary journal entitled
Tropiques which aspired to fill a cultural void in Martinique. Their main goals were
(1) to create a clandestine weapon against the Vichy regime in the region; (2) to develop
a black consciousness among the citizens of the department; (3) and to act as an
international voice for Surrealism in order to extend its boundaries beyond the borders of
imperial France. This surrealist interlude predates the actual founding of the Negritude
movement, and these Caribbean Surrealists' devotion to issues of freedom at home is
evident in their political ideology and in its literary expression.
Since our focus will be upon the writings of two women of Guadeloupean origin,
we must ask ourselves how intensely black women (in addition to black men) were
involved in the first avant-garde movements. In Negritude Women (2002), T. Denean
Sharpley-Whiting broke new ground by insisting that there were indeed several West
Indian black women, in addition to the slate of male contributors ordinarily
acknowledged, who had made significant contributions to the literary and political
pursuits of the Negritude movement although:
… the masculinist geneology constructed by the founding poets and shored up
by literary historians, critics, and Africanist philosophers continues to elide and
minimize the presence and contributions of French-speaking black women to
Negritude's evolution (14).
For example, in 1931, Paulette Nardal founded La Revue du monde noir with the
Haitian Léo Sajous, while her sister Jane published poetry about Africa and the Antilles
and wrote essays on black humanism and pan-Africanism. Sharpley-Whiting even claims
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that the efforts of these sisters later encouraged Senghor to ennunciate his theories of race
and global consciousness.
Sharpley-Whiting follows the party line when she concurs with the majority of
critics who portray Suzanne Césaire's genius as inferior to her husband's, her Surrealist
inclinations seeming to have taken second place to her duties as a homemaker. I disagree
with Sharpley-Whiting’s assumption, based upon Suzanne Césaire’s strongly
revolutionary contributions to Tropiques. In her article “1943: Surrealism and Us” she
staunchly calls for the authors of Martinique to use Surrealism for the improvement of
their lot under the Vichy regime: “when liberty itself is threatened throughout the world,
surrealism (which has not ceased for a moment to remain resolutely in the service of the
greatest emancipation of mankind) can be summed up with a single magic word: liberty.”
(124). She continues, affirming how Surrealism could contribute to Martinique’s
liberation:
We know our situation here in Martinique. Our human task is dizzily
revealed to us by the arrow of history: a society tarnished in its very origins by
crime and maintained today through injustice and hypocrisy, made to fear its
development by an uneasy conscience, must—morally, historically and
necessarily—vanish. And from among the powerful machines of war, the bombs
and explosives, the modern world places at our disposal, our audacity chooses
surrealism which currently offers it the best chance of success. (126)
With a lyricism nearly equal to her husband’s and a robust personal engagement she
describes her anticipation of the collapse of colonial power in the Caribbean:
And when suddenly, in the Caribbean night decked out with love and
silence, the drum roll explodes, the blacks get ready to respond to the desire
of the earth and of dance, but the landowners, immured in their beautiful
mansions behind their wire gauze, appear like pale butterflies caught in a trap
under the electric light (160).
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It is clear that it was not just for its polemic use that Suzanne Césaire favored the practice
of Surrealism in Martinique. She argued that Surrealism was not only an ideology but
also state of mind, a “permanent readiness for the Marvelous.” In his introduction to the
third edition of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2000) Robin Kelley situates
Mme Césaire as one of Surrealism’s most original theorists:
Unlike critics who boxed surrealism into narrow "avant garde" tendencies such as
futurism or cubism, Suzanne Césaire linked it to broader movements such as
Romanticism, socialism, and Négritude. ... In a 1941 issue of Tropiques, she
imagined new possibilities in terms that were foreign to Marxists; she called on
readers to embrace "the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic,
a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image,
dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and
overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the
metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination
and madness" (137).12
It is her particular vision of Surrealism that effectively forges the strongest link between
European and the West Indian Surrealists (in particular the female authors) who
continued in future generations to delve into its practices as a source of artistic
inspiration.
In The Black Surrealists, Jean-Claude Michel distills what he sees as the primary
attraction toward Surrealism for black West Indians:
The surrealist’s ambition would be to make permanent for mankind, those
feeling[s] (sic) which were confined and occasional in previous times. Beyond
its literary aims, surrealism aspired to nothing less than to free the human
race from all the restraints and servitude inflicted upon him by an utilitarian
civilization; thereby, to restore mankind’s true condition (8).
Quote from Penelope Rosemont, ed., Surrealist Women: An International Anthology
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 137; Franklin Rosemont, "Suzanne Césaire:
In the Light of Surrealism," (unpublished paper in author's possession).
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12
It would be difficult to deny that freedom was the primary goal behind the efforts of the
artists of the francophone regions in the Caribbean—not only political and social but also
creative freedom.
Given a heritage of servitude and their current situation of subjugation, young
black intellectuals were eager to establish more authentic means of self expression and
ultimately a course of action for articulating social freedoms for their fellow citizens who
had not garnered access to the same privileges that education had afforded them. They
found themselves in the complicated situation in which, in order to realize their social
aspirations, they would have to use any and all of the artistic means at their disposal:
In order to reach this utter liberation of the mind, it became necessary to get
rid of all aesthetic limitations, all the ethnic prejudices of a civilization, which
in the name of Christian humanism permitted war and its atrocities, admitted
colonialism and its consequences, and allowed the exploitation of the mass
by a privileged class (8).
West Indians who saw Surrealism as a viable guide thought of its tenets in both
psychological and practical terms. Social and political problems caused by race and class
issues emmanated from a sense of lost identity. If Surrealism, with its connection to
psychoanalysis, were to restore access to the original power of the mind, it might also
lead to conquering the widespread alienation experienced by a community whose roots
had been effectively destroyed. Next, it might recuperate damaged and traumatized
individuals whose forebears had been forced, by their masters and later by French
assimilative practices, to believe that they were inferior and barbarous. If it were only for
these purposes that Surrealism provided an attraction, it would have furnished its
proponents with a very useful tool for the liberation of the collective imagination and a
promise of an improved future.
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At last, before proceding to the discussion of the two texts that will be analyzed in
this chapter, it is important that we clarify some terminology that is widely used to
characterize certain types of literature from Latin America in general and the West Indies
in particular. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who is often referred to as the founder
of the genre of magical realism, while professing an attraction early on to Surrealism,
found many faults with how it was practiced in Europe. He came to believe that “... the
European surrealist was condemned to a paucity of vision because surrealism was not
embedded in society, the European cultural soil being too barren to sustain its richness”
(Richardson 12). He felt, along with countless other critics, that the machinations in
which the Breton Surrealists were involved had stolen the very spontaneity they were
constantly seeking. A native of the Caribbean, he felt that a type of Surrealism was
always at play in a region “where magic remains part of everyday life” (12). For
example, when one studies the folklore and the religion of the area, it is plain to see that
West Indians believe in countless explanations of everyday occurrences that cannot be
empirically proven and that their voodoo religion, a hybrid form of the Catholicism spoon
fed them by their former masters and the animism that had accompanied them from
Africa, leaves plenty of room in their imaginations for “magic.” According to Carpentier,
“Surrealism thus becomes the appropriate means of expression in Latin America, but it is
that surrealism divorced from its critical roots and recuperated as a ‘real marvellous’ or
the ‘magic realism’ that today substantially conditions our idea of the appropriate Latin
American literature” (12). He was wont to say that real Surrealism could not survive
over the longrun in Europe but that it could flourish in Latin America because the
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“... collective unconscious was rich enough with magic to nourish it” (13). Thus, he
advocated the terms “marvelous realism” or “magic realism” to describe what he
conceived of as a freer and more natural approach to the arts more appropriate to the real
experience and the unexplained events of his region—one that was not constrained by
theory nor regulated by a particular practitioner and his formulas.
Rather than accepting Surrealism lock, stock and barrel, many educated young
West Indians began to look more closely at it with the idea of adopting those of its
practices which might be useful to them and adapting them to the unique environment in
which they worked. It is not so unusual that gifted intellectuals from the Caribbean felt
that they could pick and choose from among the useful elements of Surrealism, since
from their outsiders’ perspective on French aesthetics (or the cultural production of any
colonial power), they could see that a significant portion of the Surrealists’ interest in the
folk traditions of the colonies and former colonies was somewhat self-serving. One of
Phyllis Taoua’s main criticisms of Surrealism in Forms of Protest (2002) is that it
attempted to explain that outsiders: “... left-wing intellectuals ... have often defined a
position of dissidence within mainstream culture by referring to colonial territories as a
repository of redemptive Otherness,” and “... a source of rejuvenation to counter
European civilization’s decline” (xviii). She feels that this is precisely what Breton was
doing when he first advocated the adoption of Surrealism by people of color:
... in considering race and other barriers that must before all else be
corrected by other means, I think that Surrealism aims and is alone in
aiming systematically at the abolition of these barriers [of difference
between people]. You know that in Surrealism the accent has always
been on displacing the ego, always more or less despotic, by the id, held
in common by all ... Surrealism is allied with peoples of colour, first
because it has always taken their side against all forms of imperialism
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and white banditry [...] and secondly because of the profound affinities
that exist between Surrealism and so-called 'primitive' thought, both of
which seek the abolition of the conscious and the everyday, leading to
the conquest of revelatory emotion (André Breton, What is Surrealism,
ed. Franklin Rosemont 258-61).
From the vantage of recent social and literary movements we are able to evaluate Breton's
comments from two perspectives: Either we can find them disturbing because they
indulge in a racist essentialism that relegates the black race to a "primitive" status in its
access to the unconscious or we can see that Breton realized that, for the most part, black
people had been less conditioned and socialized than Europeans and just might have
retained a more direct link to their unconscious, such as could be found in children before
formal schooling and insane patients whose imaginations did not follow the dictates of a
''saner'' society. However, his comments do open up a whole range of issues relating to
history, culture, religion and psychology that bear examination for what importance they
hold in the literature produced in Guadeloupe and Martinique by Caribbean authors in the
twentieth century.
So, if we set aside the limiting elements for which Surrealism is sometimes
criticized, we still have a body of beliefs that help us analyze francophone literature in
this region from the perspective of its uniquely Caribbean practice. Whether we use the
designations ''marvelous realism'' or ''magical realism'' urged upon us by strictly
ethnocentric Caribbean theorists or we accept that Surrealism truly informs and supports
those definitions, it is especially pertinent to my argument that we reach back in time to
the Surrealists' belief in the marvelous and the supernatural which they saw depicted in
indigenous art and religion and in native myths and folklore. They perceived the socalled "primitive" beliefs of African tribalism, folklore, and indigenous folk artifacts as
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reflections of a former time when human art had not yet been confined within the narrow
limits that rational academism dictated. As an antidote to the positivist view that every
that happened was explainable by reason and science, they borrowed inspiration from the
artistic practices of the so-called “unspoiled” cultures which remained in the world.
Appreciated and encouraged by the first generation of French Surrealists, and elaborated
by their successors, these thematic materials and styles of writing have spanned the better
part of a century in the Caribbean. The information that I will present in this chapter goes
a step further than Richardson, Sharpley-Whiting, or even Robin Kelley by discussing
two female authors of the succeeding generation, Maryse Condé and Simone SchwarzBart, who have profoundly influenced Caribbean literature and whose novels show
Surrealist leanings attributable to the influence of an earlier generation of West Indian
Surrealists and their respect for the importance of Caribbean history, culture and folklore.
In the end, it will be my contention that we will not find a description that places certain
works squarely within one current and, therefore outside the other, but that scholarly
inquiry will profit from an exegesis that applies the arguments of both movements. It
will be from the Surrealist side that we look at certain tendancies detected in Célanire,
cou-coupé by Maryse Condé and in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle by Simone
Schwarz-Bart.
VALORIZING ORALITY, WRITING LITERATURE
In the following pages we will examine how Condé and Schwarz-Bart take up the
crucial roles that regional traditions and beliefs play in the imaginary of their people and
how two important examples of francophone literature, Célanire, cou-coupé and Pluie et
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Vent sur Télumée Miracle from Guadeloupe epitomize Antillean literature's development
away from the canonic models of French literature and toward a more locally inspired
paradigm. As the first Surrealists admired the folk artifacts and folklore of so-called
"primitive" peoples and believed that they represented a more natural state of human
existence, so do these two intellectually elite and politically savvy authors value the
rapidly disappearing cultural artifacts of their people for their capacity to encourage
solidarity and anchor regional identity, two elements of society that have been sadly
lacking in the Caribbean. A special approach is evident in their works, because these
authors, as opposed to their Europeans forerunners who could not help but look upon this
fresh inspiration with an eye to the exotic, are evaluating their heritage from the inside.
Furthermore, their practices go beyond their predecessors in that Condé's incisive humor
and ironic treatment of West Indian problems and Schwarz-Bart's documentation of
noteworthy black role models and vestiges of positive lore surpass what other authors in
the region have depicted in the format of the novel. They have, in effect, developed their
tales by constructing surreal and fantastic bridges between the oral traditions and
religious beliefs of the largely illiterate inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and a
sophisticated literary cast of readers throughout the world.
MARYSE CONDÉ: WRITER, TEACHER, CRITIC, STORYTELLER
Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe in 1937, the youngest of eight children in
a family that she describes as bourgeois-bourgeois. At the age of sixteen, she was sent to
Paris to study at Lycée Fénélon and the Sorbonne, where she studied English. In 1975,
after years of teaching for several years in Africa and in France, she completed her Ph.D.
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in Comparative Literature with a dissertation focusing on black stereotypes in Caribbean
literature. She recalls having learned the power of writing very early in life when she
presented her mother with an original story that was too realistic and offended her. Her
earlier published works include the plays, La Morne de Massabielle (1971), Dieu nous l'a
donné (1972), La Mort d'Oluwemi d'Ajumaki (1973) followed by Pension les Alizés
(1988), and An Tan Revolisyon (1989) later in her career. She is best known for a long
slate of novels which have explored the rediscovery of African ancestry, colonial
corruption and slavery, women’s issues and experiments in intertextuality such as the
retelling of the Salem witch trials and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Since the early 1970s, very few years have passed in which Condé has not
published at least one new work, which is usually followed quite rapidly by a translation
into English done by her husband Richard Philcox. Her energy and productivity are
phenomenal considering her teaching duties and the numerous critical works she has also
authored during her career. Several of her notable texts include her first novel
Hérémakhonon (1976), Une Saison à Rihata (1981), a pair of historical novels set in
Africa entitled Ségou, Les Murailles de terre (1984) and Ségou II (1985) which was
awarded the German Prix Liberatur, Moi, Tituba, Sorcière (1986) which was awarded the
Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, and the 50e Grand Prix Littéraire des jeunes lecteurs
de l’Île de France, La Vie Scélérate (1987) which earned the Prix de l’Académie
Française, Traversée de la mangrove (1989), Le Dernier des rois mages (1992), La
Colonie du nouveau monde (1993), La Migration des coeurs (1995), Désirada (1997),
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Célanire cou-coupé: Roman fantastique (2000) which was awarded the Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award for fiction, La Belle Creole (2001), Histoire de la femme cannibale
(2003), and most recently a novel entitled Victoire, la saveur et les mots: Récit (2006)
about her mysterious grandmother which has already garnered the Prix Tropiques. She is
also an honorary member of l’Académie des Lettres de Québec, Commandeur de l’Ordre
des Arts et des Lettres, and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. In 1993 she received the
Prix Puterbaugh for the ensemble of her work which has continued the expand
throughout the years.
Condé has also written children’s literature, such as Hugo le terrible (1990),
“Victor et les barricades” (1989), Haïti Chérie (1991), A la courbe du Joliba (2006) and a
collection of autobiographical short stories entitled Le coeur a rire et à pleurer (1990)
which was awarded the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar.
In his introduction to World Literature Today (Autumn 1993) devoted to Maryse
Condé's career, Djelal Kadir generalizes, ''It is in the nature of writing and of the literary
vocation to be itinerant and transgressive.'' Referring specifically to her earliest strides
toward a literary calling, Kadir relates:
Since the time at age seven or eight when ... she first felt the power and dangers of
writing, Maryse Condé has sought the outer limits of conventional boundaries,
eventually making a vocation of intercontinental itineracy, transcultural traversals,
and ideological transgressions (695).
Furthermore, two of her colleagues, Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Lydie Moudileno,
editors of a volume of papers presented in her honor in 2002, have dubbed her ''une
nomade inconvenante.'' Other adjectives used by her friends and students to describe her
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include an iconoclast, insolent, une femme-matador, and la têtue, and it is clear from her
frank assessment of her own personality that Condé would not disagree with any of these
characterizations. In fact, she seems to believe that it is necessary to ''to make a stir'' in
order for one's critics to take notice of a situation that requires attention. During an
interview in 1991 with Françoise Pfaff she asserted: ''I write for myself but also to
provoke people, to force them to accept things they don’t want to accept and to see things
they don’t want to see. I think that this need to upset people prevails in all my books”
(Conversations with Maryse Condé, 1996, 30).
A world traveler and an astute student of human nature, Condé has studied and
taught in Guadeloupe, Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, England, Paris, California, New York
and Virginia, and the experiences, context and research for her work comes from all of
these global sources. However, it is her roots in the French West Indian Department of
Guadeloupe which have provided an important context for the majority of her literary
work in the second half of her career. It is her mining of the culture, the collective
memory and the imagination of her countrymen and women and in particular her concern
for the social problems that afflict them that inspire the tales she tells. The tragedy of
poor black peoples’ lives is balanced with comedy, and her use of humor and irony seem
to moderate the life and death situations in which the protagonists find themselves. As
readers, we sometimes find ourselves laughing when we feel sure that we should be more
decorous.
In my study of her novel Célanire, cou-coupé I am fortunate to have been able to
rely upon a multitude of critical texts written by the author herself—during her long and
brilliant career as a professor of comparative literature—to provide valuable insights into
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her practices and her changing approaches to the craft of writing. In many facets of her
work she is the antithesis of the first generation of Surrealists who often prided
themselves on the obscurity of their references and the hermeticism of their works: the
clarity of Condé's fiction rivals her scholarly texts in accessibility. Her impeccable
research and insightful thoughts on novels authored primarily by women have been of
great value to me as a student of francophone literature. She has attempted to avoid
overtly political stances in her personal interviews although she admits to being a staunch
indépendantiste where Guadeloupe is concerned. As early as 1979, in her La Parole des
femmes: Essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française, Condé advised
students against assuming that novels always advocate a particular political or
ethnological goal:
Il faut de toute évidence, se garder de trop interroger la littérature et de la
considérer comme l’équivalent du discours ethnologique ou politique. Trop
d’éléments interviennent qui font de l’acte d’écrire, d’abord et avant tout, une
aventure individuelle. Néanmoins, à travers elle, il est possible de cerner l’image
d’une collectivité et même, de vivre un moment avec elle. Le roman, s’il est le
monde intime qu’un écrivain entrouvre, est aussi un témoignage social (112).
However, she also signaled that the compensation for a reader’s involvement with a novel
was that s/he could, in a way, participate in a certain collective experience that the author
welcomed him/her into. This is the rather magical understanding that tacitly passes
between the author and his/her inspiration and the reader and his/her imagination that
makes literary creation and consumption such a complex commitment.
Beyond the enchanting existence of authorial creativity and reader response in
Condé's works lies an equally original body of fantastic, illogical and even incongrous
elements akin to those promoted by the Surrealists. Where do her tendencies toward
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fantastic, supernatural, overblown, and exaggerated tales come from? Her first reply
might be, as it was in Conversations, that:
The very act of writing is 'supernatural’ in itself ... ‘Supernatural’ inspiration
does exist in a sense, since you suddenly feel like writing about a totally
imaginary creature whom you have never seen or met, and who doesn’t exist.
You don’t really know why all of a sudden you want to write about this or
that character (59).
Again, she acknowledges a power of inspiration that resembles a Surrealist delving into
the unconscious when she declares,
I believe that someone ... said that ‘a novel is a subconscious made naked.’
You start with a particular idea, and you don’t even know where it comes
from. It imposes itself on you, I think that three-quarters of the writing of
a novel, the organization of the narrative, and the sketching of characters
come from our subconscious (124-5).
This is a subconscious that is in tune with the imaginary of her own lifelong experiences
and her skill at probing the collective unconscious and the agglomeration of cultures
around her.
In answer to Pfaff's query about two of her earlier novels: ''What would you say
about people’s relationship to the supernatural, which is so important in Tree of Life” Is
it part magical realism? Is it irony, as in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem?” Condé admits
that it is more irony than the usage of magical realism that prompts her to weave together
the elements of a novel set in the West Indies, based upon local folklore as heard in the
storytelling of the largely illiterate population of the region and traditional voodoo
beliefs.
Let us approach Maryse Condé's interest in and respect for the oral transmission
of cultural beliefs with a quote from Vilma, one of the miriad of characters who offers a
eulogy at the funeral of Francis Sancher in Traversée de la Mangrove / Crossing the
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Mangrove (1989): “Nos anciens disaient bien que la mort n’est qu’un pont jeté entre les
êtres, une passerelle qui les rapproche sur laquelle ils se rencontrent à mi-chemin pour se
chuchoter tout ce qu’ils n’ont pas pu se confier” (195). Effectively, Vilma mentions what
''...they say...,'' because all the people present live in a culture of illiteracy, where the
written word holds no value. As long as anyone can remember, important facts have
been passed along from generation to generation by word of mouth. Condé belongs to
one of the first generations of West Indians capable of recapturing the memory of the past
and placing it permanently on the pages of her novels. In doing so, as Marie-Denise
Shelton claims in “Condé: The Politics of Gender and Identity” in the August 1993 issue
of World Literature Today: “She asserts the historical and esthetic importance of the
products of oral tradition.” Not only does she privilege the oral tradition of her fellow
islanders but she also adopts a very conversational storytelling style that Shelton
identifies as ''the texture and movement of the Creole story,'' which ''lends legitimacy to
oral storytelling as an artistic form of expression'' while, for the first time, transcribing
the old stories to the pages of her novels (718).
CONDÉ AND CÉLANIRE COU-COUPÉ
The question of identity is central to Condé’s novel Célanire, cou-coupé, which
was published in 2000. Although the majority of the identity questions in the novel
appear, at first glance, to concern Célanire’s quest for her natural parents, the book also
takes up the issue of métissage, as it has evolved in the Caribbean, to encompass in one
way or another almost all of its residents. This novel deals with inter-discrimination
among black Caribbeans with varying percentages of mixed blood and visibly different
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skin colors, and it also looks at more recent immigrants from India and China to see how
their arrival has altered the gene soup of the region. It holds up the black marrons whose
forefathers fled slavery early in the history of Guadeloupe as the tradition bearers of a
less diverse population—as the only ones who still have any claim to a culture unaffected
by the ravages of slavery, colonialism and modernization.
The second theme undertaken is the importance that voodoo religion continues to
hold for a large sector of the population of the West Indies. As we follow Célanire’s
quest for identity we find that, as an newborn, she was the intended human sacrifice
required by a quimboiseur to assure the political success of a power-hungry mulatto
candidate for office. The sacrifice was bungled, and the child’s life was saved by a local
doctor who had been meddling in Frankenstein-like medical experiments. As she grows
up, Célanire seems to embody nearly all the evil that her wrenching from the Devil’s
work could entail and all of the beauty it might require to accomplish her goals. A
“zombi,” she figuratively “flies” from one continent to another—from Guadeloupe—to
Paris—to Africa—back to Guadeloupe—to South America—and finally, back to
Guadeloupe on a lifelong itinerary that includes punishing everyone who might have had
a hand in her disfigurement. She “morphs” between a stunningly capable and intelligent
woman’s nature and a mystical “horse” (the term used to describe the forms a zombi
must assume in order to cross a body of water) to take the roles of the administrator of an
orphanage, a horticulturist par excellence, the director of a women’s shelter (which she
turns into a brothel), a lesbian lover, the wife of the Governor of the colony, a temptress
who tries to “rehabilitate” a gay mixed-race schoolteacher, and a social reformer with
projects for the restoration of equal rights to African and Caribbean women. Her roles in
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the novel alternate between dutiful and impious, and her vacillation between the two
extremes is as amusing as it is charged with irony. Do we believe in the angst she is
disposing of as the unwilling agent of Beelzebub? Do we believe that her actions are
calculating and destructive? What about the good that she dispenses along the way?
Does her bringing social issues to a public forum merit a second evaluation? Condé, in
her ironic approach and her unusual authorial practices, brings attention to bear upon both
the traditional facets and the contemporary problems of the local culture through her
protagonist. As we continue to study her novel we shall see how it shares elements of
magical realism and elements of the surreal with the work of past generations of
Surrealist authors from the francophone West Indies.
SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART: ETHNOGRAPHER AND NOVELIST
Simone Schwarz-Bart was born in 1938 in Guadeloupe. At the age of eighteen,
while studying in Paris, she met her future husband André, with whom she collaborated
on two novels, Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967), and La Mulâtresse Solitude
(1972). In 1989, years of mutual research resulted in the publication of a six-volume
series entitled Homage à la femme noire dedicated to the memory of black women whose
stories had not been told in “official history” and responding to a shortage of credible and
dynamic role models for women in the Caribbean community. Schwarz-Bart’s most
widely acclaimed novel is Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), which I discuss in
this dissertation. Following Télumée, she published Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979), a magical
realist novel which portrays the legendary Guadeloupean folk hero Ti-Jean and
interweaves fantasy and even science fiction with local folklore and oral history. Her
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play, Ton Beau Capitaine:Pièce en un acte et quatre tableaux (1987) examines the
solitude experienced by poor immigrant field hands in the Caribbean. Only one living
character plays a physical role onstage, but the music and voices emanating from an old
cassette player also surrealistically embody absent personages. Although her work has
been widely read and critically acclaimed, she has remained a rather private person and
has granted fewer interviews and garnered fewer publishing honors than the other authors
I include in this research.
Schwarz-Bart has created a body of literature that celebrates and encourages the
women of her homeland in particular, as well as the Caribbean society as a whole. Her
Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle is one of the best-loved and most-commented of
Francophone titles written by an Antillean woman, and I have found that her nonfictional efforts, like Condé’s, are highly indicative of the crucial influence she has had
upon many lives. Collectively, her oeuvre narrates the harsh realities Caribbean women
endured in the clutches of slavery and colonization. According to Christiane Ndiaye,
Schwarz-Bart deserves prominent placement in her own Hommage à la Femme Noire
which concerns itself with:
Des illustrations et des notices bio-bibliographiques, légendes et proverbes
illustr[a]nt les femmes noires qui sont restées invisibles et inaudibles dans les
annales de l'Histoire, de la Reine de Saba à Harriet Tubman, de Sojourner Truth
à Alice Walker, de la Mulâtresse Solitude à la génération de “guerrières de
l'imaginaire” contemporaine, dont Simone Schwarz-Bart ("Simone Schwarz-Bart,
quel intérêt? Classer l'inclassable" Présence Francophone 61 112-120).
In Télumée (as the primary personnage in a strong matrilineal family) SchwarzBart has created a female protagonist lauded—for 35 years since the first publication of
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Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle—as the epitome of female values and “Caribbeanness” in West Indian francophone literature. Up until Télumée was created, female
protagonists, when they existed, were fatally susceptible to desires for white men or for
the “lactification,” as Fanon describes it, of the family heritage by producing children
with white fathers who would never return to the Antilles. Instead, primarily because of
its rural setting, this novel is far more representative of the need for individuals in a small
community to support one another, and speaks especially to the power of women bonding
together against the inequalities of society and the poverty they endure.
SCHWARZ-BART AND PLUIE ET VENT SUR TÉLUMÉE MIRACLE
Schwarz-Bart's novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle is a biography of mythic
proportions which portrays an exceptionally optimistic woman who faces the challenges
of a world that is most often seen pessimistically by its inhabitants. Even Condé
indicated in an article which she wrote about Pluie et vent ... in La parole des femmes that
the dominant philosophy of life in the rural milieu of Guadeloupe is simple: “... le nègre
est maudit.” Therefore, explaining the creolization of her people's religious
beliefs—especially those from rural areas—combining the tenets of the Catholic religion
imposed by their masters with the practice of voodoo and a belief in the Marvelous and
the unexplainable, Condé finds that they have made their social and economic situations
seem more tolerable (16). The protagonist of Schwarz-Bart's novel, the last wise woman
in the hereditary line of the Lougandour family, is able to endure and survive spousal
abuse, insanity, and economic servility to white sugar plantation masters because of her
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adherence to the wisdom of folk maxims passed down to her for generations and through
a belief in the healing power of voodoo enunciated by her grandmother.
Kitzie McKinney further explains the phenomenon of feminine solidarity in
Guadeloupean society portrayed by the author:
Varied in nature, eluding categorization by conventional genre, her texts focus
on the experience of black protagonists marginalized and silenced because of
their race, gender, or social class ... Through the diverse stories told by these
women, whether they be récits about their community or myths and imaginative
tales, Schwarz-Bart's texts challenge many of the assumptions and conventions of
"heroic" genres and affirm the voices of black women who bind together, through
memory, voice, and metaphor, the quotidian detail of community life, moral and
spiritual insight, and the profoundly personal ("Memory, Voice, and Metaphor in
the Works of Simone Schwarz-Bart,'' in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone
Women Writers 22-41).
In Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle, we discover a chronicle of the tribulations endured
by several generations of Caribbean black women and a tribute to their strength, valor
and ingenuity in the form of a novel in which the protagonist battles common obstacles
and somehow finds the means to overcome them. She is empowered by local folklore,
proverbs and advice passed down orally over many generations, and an access to superhuman gifts available to her because of her belief in voodoo.
Diametrically opposed as they are in many ways, the heroines of Condé's and
Schwarz-Bart's novels share the same instincts for survival and the same community
resources that encourage their victory over harsh obstacles. Condé's Célanire escapes
death at the hands of an evil necromancier, grows up unloved in the middle class home of
her adoptive father, studies to become a nun in Paris, and parlays her education into a
post as director of a home for indigent women and children in Africa before marrying the
colonial governor. Her meteoric social climb and her moral failings are narrated by the
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author completely tongue-in-cheek. There is little doubt that the entire tale is a fantasy
created to entertain a reading audience which must be perceptive enough to appreciate the
irony of the political situations and the humor of the personal relationships which
develop. There is no doubt that the protagonist can be a very evil woman—emmissary
that she is of the devils that drive her—and also a very talented one who uses her
feminine wiles to gain the power she needs to vanquish all of her adversaries. Her total
personality reversal, on the final page of the novel, catches to the reader wholly
unawares.
By contrast, Schwarz-Bart brushes the portrait of Télumée as a simple woman,
raised in a rural setting by a wise old grandmother who deems introducing her to the local
sage-femme an important part—perhaps the most important—of her education. She
grows up in an environment where everyone is poor, and is more affected by the social
aspects of poverty than the scarcity of monetary wealth. Being black and being a woman
are the realities that make her susceptible to poverty, back-breaking physical work, the
certainty of being exploited by the whites of the region, and the problems of establishing
a fulfilling relationship with a man. Yet, with the support of her neighbors in general and
the community of women in particular, she overcomes extreme personal losses and even
madness to become a woman honored by all for her strength and moral fortitude. In a
guiding metaphor very aptly chosen by the author, this woman of the islands is a ''ship''
built strongly enough to weather whatever storm Nature may send her way.
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FOLK PROVERBS AND ORAL TRADITION
In order to write about the central role that folk proverbs and oral tradition play in
the Caribbean novel, we should first consider several language issues that obtain in the
Caribbean. We need to see how questions about these issues have been theorized by
local scholars and what literary conventions are at work among the elite authors who call
the French Caribbean home. Then, we can look at how Maryse Condé and Simone
Schwarz-Bart tackle the art of transferring oral tradition across linguistic lines into the
written forms found in their novels. How do their practices contribute to the fantasy or
the surrealistic qualities of the written narrative? What do they retain of Surrealism's
influence? How have they taken it to new places?
Tracing the evolution of Creole, the popular language in Martinique and
Guadeloupe, is nearly as complicated as residents have found it to track down family
bloodlines which extend across centuries and oceans back to Africa, Asia, India or
Europe. In the same way that it is very rare to discover written records that chart the
evolution of human families (except for their commercial value), Creole became a
language of expediency in the colonies, a language which was used almost exclusively
for oral communication and had not until fairly recent times been codified. It was
developed by the slaves with origins in a myriad of cultures and sufficed as an
intermediary language for facilitating communication between themselves and their
overseers. Now, centuries later, in France's départments d’outre mer such as Martinique
and Guadeloupe, the teaching of standard French is mandated at school, but the Creole
language still dominates the minds of many Antillians and continues to be their lingua
franca in everyday situations.
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In 1989, three of the most prominent twentieth-century language and literature
theorists of the Caribbean, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant,
poetically described the Creole language in their manifest of sorts entitled Éloge de la
créolité as “... notre soupe primitive et notre prolongement, notre chaos et notre
mangrove de virtualités” (28). They envisioned for the 1990s a kaleidoscopic society
whose Creole language would be enriched by the ancient expressive culture of the region
and by all of the cultures of which it had come to be composed. They believed that West
Indians experience the lack of a language sanctioned by the colonizer as a lack of being.
In other words, not having a language that can adequately, immediately, and fully express
what one wishes to say about the world and, perhaps more particularly about oneself, is
equated with not having a fully-realized self. For the common West Indian, French was
perceived as a ''foreign'' language used in the city and by the literate minority of the
population, while their mother language was looked down upon—yet another social
factor provoking in them feelings of existential inferiority. According to the theorists,
they needed to hoist up the value of Creole and enhance it so that it could become an
unproblematic ''full'' language that would convey an unlimited and unproblematic
subjectivity.
However, other theorists and authors found fault with the Creolists' utopic
proposal for the adoption of Creole as the official language of Martinique and
Guadeloupe. In a world that was rapidly shrinking, what immediate benefits would be
reaped by a small pocket of Antillean Creole speakers stubbornly adhering to their unique
native language? Were West Indian authors whose audience was composed almost
exclusively of francophone readers to abandon French in favor of a local language that
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had not yet developed a readership, in an area already known for its low rate of literacy in
general? In La Poétique de la relation, Édouard Glissant criticizes his colleagues' theory
as short-sighted, essentialist and limiting. Caribbean scholar Michael Dash agrees with
Glissant's theory and condenses it rather succinctly in his study The Other America:
Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998):
Glissant wants to locate Martinique in its immediate hemispheric context and ...
is careful not to propose a creole, Caribbean identity as an alternative center.
His contestation of a poetics and a politics of centering leads him to visualize
a Caribbean discourse based on heterogeneity and interrelating. He uses the
term tranversality in Caribbean Discourse to refer to the synchronic system of
converging forces that constitute Caribbean identity. Glissant’s objective is to
theorize an otherness that cannot be contained or appropriated. Consequently,
his model is based on fluidity and movement—as he puts it, on ‘becoming’ as
opposed to ‘being.’ (11)
Glissant proposes that West Indians should vigorously defend their unique language and
strive to encourage its adoption into regional education curricula where it might be better
codified and learned alongside French. With a conservationist's eye to the global, he
believes that the whole world would suffer from the disappearance of Creole, should it
happen, just as it would lose important links to other minority cultures if they were to
vanish. His placement of Creole on a slate of what might be termed ''endangered
languages'' gives it a prime status in the region where it could be defended along with the
right of any other small linguistic group to do the same. His theory sees the world as a
place where both major and minor language groups need to develop a relationship of
respect and conservation toward one another.
Condé admits that the Creolists' admonition to regional authors to write in Creole
rather than in French strikes her as a politically-motivated suggestion that she is both
unwilling and unable to adhere to. People like herself who were raised in middle class
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families had been insulated and isolated from the level of society which spoke Creole as
they were growing up. Although nearly every Antillean would be likely to recognize the
folk sayings and proverbs that they overheard from family servants or in the street, to be
''fluent'' in Creole was not among the talents that the best students of the départments
d'outre mer who were sent away to France for a higher education were likely to have
retained. Like herself, many would be unable to speak it with ease, or to translate its
accents to their writing. Instead, what she and her counterparts could write about were
the problems most West Indians had faced during their four hundred years on the islands
of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and those were what she preferred to focus upon. As she
began to spend more and more time writing, she tested a multitude of new techniques that
were more likely to be cerebral—for instance, how to gain access to the Caribbean
unconscious and how to tap into the historic mind-set and imagination of its
people—than they were to be technical such as worrying about translating her thoughts to
a language in which she was not proficient.
Concerning the origin of a Caribbean literary esthetic, Michael Dash asserts that
poor West Indians have had very few possessions of value during their sojourn in the
Americas: “The only thing they could possess (and which could not be tampered with)
was their imagination and this became the source of their struggle against the cruelty of
their condition'' (88). He adds that their poverty and lack of education are among other
predicaments they share: “The appeal of a collective identity is particularly strong among
peoples faced with the urgent question of self-definition in the face of aggressive
metropolitan interests” (10). Unlike the small percentage of Martinicians and
Guadeloupians who left the islands for an advanced education, what the common people
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retain is their relish for storytelling—the “they say,” portion of their relationships with
each other. These treasured oral traditions are what both Condé and Schwarz-Bart have
masterfully found the way to transfer across linguistic lines into the written forms found
in their novels.
I believe that it is through using literary practices that resemble storytelling that
these authors are able to translate their sometimes surreal fantasies into writing. They are
not afraid to introduce the fantastic, dreamlike, and unexplainable portions of Caribbean
existence into literature destined for readers who are much less likely to believe in it but
will accept it as an integral part of the imaginary life of the subjects of the novels they are
reading. Readers are effectively distanced by one step from the surreal or magical
happenings described in their novels by the irony that Maryse Condé inserts or the
ethnographic details that Simone Schwarz-Bart introduces keeping them within
''believing'' distance of the ''native'' culture. This layer of insulation, allows their fictional
tales to be consumed with less likelihood that their veracity will be questioned.
PROVERBS AND STORYTELLING IN PLUIE ET VENT SUR TÉLUMÉE MIRACLE
Of the two works we are studying it is Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Télumée
Miracle that is the most visibly marked by the presence of the folk proverb woven
seamlessly into the very texture of the narrative and the predominance of dialog between
characters that lends an extra measure of rhythmic orality to the storytelling. The folk
sayings provide a knowledge base for the text, a sort of internal wisdom, and it is
interesting to note that they are not set off in any scriptural way from the narrative or the
conversations in the novel. For the most part, the reader is unaware that they have been
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embedded except on the occasions when they are marked by a casual ''They say...'' on the
part of a speaker. The very few which are set off are also endnoted and explained in
French in an appendix at the end of the book as a guide for non-Caribbean readers who
are unlikely to realize their origin in folk wisdom.
It is probably fair to say that, in some ways, this is a woman's novel because it is
so staunchly lauditory of women, but it has likewise been appreciated by Caribbean men
who recognize the strong feminine role models portrayed—the kind of persons their
grandmothers were, or they wish they had been—the warm, solid, industrious glue that
held their childhood universes together in spite of the troubles they faced. In the
introductory notes to the novel provided by editors Alfred Fralin and Christiane Szeps,
this prominent role that women exercised in West Indian society is highlighted:
... during the four centuries of colonial rule, the woman had always been the most
stable family element. Indeed, this social phenomenon grew out of slavery which
totally disorganized the family and prevented the black man from truly being a
father. Consequently, the West Indian woman’s strategy for survival is silent
perseverance, whereas the man’s way is one of protest and action much more
spectacular but less effective (x).
Mary Jean Green’s article “Simone Schwarz-Bart et la tradition féminine aux Antilles” in
Volume 36 of Présence francophone (1990), quotes the author as she reinforces her
editors’ opinion of the centrality of women’s roles, giving credit for the survival of the
family and also the traditions worth preserving to the woman:
Ce sont les femmes qui ont tout sauvé, tout préservé, y compris l’âme des
hommes. Ce sont des gardiennes jalouses qui ont toujours lutté en silence.
Quand l’homme antillais faisait des enfants sans revendiquer la paternité,
celle qui devait assumer la lignée, accomplir les tâches quotidiennes,
s’occuper des enfants tout en leur transmettant les traditions ancestrales,
c’était naturellement la femme (xiv).
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However, Schwarz-Bart’s novel contradicts the rather common opinion and even her own
statement that women were the silent forces behind society. We will see that what they
had to say throughout the generations was of utmost importance. Pluie et Vent sur
Télumée Miracle reinforces the Schwarz-Bart’s tribute to West Indian women in a second
genre that fictionally complements their non-fictional series Hommage à la femme noire.
The chronological structure of Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle depends heavily
upon oral history passed down from one generation to another, especially by the
grandmothers, who later in life become the caregivers of the youngest generation. The
editors remark, “If old people are venerated in Télumée Miracle, it is because initiation to
life occurs through oral transmission of which they are the privileged vehicle ... they are
the living memory of Guadeloupe that the author hopes to preserve by converting oral
communication into writing” (ix). Before Télumée was ever sent to live with her
grandmother she remembers the enormous respect that her mother showed when she told
stories about Toussine, also called Reine Sans Nom by her contemporaries:
Dans mon enfance, ma mère Victoire me parlait souvent de mon aïeule,
la négresse Toussine. Elle en parlait avec ferveur et venération, car, disait-elle,
tout éclairée par son évocation, Toussine était une femme qui vous aidait à ne pas
baisser la tête devant la vie, et rares sont les personnes à posséder ce don. Ma
mère la vénérait tant que j’en étais venue à considérer Toussine, ma grand-mère,
comme un être mythique, habitant ailleurs que sur terre, si bien que toute vivante
elle était entrée, pour moi, dans la légende.”(1)
From the first time that the grandmother took the little girl’s hand as they crossed the
Bridge of Beyond until the end of her days, the old woman was the primary person who
opened her eyes to the realities and the fantasies of life “... dans une lointaine éclaircie
fantastique, mornes après mornes, savanes après savanes jusqu’à l’entaille dans le ciel qui
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était la montagne même et qu’on appelait Balata Bel Bois ... au mystère des bois, aux
esprits, à la grâce de Dieu ...” (21).
Télumée’s love for the old woman and respect for her wisdom deepen as she
grows up under her care. It is vital to note that her grandmother—as representative of the
entire Lougandor dynasty of women and despite her humble station in life—always
conveys a surprisingly positive impression of life. Many are the Creole proverbs she
quotes to her growing granddaughter that are meant to encourage the young woman’s
growth and protect her from the pitfalls experienced by so many of her young friends.
The saying “... si lourds que soient les seins d’une femme, sa poitrine est toujours assez
forte pour les supporter,” (10) is repeated several times in the novel and speaks to the
inner strength that will help a young woman overcome obstacles. Its most important
appearance comes when it is repeated by the community of older ladies who celebrate
Télumée’s coming of age: “Les commères accouraient chantant, badinant, soulevant avec
fierté leurs poitrines tombées, fêtant de mille manières mes petits seins naissants et disant
par malice ... si lourds que soient tes seins, tu seras toujours assez forte pour les
supporter” (34). It is as if they equate the social burdens she must be prepared to bear
upon maturity with the feminine marker of the breasts she must also be able to support.
In fact, there is a play on words in the verb supporter which can refer to the physical act
of holding something up or the psychological ability to endure suffering.
Combining a knowledge of the past violence suffered by her ancestors with an
optimistic hope for the future, Reine Sans Nom teaches Télumée about the resistance and
strength of her people: “... nous avons été battus pour cent ans, mais nous avons du
courage pour mille ans, je te dis, je te dis...” (128). It is also indicative of her positive
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influence that, in spite of the realities of history, Reine Sans Nom tells Télumée stories in
which black people are not always the underdog, or inferior and secondary characters: “...
le nègre est l’enfant de Dieu ...” (Note 153, 155). What other helpful advice do the old
sayings elicit? What should one do when s/he repeatedly faces adversity? This proverb
counsels a person to be proactive toward commanding one’s own fate: “... derrière une
peine il y a une autre peine, la misère est une vague sans fin, mais le cheval ne doit pas te
conduire, c’est toi qui dois conduire le cheval” (42). Life is bound to bring sorrow to
even the happiest of women, what matters is how one deals with both joy and adversity:
“La femme qui a ri est celle-là qui va pleurer, et c’est pourquoi on sait déjà, à la façon
dont une femme est heureuse quel maintien elle aura devant l’adversité” (87). What
should one expect from a man? No more than he has been conditioned to give: “Si un
homme ne te donne pas un ventre plein de manger, s’il te donne un coeur plein d’amour,
cela suffit pour vivre” (64). Finally, in spite of the many tribulations her people have
endured, life is still good: “... [S]i la vie n’était pas belle, dans le fond, la terre serait
dépeuplée” summarizes her solidly positive outlook (81).
Not only does the grandmother provide important guidelines for adult life through
her repetition of local proverbs but she also tells wonderfully imaginative stories to
Télumée and her little friend Élie on Thursdays when they aren’t in school.
“... elle nous disait quelques contes sur lesquels s’achevaient nos jeudis ... un
vague sourire plissait ses yeux tandis qu[e Grand-mère] ouvrait devant nous
le monde où les arbres crient, les poissons volent, les oiseaux captivent le
chasseur et le nègre est enfant de Dieu. Elle sentait ses mots, ses phrases,
possédait l’art de les arranger en images et en sons, en musique pure, en
exaltation. Elle savait parler, elle aimait parler pour ses deux enfants ... Les
contes étaient disposés en elle comme les pages d’un livre, elle nous en
racontait cinq tous les jeudis...” (40)
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These storytelling evenings open the world of fantasy to the children and are also a great
source of enjoyment for the old woman. Schwartz-Bart makes the connection between
the stock of tales arranged in the grandmother’s imagination and an author’s placement of
well-designed short stories in a book of fairy tales. This device allows the novelist to
create a verbal world “filled with colourful French expressions arranged in Creole
rhythmic patterns.” The novel is written completely in French, but as her editors
emphasize “... with the profuse narrative style of someone telling a story orally in Creole”
(ix). Schwarz-Bart agrees: “J’ai voulu faire passer surtout l’esprit de la langue créole ...
J’ai l’impression de mettre, dans cette espèce de langue française que j’écris à ma
manière créole, l’esprit de notre langue” (ix). Unlike Condé, this author is capable of
writing in Creole, but she does not practice it. It is only when she comes up against a
writing block that she admits to taking a detour through Creole and then adapting her
thoughts to French so that the resulting pages echo the tones of both languages.
It is also interesting to look at Condé's analysis of Schwarz-Bart's work, since, of
the two novelists, she is the more expert in defining comparative literatures. In La Parole
des femmes... she finds that orality and the stakes of the chosen language coalesce
admirably in the Creole proverbs that Schwarz-Bart scatters profusely through her
writing. These proverbs integrate the religious and folkloric beliefs of the black
population of the islands and put the reader in contact with the Creole language as
Schwarz-Bart translates it into French. Far from exploiting the proverbs as an exotic
ruse, she integrates their orality and the importance of everyday language into her
literature.
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FOLK LANGUAGE AND STORYTELLING IN CÉLANIRE, COU-COUPÉ
Since Condé finds such resonance in the folk proverbs that are intricately braided
into Schwarz-Bart's texts, let us also examine how she has been able to integrate the
collective unconscious folk wisdom and Creole language of Guadeloupe into her own
works, especially Célanire, cou-coupé. One technique that we notice immediately is that,
unlike Schwarz-Bart, Condé puts the local language on display in her text by setting off
words peculiar to the region in quotation marks and by including a glossary of Creole
terms used in the novel. Some critics might charge that such a practice exoticizes the
novel because the language unfamiliar to the reader is emphasized rather than integrated
into the surrounding text. However, realizing that some of the terminology she uses is
''foreign'' to her readers, she has decided to advise them graphically of it—a technique
that most readers seem to appreciate. Another authorial procedure that we notice is
Condé's highlighting, again by enclosure in quotation marks of words and phrases from
the French language that she has endowed with special meanings or are used differently
in Africa and the Antilles than they are on the continent. Her non-standard spelling of
these words often reflects the Creole pronunciation of French vocabulary. Also, as a
result of her own childhood, growing up in a household that she describes as patently
bourgeois-bourgeois, her experience leads her to include not only folk proverbs from
Guadeloupe but also the middle class French proverbs that were repeated in her home as
she was growing up. Since this novel is situated in a less rural and, ultimately, in a more
international milieu, it seems only fitting that the registers of language and sayings of her
protagonist and her supporting characters would reflect their social classes. The author's
passion for hyperbole also lends a hint of orality to the text that no reader is truly
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expected to accept lock, stock and barrel. Such descriptions are strategically placed to
stimulate an aura of ventardise that would normally be situated in oral storytelling.
First, let us examine the ways in which Condé puts the local spoken language on
display in her text as the artistic appearance of language and its graphic inscription on the
page were also a passion of the first generation of Surrealists. Enclosure in quotation
marks is a practice widely used in Célanire cou-coupé to denote the particular
significance of a word or phrase outside the realm of its customary geographic or
semantic context. This highlighting makes its first appearance in the novel when Jean
Seydou, the half-blood son of a former administrator in the colonies and his indigenous
paramour, is described as ''moussé lékol.'' Since, Hakim, as he prefers to call himself, has
selected an Arabic name and professes to be Muslim, the oddly spelled ''Mr. School
(teacher)'' reflects a phonetic spelling of the spoken French ''Monsieur l'école'' so often
used by residents in the colonies, in the Mahreb, and in the Caribbean to designate their
schoolmasters. At other times in the novel Hakim is also referred to as ''moussé lékol,
brodeur du français-français,'' and, after he loses his job, as ''l'ex-moussé lékol.'' We
make his acquaintance through Karamanlis, a Greek immigrant who has already been
described as living in a ''poto-poto'' neighborhood where the shacks bear the odor of
''caca-boeuf'' and are inhabited by ''les étrangers qui massacraient la langue de Descartes,''
so we are expecting that language may be used differently in this novel than in others we
have read (Célanire 19-20). This tongue-in-cheek treatment of character introductions
leads the way into a novel that treats social problems and the words with which they are
discussed with jollity as well as with gravity.
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Within just a few more pages we learn that the local African king Koffe Ndizi has
summoned his Muslim féticheur who devines that evil spirits from across the sea have
just set foot in the territory. We are told that they must be very powerful because
normally spirits do not have the power to cross great bodies of water:
S'ils avaient pris pied à Adjame-Santey, cela voudrait dire qu'ils chevauchaient un
''cheval.'' C'est ainsi que l'on appelle un humain qui fait leur quatre volontés et
qui se reconnaît à un signe particulier. Il s'agissait donc de découvrir ce signe, de
trouver ce ''cheval,'' puis le mettre hors d'état de nuire, ce qui n'est pas aisé (26).
Not only is the term for a person with connections to the spirit world set off from the
remainder of the text, but it is defined in the following sentence. Then, it is re-employed
and set off again, now with a tacit understanding that the reader will recognize it when it
appears later in the text. As a series of deaths due to unusual circumstances ensue, each
one advantageous to Célanire's social rise, the supporting characters begin to wonder if
the mysterious scarves she always wears around her neck might be a way of disguising
''the sign'' that evil spirits have taken up residence in her body.
Quotation marks are also used frequently by the author to highlight somewhat
controversial terminology—often the stereotypical classification of one social group by
another. Instead of referring to native peoples who have earned an education as ''elites,''
which in itself carries some prejudicial baggage, they are often described in the novel as
''évolués'' in a less respectful sense and ''lettrés'' when the speaker wishes to show
deference. Seeing, in parentheses, ''travailleurs volontaires,'' the euphemism used by
colonial administrators for the mistreated and starving laborers building the railroad in
the Ivory Coast, the reader becomes aware that their lot differs significantly from what
the terminology implies (38). Hakim and the king's cousin discuss the strife between the
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French and the natives, commenting that the colonial policies which the French call
''pacification,'' are indistinguishable from what they call ''guerre,'' and wonder: ''Combien
de morts avait-on déjà enterrés? Combien de morts allait-on encore enterrer ''(47-8)? By
contrast, the local people are also wont to name-call when they speak about the colonial
administrators as ''les dieux de la brousse,'' a term not far removed from the poisonous
snakes that they call ''les maîtres de la brousse'' (90). The French were famous for
conducting themselves disrespectfully toward the traditional chiefs of the territory,
requiring that they send them their most beautiful daughters, and often impregnating
them. Then, these ''masters of the bush'' were said to have ''parked'' their rejected
children in the orphan asylums that they, themselves, had set up in the colony—fully
deserving the derogatory names the local people coined for them (76).
One of Célanire's first public works projects, as the wife ''régularisée'' of the
Governor, succeeds in making Bingerville a capital of art; she supervises the building of
a Black African ''Musée ethnographique.'' However, her actions are misconstrued by a
public predisposed by her former social climbing to mistrust her motives: ''L'intention
était de prouver non seulement aux orphelins du Foyer, mais aussi à ceux qui en
douteraient, que l'Afrique possédait sa culture'' (92). This incident carries a political
message, since the French colonial policy of assimilation strived to create more docile
colonial citizens by attempting to teach indigenous people to despise their former values
and replace them with more ''cultured,'' typically French beliefs. The locals tended to
believe the worst about Célanire, so instead of welcoming her efforts toward promoting
an appreciation of their indigenous culture, they preferred to believe that she was
pillaging their cultural heritage by removing artifacts from their rightful sacred places
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into the profane public view where they would lose their magical powers. In this case,
the reader is encouraged to look at both sides of an argument that exists to this day
between cultural preservationists and conservationists concerning material culture.
Also, in the more intimate confines of their home, Thomas de Brabant reinforces
the suspicion held by others of the community that his wife may, indeed, be inhabited by
wild bestial passions that go beyond human nature when his terms of endearment for
Célanire include ''ma petite panthère'' because ''il ne savait jamais si son étreinte le ferait
râler de douleur ou de plaisir'' (42).
Although several characters state, in the text of the novel, that no one pays much
attention to old sayings or old wives tales anymore, ''... personne ne prêta attention à ces
dictons d'un autre âge,'' it is quite clear that the author means for her readers to take note
of them (43). Maryse Condé recycles traditional folk dictons, mixing them freely
throughout the novel with standard French sayings, showing how indigenous Africans
and rural and middle class West Indians share some of the same basic folk beliefs. For
example, ''... la beauté des femmes fait le malheur des hommes...'' can be appropriate in
nearly any milieu (43). A political statement used by the French administrators to
promote assimilation, ''La femme africaine ... doit être la gardienne éternelle des
traditions,'' is used by Betti Bouah to reinforce his African (and male chauvinistic) belief
that women should stay at home and tend their children rather than seeking to better
themselves outside the tribal compound. The born-again evangelist Zulefi uses a line that
finds its source in a Caribbean proverb to lure new disciples to his Sunday morning
services: ''... les négres sont une race maudite ... Ils mangeaient toujours la même misère
... Dans l'au-delà, ils seraient l'égal des autres peuples'' (161-2). He quotes from the Bible
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when he explains how, at the age of twelve, he managed to reverse trajectories after
arranging a human sacrifice for his father the malfaiteur: ''C'est un jour les écailles sont
tombées de mes yeux comme de ceux de Saül sur le chemin de Damas'' (163). Mama
Justa, a black Peruvian clairvoyant tries to explain the violence done to Yang Ting's body
in death with a combination of conventional and folk wisdom: ''On a beau courir tout
partout pour se cacher, la justice de Dieu a des yeux de lynx, la terre n'est pas assez
grande, on n'échappe jamais à ses péchés'' (225). Quotes from the Bible are likely to be
recognized in any region where Western religion has taken hold.
In addition, the author has chosen old French sayings, some that have resonance
in English, to add an air of familiarity and humor to the text. When Célanire summons
Hakim to the Foyer to try to convince him to work for her, he observes: ''Quel moulin à
paroles! Elle n'arrêtait pas une minute'' (70). He says that Célanire's predatory look
recalls ''comme le chat la souris qu'il va dévorer ou le serpent python la proie qu'il va
avaler avant de s'allonger pour la digérer voluptueusement (71). He attempts to drown
his fear at a fisherman's bar that other ''boit-sans-soifs'' frequent (74). He wonders when
it will come to light that the Foyer is a bordello and that Célanire is its Madame: ''Quand
le pot aux roses serait découvert ... Qui vivrait verrait!'' (74). Members of the community
would have liked to blame Célanire for the death of Kwame Aniedo and Hakim's
banishment to Guyane, but in this matter '' ...elle semblait aussi innocent que l'agneau
pascal'' (82).
In Guadeloupe, Kung Fui is said to have taken the money offered him for
providing an infant for sacrificial purposes and disappeared with Yang Ting: ''Ni vu ni
connu'' (113). To Ufusan's plan of returning to her people in the mountains with the
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young Célanire, the doctor replies ''Bonsoir la compagnie! La compagnie, bonsoir et bon
vent'' (119)! Defeated in his plan to rid himself of the little girl with evil powers who
even tried to seduce him, Pinceau allows: ''J'avais peur comme le sans-abri qui sait que le
cyclone va foncer directement sur sa tête'' (122). The last two sayings have particular
resonance for an island population used to depending upon the wind for successful sailing
and alternately afraid of its ravages during tropical storms. And finally, in reference to
the toll of deaths the protagonist has left behind her that may forever remain unexplained,
''Les morts n'ont jamais la parole'' (76). These are but a sampling of the recognizable old
saws that Condé includes to express irony and lend a feeling of familiarity to the text.
These strategies succeed, as well, in constructing an oral-to-written bridge of cultural
understanding.
Situated in Côte d'Ivoire at the beginning of the 20th century, we find that Condé
has essentially kept the language registers of the novel in line with her own françaisfrançais and bourgeois-bourgeois roots and those of her intended readers, but what
makes the text unusual is that she has also slipped in a modicum of creole sayings. She
has liberally seasoned the French language with Creole terminology which reflects the
diverse origins of her characters. Creolists might argue that she should have written the
entire novel in the language of the people. However, Condé would beg to differ with
them. She brandishes a different linguistic weapon for subverting colonial discourse by
poking fun at the conventions and deforming the shape of the French language through
the use of phonetically spelled French quotes or the deft insertion of brief quotes in
Creole. As words issue from the mouth of the newly baptised King Koffi Ndizi—''Ce wa
ben? Ce wa ben?''—the graphic representation of his words seems laughable, letting the
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reader know that his royal stature has been diminished by his conversion (56). In the
same vein, one's respect for Governor Brabant can only wane when he is described as
having declined from a ''... fringant pète-sec...'' to a ''... gros poussah'' (96). However,
insertions of Creole also serve to elevate the status of some characters. When Papa Doc
Pinceau talks about his medical education, he is proud to brag: ''...je ne suis pas un doktè
mawon, un doktè fèye, moi. J'ai fait mes études à l'université de Pau, en France. Premier
Guadeloupéen descendant d'esclaves à mettre les pieds dans une fac de médecine pour
Blancs'' (104).
Perhaps more often than French, Creole is used to explain the physical differences
between different sets of Guadeloupeans. The West Indies are home to one of the vastest
panoramas of racial métissage in the world. The color of one's skin may well affect, if
not reflect one's social status. So, how does one resident describe the appearance of
another? What is a nèg mawon? It is a term used to describe an individual who can
alternately be respected or detested because of his/her fairly pure racial background and
darker tone of skin because his/her ancestors fled the plantation and lived sequestered in
the mountains for several generations. A chakin, un kako, a peau-chappée, a mulâtresse,
a négresse, a peau noire-noire? Because the Caribbean society has also become home to
so many immigrants, imported to do menial work in the islands, we read about the
mulatas, zambo-zambas, des métis de Chinois, une kouli, une méli-mélo, des Zindiens,
and ''... les sang-melés de toutes couleur [qui] pullulent...'' in the region (201). I believe
that Condé expends a fair amount of linguistic effort in mocking the plethora of racial
terminology still employed in the region, by extension trying to convince readers of the
futility of describing others with discriminatory terms.
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SUPERSTITION, FOLK RELIGION AND THE OCCULT
In addition to the naming of living, breathing humans, the novel is replete with
personages whose identities arise from a generalized belief by the inhabitants of each
region in the gods of African religions or the practices of voodou: ''On pouvait répertorier
une dizaine d'histoires plus surprenantes les unes que les autres où l'ignorance, religion et
magie se disputaient'' (202). Of all of the “spirits” the zombi is the best known and the
most feared. It can take the form of a human, male or female, or an animal and is a being
that has been sentenced to wander forever tormented on the face of the earth. It is said
that when one builds a house, a small corner of earth beside the door should be left where
one can make a pile of sand, because, along with other vexing tasks, zombis have been
sentenced to counting every grain of sand before entering, and this delay offers protection
to the occupant. Humans beings are also believed to spend a period of time as a zombi
between their death and their acceptance into the world of the dead when they wander
about in misery.
Likewise, there exist “diablesses” who are very beautiful and who wait for and
seduce men, sometimes even murdering them after they have had their way with them.
The male counterparts of the diablesses are the “dorliis” or “hommes aux bâtons” who
attack women in their sleep and impregnate them. There are also werewolves, evil spirits
who can change themselves into animals. Special prayers and practices are necessary to
keep away possessing and flying spirits and dorliis as well as for preventing nightmares
and sleeplessness.
On the positive side of folk religion can be counted the sorceresses, sage-femmes
and quimboiseurs (also called séanciers and gadézafés) who are visited by a large
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percentage of West Indians because they are reputed to have the power to cast evil spells
on their enemies and may also protect them from evil that has been sent their way. In
Guadeloupe, charmed objects, worn inside one’s clothing which have been prepared
according to ritual by these sorcerers/esses are believed to have magical or protective
powers.
It is also common to see the remnants of beliefs in traditional religion descended
from Africa and the Roman Catholic teachings taught to the slaves in the New World
combined into a heterogeneous practice in most communities. Many elderly West Indian
women feel it necessary to travel with a crucifix, and one also hangs from the rearview
mirrors of automobiles of younger drivers. Many women repeat prayers at certain times
throughout the day, and even the men are wont to repeat their Christian prayers when
they find themselves in trouble.
CONDÉ'S LINGUISTIC TREATMENT OF THE OCCULT
How do these fantastic spirits play a part in the novel we are studying?
According to the author, in the Ivory Coast, among its ''miasmes délétères'' exist an entire
host of spirits who represent the local animist religions. Le père Huchard warns the
group of oblats he has accompanied to Africa: ''Attention à ce vous mangez, à ce que
vous buvez, à ce que vous respirez; à l'eau, à l'air, aux païens surtout. Ces suppôts de
Satan là peuvent vous tuer avec leur magie'' (16). We soon learn that ''La nuit, trop
d'esprits rôdent en libre malfaisance'' (17). We meet the féticheurs of the local tribal
chief whose dreams and premonitions require important sacrifices to the local gods.
They are the first to detect a new evil spirit in their midst which appears to have ''...sort[i]
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de l'autre côté de l'eau'' (26) and predict ''Bientôt, les esprits allaient commencer leur
maraude'' (37). Even Hakim, who laughs at tribal superstition, begins to believe that
Célanire has ''bewitched'' him and fears that he will suffer a death similar to one of the
others who stood in the way of her ascension:
Tout le restant de la journée, Hakim demeura terré dans sa chambre.
Ainsi, la superstition était vérité. Célanire était un ''cheval'' et son signe se
cachait dans son cou. C'était cette cicatrice extraordinaire qu'il avait vue,
vue de ses deux yeux. Par conséquent, il allait être la prochaine victime: sa
mort était annoncée. Serait-il lui aussi piqué par une mystérieuse mygale?
Dévoré par des mangeurs d'hommes? Comment? ... Le cercle d'arbres autour
de la maison lui semblait cacher des créatures magiques. Il les entendait
siffler, murmurer, crier (72).
Not long afterward, he is found covered with blood at the scene of the murder of Kwame
Aniedo, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to the penal colony of Guyane. His ultimate
death in a hallucinatory setting along with Jean Pinceau does not come until he has
suffered for years because of his knowledge of Célanire's secrets.
One of the native monitrices at the Foyer assured all who would listen that
Célanire had the power to leave her own body like a snake that slides out of its skin:
Une nuit que la pluie et le vent faisaient claquer les volets, elle était entrée à
l'improviste dans sa chambre et avait vu devant la fenêtre grande ouverte un petit
tas de peau et de chairs molles, informes. Cachée derrière une penderie, elle avait
assisté au retour de la jeune femme aux premières heures du matin. La bouche
barbouilléee de sang, elle avait renfilé son enveloppe charnelle et avait regagné
son lit tout tranquillement (84-85).
She harboured no doubt that Célanire ''... était au service de puissants aawabo'' (85).
When the narrator asks the rhetorical question, ''Peut-on réellement avoir foi en pareilles
bêtises et malparlances?'' (85) what is the reader to answer? The frequency with which
supporting characters in the novel ask themselves whether they have been ''bewitched'' by
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Célanire continues to reinforce the reader's impression that the characters themselves
subscribe to the superstitions of their region.
One of the most captivating examples of the personification of supernatural forces
in the novel takes place in Guadeloupe as Célanire's true identity unfolds. Returning as
the wife of its new governor Thomas Brabant, the Wayanas—a tribe of marrons who
seem to have a more direct access to primitive intuition—whisper that ''Célanire était
l'enfant de mauvais esprits et semait le malheur autour d'elle. C'était pire qu'un
soukougnan, un jan gagé qui rôde à la recherche de victimes jusqu'au devant-jour et se
gorge de sang frais'' (151). A series of deaths attribuable to voodou occur after her
arrival. We find that Agénor de Fouques-Timbert, who was running for office before she
was born, had contacted Madeska, a local malfaiteur, and paid a considerable sum of
money to have a newborn child sacrificed to ''concilier les invisibles'' (157). However,
Dr. Pinceau brought the child back to life, reconnecting severed tissue and restitching her
slashed neck, making the child an even more powerful manifestation of evil:
''... grâce à ce petit corps docile, les mauvais esprits, Ogokpi, le super-demon,
en premier, paraderaient librement parmi les humains. Jusqu'à sa mort, ils
l'utiliseront pour commettre tous les crimes qui leur passeraient par la tête,
toutes les méchancetés dont ils auraient fantasie ... en outre, convaincus qu'on
avait cherché à les fouer, ils se vengeraient sauvagement de tous ceux qui
avaient participé au sacrifice manqué ... ils rattraperaient quand ils le voudraient
l'un après l'autre chacun de ceux qui avaient été mêlés au drame (158).
Thus, the will of the voodou gods, working through Célanire, succeeds in disposing of at
least sixteen characters who either were responsible for her embodiment as a handmaiden
of evil or stood in the way of her rise to power.
In the previous paragraphs, I have described how the language of Maryse Condé's
novel has breathed life into a secondary cast of characters that act in a territory beyond
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the lives of her human protagonists. It is important to understand that these spirits exist
because of a widespread regional belief in voodoo and are, for the most part, the same
sort of personages that populate the merveilleux in novels also classified within the genre
of magical realist literature. We have seen how these fantastic ''beings'' underlie the
beliefs and actions of the human characters who find themselves in surreal situations that
are completely unexplainable by a logical sequence of events. Now, let us look at the
reasons why they have tended to endure and populate literature from the West Indies.
Neither the commandments nor the prohibitions of Catholicism, the evangelism or
the charity of protestant missionaries, nor a long history of colonialism and assimilative
practices have able to erase the tradition of voodoo in the Caribbean, where is known to
be practiced behind closed doors, if not openly, at almost every level of society. We
know that the first generation of Surrealists refused all codified Western religion as a
societal power structure that limited their investigation of the unconscious and placed
taboos on their freedom of sexual expression, but we also find that they were intensely
interested in voodoo, as a non-western religion that tended to give credence to
unexplainable occurrences and super-natural powers to its practitioners. Instead of taking
up a search for less regimented and more shocking ways to tease inspiration to the
surface as the Surrealists did, our Guadeloupean authors have delved into the collective
imaginary of their ancestors and their peers to find the sources of the sometimes
unexplainable events that make for good fiction. Their folklore and their culture is rich
with such oral tales and fantastic happenings. Asked whether she believes in voodoo,
Condé replies: ''What difference does it make? I don’t believe in it, but these beliefs are
still quite prevalent in the West Indies and Africa. I incorporate them into my narrative
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plots when it is appropriate” (Conversations 72). She also adds that she very much
admires and understands how Aimé Césaire,
“... used surrealism as a means rather than an end. He wanted to make use of
surrealism to search for his own self and to recover his African essence hidden
under the cloak of Western education, the same way the surrealists were looking
for the primitive man, the child, hidden by education. He has thoroughly
explained his relationship with surrealism, which involved a stylistic as well
as a political rebellion” (112).
In the same interview Condé also explains her own authorial relationship with the occult,
by “... show[ing] the conflict between tradition and modern knowledge...” by saying
“... that if people want to do something in Guadeloupe, they must first build upon
traditional forces: popular beliefs, traditions, and a certain relation to the occult” (34-5).
But when she is asked whether her treatment of voodoo is a re-deployment of the
“... magic realism found in the works of some West Indian writers,” she is quick to reply,
Absolutely not. All of this is largely mockery ... But I really don’t mean to mock
people’s belief in spirits, which is a cultural phenomenon found in our societies.
I am aware that there can be no West Indian novel without the presence of the
occult, so I derisively add to it (70-71).
So, it appears that while valuing her local heritage, as a non-believer of sorts, she is able
to respond to the taste for the unusual and the fantastic that a reader may appreciate as
s/he engages with the novel.
SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART AND THE OCCULT
By contrast, Schwartz-Bart leads us to a perspective concerning the occult in the
daily lives of poor rural Guadeloupeans that is more reverent than Condé’s. It does not
seem unusual that, with her life-long penchant for the ethnographic, that she would
describe cultural practices differently in her fiction than an author like Condé. We have
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no blanket statement from her, as we do from Condé, about whether she believes in the
occult or not. It really does not matter. What does matter is how the author integrates a
vital part of West Indian heritage into her work and how it helps the reader understand
the motivations of her protagonist. Let us return to Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle to
examine the last point of our discussion of the treatment of folk religion in West Indian
literature.
When Télumée was still a child, her grandmother deemed it an essential part of
her education that she become familiar with the spiritual world represented by the voodoo
religion. In her community, the representative of this world was Reine Sans Nom’s old
friend, Man Cia. Traditional religious beliefs allow Man Cia to be regarded as an
intermediary or medium between the living and the dead who holds parallel powers as a
witch and a healer and even as an exorcist for les Poursuivis—people who are tormented
by an evil spell. “Grand-mère m’avait déjà parlé de cette femme, son amie, qui côtoyait
les morts plus que les vivants, et elle promettait toujours de me la faire connaître un de
ces après-midi” (27). Reine Sans Nom understands this sage-femme’s approach to life
and supports it, although not everyone accepts her role in the community: “Les gens ne la
comprennaient pas toujours, c’était une ‘femme fantaisie’, une ‘lunée’, une ‘temporelle’,
mais tout cela ne l’amenait qu’à hocher la tête et sourire, et elle continuait à faire ce pour
quoi le bon Dieu l’avait créée, vivre” (34).
When Man Cia meets Télumée for the first time she predicts: “Tu seras sur terre
comme une cathédrale.” In this statement we see the blend of beliefs in le bon Dieu of
Christian teachings and her practice of animistic ritual and voodoo that is common in the
West Indies. Later, when Man Cia becomes Télumée’s “spiritual advisor,” she tells her:
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“Sois une vaillante petite négresse, un vrai tambour à deux faces, laisse la vie frapper,
cogner, mais conserver toujours intacte la face du dessous” (32). This advice seems to
have come from the prescience that, like most Caribbean women, Télumée is about to
experience serious reverses. Unfortunately, Télumée does come up against her share of
trouble in the person of the beloved Élie that she has adored since childhood. After
months of happiness and tranquility together in the little cabin he had built for her,
something evil began to work inside him. “Je le surveillais comme un marin surveille le
vent, par beau calme, sachant que tous les navires n’arrivent pas à bon port” (80). He
begins to drink excessively, stay out late with other women and beat Télumée when he
comes home. As a result, she withdraws from the village to hide her shame “... car la
misère d’une femme n’est pas une tourmaline qu’elle aime à faire étinceler au soleil (85).
Man Cia tells Reine Sans Nom that evil spirits have invaded Télumée’s home and
have taken possession of Élie. What they must do is to burn some herbs to drive away
these spirits before they take possession of Télumée, too. Commenting upon what Man
Cia has told her, the grandmother expresses her belief that humans should be able to
stand up to any adversity they encounter, unless the spirit world also is set against them:
“Tu le sais Télumée, le mal est très puissant sur terre, ce qui germe du coeur de l’homme
suffit aux épaules de l’homme, et il n’est pas utile que les mauvais esprits y ajoutent leur
fantaisie...” (90). Sadly, the charm the Man Cia provides is not strong enough to reverse
the adversity that tears Élie and Télumée apart. She succombs to depression and isolates
herself from her neighbors: “... je me sentais comme un jardin à l’abandon, livré à ses
ronces et ses épines” (92).
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Weeks turn into months after Télumée has fallen into insanity. The author
describes her protagonist’s surroundings and actions surrealistically from the point of
view of a mentally ill person:
Je n’ai pas le souvenir des jours qui suivirent. Je sus plus tard qu’on me vit
assise sur une pierre, le lendemain matin, dans l’arrière-cour de Reine sans
Nom, plongée dans l’hébétude. Je restais là plusieurs semaines, sans bouger,
ne distinguant même plus le jour d’avec la nuit. Reine San Nom me donnait
à manger et me rentrait le soir venu, comme un poussin qu’on préserve des
mangoustes” (95).
Finally, her grandmother, in a scene where she appears with a monstruously flat noseless,
earless head burning with beautiful, kind eyes, pricks Télumée with a pin to show her that
she still bleeds like a human.
Apparently, it is her grandmother’s magical love along with her voodoo
preparations that begin to bring Télumée to her senses. Moments later the granddaughter is standing on top of the rock where she had spent weeks vegetating, singing at
the top of her lungs. Song is what saves her. She has vanquished madness in a singing
duel against an unseen force and finally runs breakneck to the river where she
figuratively washes away the evil that had held her hostage. Returning to her
grandmother, she announces:
... la Reine, la Reine, qui dit qu’il n’y a rien pour moi sur la terre, qui dit pareille
bêtise? ... en ce moment j’ai lâché mon chagrin au fond de la rivière et il est en
train de decendre le courant, il enveloppera un autre coeur que le mien ... parlemoi de la vie, grand-mère, parle-moi de ça...” (96).
Since her “devils” have been exorcised she returns to a normal relationship with her
aging grandmother and the community at large.
Not long after her return to health, the protagonist is destined to lose her
grandmother. The reader learns how Télumée is going to continue to live without her
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influence and how their belief in the supernatural is going to ease the transition. Let us
examine Reine Sans Nom’s death as an alternate interpretation of the English title of this
novel—The Bridge of Beyond—as the old woman’s passing from Fond Zombi to the next
life. Perhaps the most precious time that Télumée spends with her grandmother comes
during the nine days and nights they are together before Reine Sans Nom passes away.
Knowing that death is imminent, the grandmother strives to express what their life
together has meant to her and continues to instruct Télumée about building a life without
her. She assures the young woman that she does not fear death and looks forward to the
existence she believes will follow it when she will always be available to her
granddaughter through a spiritual bond:
Ce n’est pas ma mort qui me réjouit tant, dit-elle, mais ce qui la suivra ...
le temps où nous ne nous quitterons plus, mon petit verre en cristal ...
peux-tu imaginer notre vie, moi te suivant partout, invisible, sans que
les gens se doutent jamais qu’ils ont affaire à deux femmes et non pas
à une seule: peux-tu imaginer cela ...” (100)?
She advises her about how to seek and share her happiness and optimism with others:
“... les gens t’épient, ils comptent toujours sur quelqu’un pour savoir comment
vivre ... si tu es heureuse, tout le monde peut être heureux et si tu sais souffrir,
les autres sauront aussi ... chaque jour tu dois te lever et dire à ton coeur: j’ai
assez souffert et il faut maintenant que je vive, car la lumière de soleil ne doit
pas se gaspiller, se perdre sans aucun oeil pour l’apprécier ... et si tu n’agis pas
ainsi tu n’auras pas le droit de dire: c’est pas ma faute, lorsque quelqu’un
cherchera une falaise pour se jeter à la mer ...” (101).
Télumée is comforted by the peacefulness with which her grandmother meets death: “...je
ne m’étais jamais imaginée que l’on puisse mourir ainsi, avec une telle douceur.” She
discovers that the old woman who had always taught her how to enjoy life has also
demonstrated how to die with grace and with very little sadness: “J’avais toujours
entendu dire qu’une bonne âme ne quitte jamais la terre sans regret, et c’est pourquoi
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cette rosée tombait, une rosée, et non pas une averse, non pas des larmes, une simple
rosée.” (101) It is Nature’s dew and not tears that signal death. She sums up the
experience: “Ainsi avons-nous causé, chanté et somnolé neuf jours et neuf nuits, jusqu’à
ce que l’âme de Reine Sans Nom s’allège du poids de la terre et prenne son envol” (106).
Repeating the novel’s guiding metaphor which describes the Caribbean woman as a ship
upon life’s seas, Télumée sums up her grandmother’s final efforts on her behalf: “Ainsi,
au long de ses derniers jours, grand-mère fabriquait-elle du vent pour gonfler mes voiles,
me permettant de reprendre mon voyage sur l’eau” (97).
After her grandmother’s death, the old sorceress Man Cia assumes the role of
mentor, teaching Télumée how to cross the bridge between her old life and the
establishment of a new one. Télumée spends several weeks at her property, while the old
woman performs her daily duties and instructs her about even more unusual activities:
Ainsi ai-je laissé Fond-Zombi pour suivre man Cia dans ses bois, habiter la
case où elle vivait avec l’esprit de son mari défunt, l’homme Wa. Elle jardinait
un peu, recevait les malades qu’elle frottait, les Poursuivis dont elle levait
l’envoûtement, renvoyait le mauvais sort. Vivant à ses côtés je me sentais moimême devenir esprit. Chaque matin, je m’évaillais trempée de sueur, résolue à
quitter ces bois exister dans mon corps et mes seins de femme (106).
She learns how to become a sage-femme, but something stops her short of learning how
to metamorphose into a spirit, to take on alternate bodies and to fly above the
earth—basically, how to cross the bridge into the spirit world:
... nous nous promenions dans la forêt où man Cia m’initiait aux secrets des
plantes. Elle m’apprenait également le corps humain, ses noeuds et ses
faiblesses, comment le frotter, chasser malaises et crispations, démissures.
Je sus délivrer bêtes et gens, lever les envoûtements, renvoyer tous leurs
maléfices à ceux-là mêmes qui les avaient largués. Cependant, chaque fois
qu’elle était sur le point de me dévoiler le secret des métamorphoses, quelque
chose me retenait, m’empêchait de troquer ma forme de femme à deux seins
contre celle de bête ou de soucougnant volant, et nous en restions là (111).
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They seem to discuss everything under the sun, but the old woman is perplexed by one
subject that continues to confounds her:
Enfin d’après-midi, nos conversations en venaient à prendre un certain ton,
toujours le même, à la fois décevant and mysterieux. La clarté du jour nous
pénétrait, la lumière arrivait par ondes à travers le feuillage que le vent secouait,
et nous nous regardions, étonnées de certaines paroles, de certaines pensées
que nous avions eues ensemble, et soudain man Cia se penchait et me demandait
âprement, à brûle-pourpoint ... sont-ils arrivés à nous casser, à nous broyer, à nous
désarticular à jamais... (111)?
How is it that her race came to be damned to slavery? This is a topic that even the wisest
of humans seems unable to understand. Even though she practices extraordinary medical
cures and concocts magical potions, she has no more ability to understand man’s
inhumanity to man than anyone else.
Later in life Télumée earned the second part of her name—“Miracle—because of
her amazing resilience against whatever trials she had to endure and her praiseworthy
generosity toward all her neighbors. She experienced the happiest days of her adult life
with her second man, Amboise. He represented for her a father image in a society where
very few young women have the opportunity to know their fathers. Their physical
relationship was full of passion, and he also stood for goodness, knowledge, education,
and political savvy. Unfortunately their relationship to be of short duration, because he
was killed at the head of a protest against low wages for sugar cane workers. After his
death, she was able to prolong their love by communicating with him through the dream
world. ''Une nuit il m’apparut en rêve et me demanda de l’aider à rejoindre les morts,
dont il n’était pas tout à fait, à cause de moi, cependant que par lui je n’étais plus tout à
fait vivante. Il pleurait, me suppliait ....'' Because they were both caught in a world
between life and death, she couldn't live fully, and his spirit could not pass to the point
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where he would always be with her in spirit as Reine Sans Nom was, she had to break the
spell. According to island tradition, it is sometimes necessary to chase away the souls of
the dead who were stuck between life and death by striking their graves with acacia
branches. So the next day, ''... je coupai trois baguettes d’acacia et descendis au cimetière
de la Ramée, et je fouettai la tombe de l’homme Amboise, la fouettai ...'' (131).
For both their sakes, she had to separate herself from his ghost. In an event such as this,
one can comprehend how vividly magical beliefs live alongside reality in the lives of
many Guadeloupeans and how their recounting validates traditional beliefs.
THE (DOM)INATED FRENCH LANGUAGE
So let us sum up the practices we have been discussing in this chapter as they
pertain to the relationship between a male-dominated, français-français literary
movement, albeit described as avant-garde, and the work of a pair of innovative
francophone women novelists from Guadeloupe whose novels reflect some of the same
interests and practices ascribed to the former group. Like the first Surrealists, SchwarzBart and Condé are the products of the French system of education, begun in the colonial
schools of Guadeloupe but fine-tuned in the universities of the Hexagon. Their first
cultural memories of home and family originate in the colonies, and their awareness of
racial and social problems are attributable to their Caribbean backgrounds. Like the
Surrealists, they also grew up rebellious, as teen-agers are wont to be, but with a different
world view that they were bound to rebel against.
The Surrealists tended to enunciate their refusal of the laws and mores of
bourgeois society, while the colonials’ refusal extended more toward a rebellion against
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the French society that had held the colonies hostage for centuries. They also rebelled
against what they saw as a mindless imitation by the black bourgeoisie of white
bourgeois mannerisms and habits. Just as the Surrealists looked to psychoanalysis,
automatic writing, scandal, and primitive cultures for inspiration, Schwarz-Bart and
Condé were more inclined to value the heritage of their own people and expand upon
centuries-old wisdom and mystic beliefs in the novels they produced. Although Condé
has used settings from around the globe in her numerous works, her protagonists have in
common a search for their origins that harks back to their native land. Neither woman
has lost sight of the fact that the DOM status of Martinique and Guadeloupe, adopted at
the close of WWII, has yet to furnish effective solutions to the distress of its people or to
be replaced by more independent and functional political and economic relationships
with France and other nations.
It is primarily the recovery of a collective past for generations of individuals
whose lives were destroyed by slavery and the tenuous nature of relationships between
men and women in the ensuing postcolonial or neo-colonial society that interest Condé
and Schwarz-Bart. Their challenge has been to protest, to validate, and to elucidate the
experiences of their people using the imaginary and creative resources at their disposal
when, all the while, they are still subject to a "neo-colonial" relationship with the French
literary establishment. In spite of their female and postcolonial identities, they have
managed to create a fascinating body of literature, full of the diversity that characterizes
their region’s history and culture which is truly representative of the collective
imagination of their people. They have both contributed to articulating future social
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freedoms for their fellow citizens who have not yet earned access to the same privileges
that education has afforded them.
Like Alejo Carpentier, who believed that Surrealism was always at play in a
region where magic is an integral part of everyday life, they studied the folklore and the
religion of their region and recounted folktales and everyday occurrences that could not
be empirically proven. They have, perhaps, as Carpentier advocated, divorced
Surrealism from its critical roots and recuperated it into the tales they tell with humor and
respect.
Their works exhibit a special appreciation of their heritage because these authors
evaluate their culture from the inside, as opposed to their Europeans forebears who could
only look upon the fresh inspiration of the ''primitive'' with an eye to the exotic.
Furthermore, their practices go beyond their predecessors in that Condé's incisive humor
and ironic treatment of West Indian problems and Schwarz-Bart's documentation of
noteworthy black role models and vestiges of positive lore surpass what other authors in
the region have depicted in the format of the novel. They have, in effect, developed their
tales by constructing surreal and fantastic bridges between the oral traditions and
religious beliefs of the largely illiterate inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and a
sophisticated audience of readers throughout the world.
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CHAPTER 4
A NOT-SO-TRANQUIL REVOLUTION IN QUEBEC
This is my place here This is in my skin
Let me in Get out of here
But nobody hears me
They give a deaf ear with my own ears
The words of strangers continue to lodge in my mouth
I no longer live in me I am colonized from all sides
Chilled with unknowns I am haunted from top to bottom.
France Vézina, Les Journées d’une anthropophage
I write and I no longer want to do it alone. I want us.
To crack, to grind up, to grind up history.
Nicole Brossard, La Nef des sorcières
INTRODUCTION
Journalists, authors, physicians, even politicians variously employ the adjective
“tranquil” to characterize scenes that appear orderly, placid, untroubled and reasonable.
For a sizeable portion of the population of the Canadian province of Quebec, the bold
political, economic, social and cultural changes that took place on their soil in the early
1960s were nearly bloodless and reasonably “quiet” by comparison with historic
revolutions and civil wars in other lands. This is perhaps why the kinder, gentler
term,“La Révolution Tranquille,” came to represent this massive transformation of
Quebec provincial society that unfolded in a relatively short period of time. For many
reasons I believe that this title represents an ironic contradiction in terms which aptly
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reflects a violent democratization of ideas coupled with a less traumatic political
resolution of longstanding social inequities. As we have already seen, in spite of
modernism’s profound influence on literature and the arts in the Caribbean during the
first half of the twentieth century, Martinique and Guadeloupe remain to this day in a
"neo-colonial" relationship with France which is evidenced by their continued economic
dependence and their departmental political status. At the other end of the colonial
continuum, Quebec—which France established as la Nouvelle France four hundred years
ago and then lost to the English a century later—is three hundred years removed from
French domination. However, the French-speaking province, within the borders of the
vast Canadian Anglophone nation, has been forced to deal with a very different set of
postcolonial issues. In particular, Francophone citizens have had to combat economic
and social discrimination resulting from their nation’s lengthy domination by Great
Britain, the overwhelming cultural paternalism of the remainder of the English-speaking
provinces of Canada, and the cultural and economic dominance of the United States to its
south. The hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church is yet another issue that the
Quebecois have had to circumvent in order to invent new social, artistic and political
identities. As in the other regions of the former French empire which have already been
discussed, I will examine how women have come of age led by feminist activists who
waged personal and public literary battles in the province of Quebec.
Just as the Surrealists attacked the French government for its complicity in World
War I and railed against the presence of religion in everyday affairs, the works of Anne
Hébert and Jovette Marchessault strike out against a roster of “father figures” whom they
hold responsible for delaying the entry of French-speaking citizens into the modern
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world. Hébert's novel, Les Enfants du sabbat, indicts the Catholic Church for keeping
parishioners in poverty and defenseless against the invasion of the English language and
assimilation practices that threated their culture. More specifically, she documents the
centuries-long emprisonment of women as nuns subservient to a male-dominated Church
hierarchy or as wives subject to its eternal call for more children to swell the ranks of the
faithful. Hébert and Marchessault give us complementary accounts of the domination of
women, but they create protagonists with very different strategies for “breaking out” of
their prisons.
In Les Enfants du sabbat Hébert invents a young World War II era schizophrenic
who vaccilates between completing her religious vows or embracing a life of superstition
and debauchery as a backwoods witch. By contrast, in La mère des herbes, Marchessault
creates loving mother figures and powerful female saviors who enable other women to
refashion their roles. Drawing upon her autochtonous heritage, she imagines a
supernatural utopian world of women who nurture one another as an antidote to the
patriarchal domination of the real world. I will examine these authors' preoccupation
with the occult at specific moments in their careers thus linking their work to the novels
of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart and the movements of Magical Realism and
Surrealism. Nicole Brossard's theoretical works, along with those of Patricia Smart,
Madeleine Gagnon, and Lise Gauvin will be helpful for charting the rise of women’s
writing in Quebec and particularly for examining the development of a sophisticated
theoretical and critical framework for Quebec’s feminist literature.
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THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN THE NEW WORLD
Let us take a moment to reflect upon the foundation of la Nouvelle France and
briefly trace its linguistic and social history so that we can better understand the more
recent challenges that modernization has brought to the province. First and foremost, the
saga of the French language in the New World colors all other aspects of Quebec’s social
and economic history. Recent linguistic investigators agree that the French(es) spoken in
the popular milieus of both France and Quebec at the beginning of the seventeenth
century were very similar, and that they developed for about a century in a like manner
on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. French pioneers who immigrated to the American
continent between 1608 and the end of the seventeenth century came primarily from the
northwest quadrant of France, from the villages and small towns of Normandy, Perche
and Île de France. The men originated in the lower classes and were artisans, peasants,
soldiers and sailors before leaving their homeland. A “marriage pool” of young orphan
girls, dependants of either the State or the Church called les Filles du Roy, was sent to
these men in the colonies to encourage them to remain there, to establish families and to
populate the new land. In contrast to the men, most of these young women had been at
least minimally educated. For the most part, the settlers spoke the Francien dialect, and
any corollary dialects that they may have used before sailing regressed rapidly in the new
environment. As the newcomers set up homesteads along the banks of the Saint-Laurent,
mothers raised their children speaking this dialect. The only representatives of an
educated class in the colony were a few upper class functionaries and the clergy and nuns
of the Catholic Church who had accompanied the settlers. When France officially ceded
its territory to Great Britain in 1763, the ecclesiastics who remained were the only French
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speakers left to maintain the French language. Because of the colonists’ isolation from
France and its culture and a very real disparity between their daily life experiences and
those of their European counterparts, a gradual divergence began to develop between the
two French languages.
By 1763 French speakers were in the majority in the Quebec region. In the course
of just over one hundred years, it is estimated that the French-speaking sector of the
population had increased from 60,000 to 1,000,000—a demographic figure that attests to
an avid encouragement by the clergy of the Biblical admonition to “Go forth and
multiply.” But the Francophones belonged to the lower classes where they held no
political power, and they were destined to stay there because of the poverty that the size
of their families imposed upon them. Elsewhere in Canada, they found themselves not
only in the economic minority but also outnumbered linguistically. Since the Englishspeaking administrators of the Crown were of a higher economic and social level, a rise
in the status of the English language in governmental and commercial arenas was
paralleled by a decline in the prestige of the French language. As in each of the other
colonial regions that we have examined, the dominant society made every attempt to
assimilate the Francophones and to erase their linguistic and cultural heritage.
With the aim of reducing linguistic animosity and assimilating the Francophones
into a more cohesive Canadian culture, Lord Durham proposed the Acte d’Union du Haut
et du Bas Canada in 1841. English was declared the sole official language of the
government, and French-speakers were forced to adopt a sort of unilateral bilingualism in
order to survive in the workplace. As the English upper class held a monopoly on
commerce and industry, the only factor that kept the French and their language from
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disappearing was the Catholic Church which continued to pursue its well-worn policy of
encouraging high birth rates among parishioners as a means of maintaining a population
majority.
Because work was difficult to obtain in the rural areas and villages, men found it
necessary to leave their wives and children alone during the winter and move to logging
camps in the wilderness to make ends meet. Although the Church preached attachment
to the land as a way of safeguarding Catholic families from the influences of “outside”
society, by the 1870s many thousands of men had been forced to migrate to the growing
cities in Canada or to the factories of New England for a portion of the year. The typical
family was mired in poverty, exacerbated by the long and frequent absences of the father
figure and by rising birth rates that resulted from the reunion of wives and husbands in
the spring. This social and geographic sequestration, coupled with the contamination of
English in the speech of the men returning from the cities and from the United States,
resulted in a deterioration of the French language, and at this point, Quebecois French
began to differ markedly from the language spoken in France.
Once it became economically imperative, whole families, against the advice of
their parish priests, began to move to the city in search of employment bringing even
women and children into daily contact with the English language. Bombarded from all
sides by English bosses, factory supervisors and Anglophone merchants, advertising and
newspapers, the undermining of the French language accelerated. A survey taken in
1922 by l’Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française showed that
English had penetrated nearly every aspect and activity of daily life. In business,
advertising and signage in English had risen to 95%, and the English language had
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become the work language of the majority of the population. French had been banished
from the public scene and was even losing ground inside the family. In her 1998 outline
of Quebecois identity entitled La Langue et le nombril, Chantal Bouchard explains how
belonging to the Francophone community relegated French-Canadians to subaltern
employment, and how the evolution of their language practices finally resulted in a
collective identity crisis:
Cette évolution à l’égard du mépris exprimé par les Anglo-Saxons
envers eux et à l’endroit de leur langue suit très exactement la courbe
descendante de l’estime de soi dont on a observé qu’elle était en corrélation
directe avec la détérioration socio-économique qui s’est produite pendant
la même période (95).
Travelers from Europe, especially French journalists, began to report on the large number
of anglicisms that had infiltrated the language and the very real disparity that had
developed between the variety of French spoken in Quebec and so-called “standard”
French. This was the first time that outsiders had criticized the French-Canadians’ way
of expressing themselves—they were fairly accustomed to being looked down upon by
the English—causing them to develop an inferiority complex concerning their language
practices. Their self-respect was deterioriating with each generation.
A NEGATIVE IMAGE OF QUÉBÉCOIS CULTURE
In order to better understand the sort of criticism that has been leveled against
Quebecois culture from the outside, I would like to discuss an interesting article that was
published in the March 1942 issue of The French Review. Coming from south of the
Canadian-American border is an essay written by Marine Leland entitled “La Vie
Intellectuelle au Canada Français.” Born in the city of Quebec of English parents, Ms
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Leland earned a Ph.D. in French from Radcliffe College in 1928 and was Professor of
French for forty years at Smith College. She was an American pioneer in the field of
Canadian civilisation and literature and was responsible for building the French Canadian
Collection in the William Allan Neilson Library at Smith. In spite of her love for her
pays natal, her essay focuses primarily upon American influences on the French literary
tradition in Canada, and I believe that it is particularly relevant to how Americans (and
other foreigners) tended to evaluate Canadian artistic production in the 1940s.
Leland’s thesis precludes a French-Canadian literature that could stand on its own
merits: “... l’histoire de la litérature canadienne française est celle des pays qui
constituent les Amériques” (375). She compares the evolution of particular literary
practices in the Province of Quebec with their counterparts elsewhere in North and South
America in a rather condescending manner:
L’histoire et la poésie sont au premier rang partout en Amérique. Le roman,
sauf aux États-Unis, où il a donné les oeuvres fortes au cours des quarante
dernières années, commence à peine à se développer. La critique, surtout
dans les pays latins où l’amour des idées générales persiste, est excellente.
Le théâtre partout, sauf encore une fois aux États-Unis, en est à ses premiers
balbutiements (378).
In the discipline of history, Professor Leland mentions the contributions of several
eminent Quebecois gentlemen including “... Sir Thomas Chapais, M. Pierre Georges Roy,
ancien directeur des Archives à Québec, le major Gustave Roy, ancien directeur des
Archives Nationales à Ottowa, l’abbé Gosselin, l’abbé Groulx et M. Jean Bruchési, soussecrétaire de la Province de Québec...” as well as Le Groupe de Dix’s annual publication
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of “... un fort volume où se trouvent réunis de savants articles sur les aspects les plus
divers de l’histoire du Canada français” (379).
Hinting at her preference for romantic literature, Leland characterizes the field of
poetry in Quebec in the 1940s:
Au Canada français, comme partout ailleurs en Amérique, les poètes
abondent ... Le fait est qu’au pays de Québec, comme dans les pays de
l’Amérique du Sud, le romantisme possède encore ses adeptes, ce qui
n’est pas à dire cependant, que d’autres écoles comme le parnasse, le
symbolisme et le surréalisme ne se sont pas succédé au Canada et qu’elles
n’y ont pas inspiré des oeuvres intéressantes (380).
In her appraisal of Quebecois poetry, she mentions a secondary domain which she calls,
“la poésie populaire, le folklore,” and she relegates it to an inferior status: “Il serait
superflu de préciser que les innombrables oeuvres poétiques du Canada français ne sont
pas de valeur égale....” However, she does admit that, “Les classes cultivées
commencent partout ... à se rendre compte de la valeur esthétique et historique de cet
héritage national” (380). She mentions Marius Barbeau’s enthusiastic recording and
transcribing of folklore and oral storytelling throughout the province, but it is particularly
troubling that she attempts to purloin his contribution to French Canadian ethnography
and incorporate it into an area of poetry that she persists in characterizing as “naïve” and
“spontané” (381). Although her intentions were certainly honorable, she succeeded in
“colonizing” an enormous segment of Quebec oraliterature quite simply because it did
not fit the parameters she was attempting to describe.
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It is truly unfortunate that Leland’s discourse leads from an uncertainty about how
to classify certain manifestations of culture to blatant quality judgments when she
compares the genre of the novel in various regions of the Americas:
Le roman canadien français ne peut se comparer, ni du point de vue de
la qualité ni de celui de la quantité à la poésie ou à l’histoire canadienne.
Il ne peut se comparer non plus au roman états-unien ... ce genre littéraire
n’en est qu’à ses débuts ... c’est dans le roman régionaliste, qu’il s’agisse
d’histoire locale ou de moeurs contemporaines que les romanciers canadiens
... ont le mieux réussi (381).
She lists Marie Chapdelaine (1914) by Louis Hémon, La pension Leblanc (1927) by
Robert Choquette, Un homme et son péché (1933) by Claude-Henri Grignon, and Trente
Arpents (1938) by Ringuet (Phillipe Panneton) as specific novels which can “... justifier
la croyance que c’est dans le régionalisme, dans l’observation de la vie du peuple que les
romanciers canadiens ... découvriront l’inspiration la plus propre à produire des oeuvres
d’un intérêt universel” (382). All of the works that she cites belong to the category of
“romans de la terre” which extolled the simple and virtuous lives of Quebecois peasants
in the first half of the twentieth century and discouraged their flight to the city. The
writing of this sort of novel was encouraged—even indulged in—by the clergy who
wished to prevent parishioners from moving to urban environments that they believed
were steeped in sin.
Finally, let us look at Leland’s evaluation of Quebecois literary criticism in the
1940s. Even though she was disappointed that the novel as a genre had not yet reached
the heights she had hoped, she was quick to point out that criticism was thriving: “La
clarté, le bon sens, la franchise et la vie sont les qualités qui distinguent les meilleurs
critiques canadiens français” (382). She goes on to inventory fourteen critics: a few were
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also authors; four were also artists; several were lawyers and government officials; a
handful were journalists and editors of literary magazines or newpaper columns; four
were clerics and all were male. Therefore, when she concludes that, “... la vie
intellectuelle est très active au pays de Québec aujourd’hui,” we must agree that among
the most powerful French Canadians there was a certain appreciation of culture.
However, the critics she mentions represent only a miniscule portion of the Frenchspeaking population at the time, and she fails to include any women at all. We must
wonder why.
If Leland’s article reveals anything of value to us, it shows that women, common
people, young people, and even the middle classes were grossly under-represented in the
arts in Quebec in the 1940s. Intellectual or cultural capital that existed outside Englishspeaking institutions was the privilege of a few upper class men and men of the cloth. It
also demonstrates that the burgeoning business of literary criticism in the United States
was likely to judge works from other North American regions according to its own
standards and was unwilling to look beyond the culturally elite of Francophone Quebec
society for data that might support any diversity.
It is because of this exclusionary thinking that undercurrents of revolution began
to appear on the Quebec arts scene in the post-World War II years. For a number of
reasons, historians have compared life in pre-World War II rural Quebec to life in the
pre-Renaissance period of feudal Europe. The French-speaking people of the province,
isolated from the rest of the world until the beginning of that war, were largely
uneducated and followed in the footsteps of many generations of their ancestors as
farmers and woodsmen or manual laborers. Their lives revolved around the limited
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spheres of the family, the village or the working-class neighborhood where local priests
wielded Catholic doctrine with an iron hand. Their French identity, their French
language, and Church propaganda combined to segregate them from the Englishspeaking population which controlled the government and the economic power of the
province. In the pages that follow I will supplement Leland’s very privileged and elitist
appraisal of the state of Francophone literature with the assessments of several “insider”
critics who have analyzed the problems that compelled early Francophone authors to
combat social inequality in their province.
QUEBEC’S “GRANDE NOIRCEUR” AND THE CARNAVALESQUE
Roch Carrier, in his carnavalesque novel entitled La Guerre, yes sir (1968),
documents a society in which the only way for a young French Canadian to escape
poverty and monotony was to enlist in the armed services. However, foreign travel, other
than to the United States for seasonal work, was almost unthinkable for a young person
who had never ventured far from his birthplace. Enlistment was risky business and
appealed very little to most French-Canadians because they felt no particular duty to fight
on the side of the English government which discriminated against them in Canada, and
they continued to hold a longstanding grudge against the French for abandoning la
Nouvelle France to the English. It has been documented both in the history and the
literature of the period that young men sometimes suffered self-inflicted woodcutting
“accidents,” like cutting off a hand or a foot—as one husband does in Carrier’s novel—or
by hiding out for months under a haystack as the protagonist of Louis Caron’s novel
L’Emmitouflé (1977) does—in order to avoid military service.
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In spite of their opposition to war, it was this global event that was to bring
dramatic changes to all sectors of society. In Carrier’s novel, an employee at the village
train station watchs a party of English soldiers unload the repatriated casket of a local son
killed in Europe. He sums up the resentment that rural French Canadians held about their
subordinate status when he observes:
Ils sont tous semblables: les Allemands, les Anglais, les Français,
les Russes, les Chinois, les Japons; ils se ressemblent tellement qu’ils
doivent porter des costumes différents pour se distinguer avant de se
lancer des grenades. Ils sont des gros qui veulent rester des gros ... C’est
pourquoi je pense que cette guerre, c’est la guerre des gros contre les
petits ... Les petits meurent. Les gros sont éternels. (29).
The outside world was beginning to make an impression on the long-sequestered
Quebecois. Carrier’s carnavalesque practices illustrate what Mikhaïl Bakhtine describes
as the resistance of a peasant community against the dominant power structure in
L’Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la
Renaissance (1970):
Toutes ces formes de rites et spectacles, organisées sur le mode comique,
présentaient une différence extrêmement marquée, une différence de
principe, pourrait-on dire, avec les formes de culte et cérémonies officielles
et sérieuses de l’église ou de l’état féodale. Elles donnaient un aspect du
monde, de l’homme et des rapports humains totalement différent, délibérément
non officiel, extérieur à l’Église et à l’État (13).
Bakhtine believed that the celebration of the carnavalesque always has an historic
rapport, and that it often accompanies a period of crisis in society. This coming to
awareness of a people’s repression is what Carrier so comically and ironically describes.
Margot Northey comments on the author’s purposes in a 1970 article in Canadian
Literature:
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Carrier gives no real hint of the shape of things to come, but the underlying
energy of his characters and the constant upsurge of humour against the
horror precludes a vision of total despair ... the old grotesque encasement of
society must be broken through, or overturned and discarded, before a new,
freer being will emerge (17).
I believe that Carrier’s work aptly describes the living conditions before the Quiet
Revolution and how its accomplishment must be attributed to “the folk” as well as to a
few elite and well-educated French-Canadians.
COMING OUT OF THE DARKNESS: THE AUTOMATISTS AND REFUS GLOBAL
The choice of language is always a political one. In a hostile environment, the
individual needs an especially strong identity for protection. However, toward the end of
the second world war, with the return of Canadian soldiers from deployment in Europe
and North Africa and the improvement of the media and the improvement of
transportation, the Quebecois experienced an identity crisis which included a growing
insecurity concerning their language. The politics of Maurice Duplessis’s repressive
conservative government weighed heavily upon the small group of intellectuals who were
attempting to liberalize artistic expression in the province. Directed by Paul-Émile
Borduas and composed of young Surrealists and Communists, this group established
contact with the Surrealists in France, and Breton had even invited them to sign a
manifesto entitled Rupture inaugurale in 1947. Borduas and his compatriots, who were
working under the title of “Automatists,” decided that placing their signatures on a
European affidavit would have no practical value to them in Quebec and decided to draw
up a somewhat similar document which outlined their particular history, grievances and
strategies, naming it Refus Global.
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Their manifesto, which denounced the domination of the Catholic Church and the
stifling atmosphere of the government, reiterates many of the refusals enumerated in the
Surrealist Manifesto which had preceded it by twenty-four years. Patricia Smart, in Les
femmes du Refus Global (1998), explains that this subversive act taken by the fifteen
artists surrounding Borduas was the result of
… sept années de discussions et d’expérimentation, en lisant Marx et
Freud, en écoutant la musique moderne de Stravinski et de Varèse, du
jazz et des rythmes vaudou, et en créant au théâtre, en poésie et en danse
des productions d’avant-garde qui ont scandalisé les critiques et le public
bien-pensant. Si un mouvement a exercé une influence prédominante
sur leurs idées et leur esthétique, c’est le surréalisme, par son insistance
sur l’interdépendance de l’art, de la libération de l’inconscient et de la
transformation sociale (9-10).
She maintains that Quebecois artists were seeking an aesthetic freedom unprecedented in
their nation through a “refusal” or revolt parallel to, but also differing in significant ways,
from that of the French movement.
In the Refus global, the Automatists describe their subjugated status in the New
World in terms that recall Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal—words that
were to be reiterated for the next thirty years by other generations of Quebecois activists:
Un petit peuple serré de près aux soutanes restées les seules
dépositaires de la foi, du savoir ... Petit peuple qui malgré tout se
multiplie dans la générosité de la chair sinon dans celle de l’esprit,
au nord de l’immense Amérique au corps sémillant de la jeunesse au
coeur d’or, mais à la morale simiesque, envoûtée par le prestige
annihilant du souvenir des chefs-d’oeuvres d’Europe, dédaigneuse
des authentiques créations de ses classes opprimées.13
They illustrate how Church censorship denied access to literature and films which were
prohibited by “The Index,” suppressing the intellectual freedom of all Catholics, and how
13
This and the succeeding passages from the Refus Global come from an unpaginated,
mimeographed copy.
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the government maintained its power at the expense of the majority of its citizens and
their vast natural environment:
La religion du Christ a dominé l’univers ... La décadence chrétienne
aura entrainé dans sa chute tous les peuples, toutes les classes qu’elle
aura touchées ... La méthode introduit les progrès imminents dans le
limité. La décadence se fait aimable et nécessaire: elle favorise la
naissance de nos souples machines au déplacement vertigineux, elle
permet de passer la camisole de force à nos rivières tumultueuses en
attendant la désintégration à volonté de la planète ... L’écartèlement
entre les puissances psychiques et les puissances raisonnantes est près
du paroxysme.
The document outlines the kind of contacts with the outside world that finally brought
about the awakening of its signitaries and the publication of their protest:
Les voyages à l’étranger se multiplient ... Ces voyages sont aussi dans
le nombre exceptionnelle l’occasion d’un réveil ... Des consciences
s’éclairent au contact vivifiant des poèts maudits ... Les frontières de
nos rêves ne sont plus les mêmes ... Le règne de la peur multiforme
est terminé ... Un nouvel esprit collectif naîtra ...
The goals of its authors correspond to a number of those enunciated in the Manifeste du
surréalisme, in particular their shocking break from societal standards of morality, their
demand for the freedom to create art and literature that would not have to replicate
formally sanctioned styles, and a rejection of what the Church and the State deemed
“reasonable,” “proper,” and “righteous.” In short, the Automatists demanded the right to
tear down their repressive society and its aesthetic restrictions and to rebuild them in a
more creative and democratic fashion.
It is interesting to examine the statement of ideals that follows the Automatists’
rejection of the past, many which parallel those of the Surrealists and others that
correspond to the particular needs of the Quebecois people: “Place à la magie! Place aux
mystères objectifs! Place à l’amour! Place aux nécessités!” The Quebecois group’s
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search for imagination, fantasy and love echoes the Surrealists’ demands, but it is also is
accompanied by calls for “nécessités,” which I interpret to include not only the need for
intellectual freedom, but an appeal for better economic opportunities. Rather than
eschewing monetary pursuits as the Surrealists had done and finding fault with formal
educational channels, the Automatists favored access to education for all classes of
people, better representation in the government and the establishment of labor unions
which would work toward better wages and working conditions. They saw cooperation
as the key to both artistic and societal transformation: “Si nos activités se font pressantes,
c’est que nous resentons violemment l’urgent besoin de l’union.”
In temperament, the Automatists also distinguished themselves from the
Surrealists in that their leader, Paul-Émile Borduas, was a generation older than his
protégés. His maturity seemed to encourage a harmonious atmosphere, thus avoiding the
dissent that erupted regularly in the French movement. His group shared an interest in
the theater and were known to combine all of their efforts into the many artistic facets of
a single production. Smart gives a fine of example of the sort of collective artistic
enterprise characteristic of the group when she describes their presentation of the play
Bien-être: "... les costumes étaient de Madeleine Arbour, le décor de Pierre Gauvreau,
l’éclairage et les effets techniques de Maurice Perron ...” (129). A final difference which
is particularly salient to our argument is the fact that seven active women artists signed
the Refus global along with eight of their male associates. The greater visibility and
equality of women as signitaries—and more importantly as participants with equal
responsibilities—distinguished the Automatists from the Surrealists in a very significant
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way and opened the gates to a flood of women who were to distinguish themselves on the
Quebec artistic scene in the succeeding half century.
With its origin within this small team of artists, a spirit of intellectual rebellion
began to filter slowly throughout the province. Side by side with men, women contested
the power of the Church in their private lives, the domination of the English language in
business, and the influence of the United States on many aspects of their culture and their
natural environment. As the Quiet Revolution evolved, poetry was once again put to the
service of politics. Almost the entire decade of the 1960s can be characterized by this
establishment of conditions which would eventually usher citizens into the modern world
with their language, their culture and their collective identities intact and legitimately
recognized by the governments of the Province of Quebec and of Canada as a whole.
This evolution required the democratization and secularization of the educational
system and advancements in the levels of schooling available. It also necessitated a refrancisation of environmental franchises and the business world and the establishment of
relationships with other countries in the Francophone world. Reassured by the expansion
of communications, a better education and a lower birth rate, French-speaking workers
were able to improve their economic situation for the first time in centuries. These
personal victories eventually led to the improvement of the Québécois image in the world
and within Canada (Bouchard 282-4). While the Parti Québécois was never successful in
separating Quebec from the other provinces of Canada, it did succeed in claiming a
special status (un statut à part) for the province and in establishing French as the official
language of the province and as one of the two official languages of the remainder of the
nation.
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Yet there always seems to be a “however” lurking in the analyses of socioeconomic trajectories: Although the women of the Automatist movement had been
accepted on equal terms with the men and their artistic realizations had earned equal
prestige, it was nearly two decades before fundamental changes were to be wrought in
women’s rights for the majority of Quebecois women. The “Révolution Tranquille” had
worked its magic by improving the lot of the Quebecois in general, but rights for women
had taken a back seat to nationalism in much the same way that they had in the
postcolonial Maghreb and the rest of the world. Women had gained a measure of
personal freedom as the result of a nation-wide reduction in birthrates, but continued to
experience discrimination in the workplace and in practically every other sector of
society. By the early 1970s, women artists, authors and activists who had worked just as
diligently as men for equality in employment and personal rights, realized that they had
been short-changed.
THE WOMEN MAKE A FUSS
This is my place here This is in my skin
Let me in Get out of here
But nobody hears me
They give a deaf ear with my own ears
The words of strangers continue to lodge in my mouth
I no longer live in me I am colonized from all sides
Chilled with unknowns I am haunted from top to bottom.
The poetic inscription at the beginning of this chapter, which comes from France
Vézina’s Les Journées d’une anthropophage, indicates the plight of the majority of
Francophone women in Quebec after the Quiet Revolution. At the threshold of gaining
personal freedoms after four hundred years of colonization, they struggled to take
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possession of their own space for the first time. They had to come to terms with the
politics of their history before they could make significant changes.
In the seventeenth century, the French government had procured the filles du Roy
from the orphanages and convents of Paris, shipped them to the New World, and
“furnished” them to the men of the colony as little more than sex objects and household
slaves. The Church “blessed” these unions by performing marriages with no more
concern for women’s desires than had been paid to the “primitive” emotions of the slaves
who had been shipped to the Caribbean. The clergy remained complicit in this plot by
threatening eternal damnation to women who did not submit to the will of their husbands
and the laws of the Church.
In spite of their traumatic introduction to the New World, these girls became the
mothers of a prodigious society, judging from figures that put the average lifetime live
birth rate at approximately a dozen children per mother per generation.14 Succeeding
generations were trapped in the same conditions of poverty and exploitation, because the
Church taught them that life on Earth was supposed to be a trial period, and that they
would be rewarded for their suffering in the next “life” in Heaven.
Looking back less than a century, it is difficult to believe that so many women
could have been so completely brainwashed that they did not begin to rebel collectively
until they realized that the Quiet Revolution hadn’t garnered them all the freedoms that
they had expected. “The words of strangers continue to lodge in [her] mouth,” and she is
“colonized from all sides ... chilled ... and haunted from top to bottom.” For the first
14
The huge number of mothers and children who died in childbirth do not figure in these
statistics. Neither does the high mortality rate that can be attributed to harsh living
conditions, poverty and disease.
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time, when the aggressor (her father, her husband, her parish priest or a public official)
“wants in,” the woman replies, “Get out of here,” even if nobody pays attention. She
dares to slip out of isolation and refuses to accept the excuses that had kept her
subservient to masculine power for so long. No longer satisfied with the unequal
distribution of freedom in Quebec, women began to band together to build a strategy for
gaining their fullest independence.
Nicole Brossard, in her 1977 article “L’avenir de la littérature québécoise” in
Études Françaises, cites the Church’s loss of control over sexuality as the source of other
revolutionary modifications to the power structure of Quebecois society:
... la laïcisation a transformé nos comportements sexuels, fait surgir
des interrogations sur ces rapports et surtout a permis aux femmes ...
une prise de conscience de leur condition ... lorsque la soumission à
l’ordre divin s’effrite, se transforme parallèlement la soumission à
ses représentants: le père, la mari, l’employeur, l’État ... La laïcisation
va donc modifier tous les rapports à l’autorité et conséquemment
transformer les échanges cela tant au niveau économique, que sexuel
ou culturel (384-5).
She explained that improvement in the status of women would promote a better standard
of living for all citizens of Quebec, and that women must be encouraged to develop their
talents outside of the home. The participation of every citizen was required in the
construction of a modern Quebec.
NURTURING THE QUEBECOIS IMAGINATION
In less than a half century Quebecois women have overcome the poverty and
sequestration inflicted upon them by centuries of repressive reproduction policies and
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have escaped from the drudgery of the kitchen and the factory into a wider world where
they are more frequently valued for their intellect, their skills, and their imagination.
It is this imaginative element, coupled with an experimental corollary and the
transgressive tactics employed by a brave generation of female novelists that drive my
examination of the works of Anne Hébert and Jovette Marchessault. When Katherine
Conley asserts that “contemporary writing that extends aspects of the surrealist project in
its valorization of the unconscious, of dream states as sources of creativity, and of
experiments with form ...” survives today in Quebec, I can only concur (Automatic
Woman 25). Francophone men and women in Quebec shared the initial struggle to
reconstruct a respectable and authentic identity in which the French language played an
integral role. What remained to be resolved between them were the challenges of their
separate histories which continued to manifest themselves in gender inequalities. The
past has shown us that men and women have often chosen dissimilar strategies for
resolving their problems, and this remains true in my examples. In the pages to follow I
will examine authorial practices employed by Anne Hébert in Les enfants du sabbat and
by Jovette Marchessault in La mère des herbes which are remarkable for their originality
and for their effectiveness in singling out discrimination and gender bias and subverting
them through fiction.
ANNE HÉBERT, QUÉBÉCOISE DE SOUCHE, PRIVILÉGIÉE
Anne Hébert was born in 1916, in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, a small
village about twenty-five miles from Québec city, into a bourgeois family with roots back
to the establishment of the colony and connections in the government where her father
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was employed and in the publishing world. Unlike many young women of the period,
her education and her creative attempts were encouraged by her father who wrote poetry
and literary criticism himself and by her rather famous cousin, the poet Hector de SaintDenys Garneau. Coming from a middle class family, so different from the majority of
French Canadians we have been describing, it seems surprising that she was soon to
declare herself a rebel: “Je crois que, foncièrement, je suis une révoltée. Je n'accepte pas
les choses telles qu'elles sont. Quand on a une fois dans sa vie désiré l'absolu, on ne peut
pas se contenter de la réalité telle qu'elle est.” It is also unusual, that by the 1940s her
work began to reflect a darker side of Quebec society—one which she had not actually
experienced while growing up.
Hébert’s earlier work was primarily in the genres of poetry and the short story
which she packed with free verse and symbolist images, achieving a nearly surrealistic
effect. Her first volume of poetry, Les Songes en équilibre (1942) was awarded the Prix
David. However, the violence in her 1945 story "Le Torrent" and the darkness of her
poetry collection Le Tombeau des rois (1962) discouraged Québec publishers from
promoting them. In 1954 Hébert used a grant from the Royal Society to continue her
writing in Paris, a milieu she thought would be more receptive to her work. She
established a relationship with the French publisher Seuil and continued to live and work
in Paris with frequent visits back to Quebec for more than forty years.
Her works are among the most read and most commented of novels, short stories
and poetry in both anglophone and francophone Canada and have been translated into
several languages. The two of her novels that are set in Paris, Les Chambres de bois
(1958) and Héloïse (1980) are outnumbered by the five that are set in Quebec and deal
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with the repressive nature of its culture, especially in smaller communities. Her
European exile, although self-imposed, is reflected in the themes of isolation and
alienation that she often exploited in her work. Her epic novel of the North was
Kamouraska (1970), part psychological novel and part historical fiction, which won the
French Prix des Libraires and was also made into a film in 1973.
The collective Quebecois memory, repressed as it had been for four centuries,
provided a fertile field for Hébert’s investigation of the nether side of experience. Les
Enfants du sabbat (1975) particularly attests to her fascination for what Denis Bouchard
calls “... une névrose collective ... une sorte de mal québécois ...” (“Les Enfants du Sabbat
d’Anne Hébert: l’enveloppe des mythes” Voix et Images 1976). Her biographers agree
that she was always intrigued by the occult and sought to delve into the unconscious in
order to depict a perversity of motivation in her characters. Her novelistic efforts went up
against the norm of Quebec forms and morals as she re-fashioned novelistic standards by
writing a brand of tale dominated by shadowy and malignant authority figures and
women suffering from mental or physical illnesses or inhabited by repressed sexual
desires and evil spirits. Readers discover an oneric/haunted/deranged element in her
characterization of the protagonists she has invented.
Hébert’s talent was immense, and it seemed to extend into nearly every written
genre. Writing from across the ocean gave her the freedom to experiment with surrealist,
magical realist, and nouveau roman techniques. In spite of their dark sides, her poetry,
short stories, and novels have garnered many literary prizes, including the Prix Femina
for Les Fous de Bassan in 1982, the Prix du Gouverneur géneral in 1992 for L’Enfant
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chargé de songes, and the Prix Alain-Grandbois in 1993 for the collection of poems
entitled Le Jour n’a d’égal que la nuit.
JOVETTE MARCHESSAULT: BLUE COLLAR, NATIVE AND LESBIAN
By contrast, Jovette Marchessault’s life could scarcely be more different. She
was born in 1938 into a working-class family. Her father and grandfather worked in a
munitions factory making bombs for World War II, and her mother and grandmother
worked, as women often did who were fortunate enough to find employment outside of
the home, in “chocolate” and “textiles.” After the munitions plant closed, her family was
forced to abandon their riverside home in the country and move into a crowded and
dismal apartment in a poor neighborhood of Montreal. Leaving school at the age of
thirteen, Marchessault blames the monotony and hazardous working conditions of the
factories and the lack of concern of her “bosses” with making her old before she had
reached her twenties. In La Mère des herbes she chronicles a series of menial jobs that
she worked at for the next 18 years. She credits her mother and grandmother for having
introduced her to the delights of reading when she was young and her position as a sales
clerk in a bookstore for putting the reading materials she was to devour as she educated
herself at arm’s reach. After the death of her grandmother, to whom she also attributes
enormous credit for encouraging her artistic talents, she quit working for others and
began to concentrate on developing her artwork and her writing. Her first successes were
in painting and mixed media graphic arts. Within two years, she began showing her work
in Montreal, New York, Paris and Brussels. In 1975, she published her first novel Le
Crachat solaire which won the Prix France-Québec the next year. The second piece in
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the trilogy was the autobiographic La Mère des herbes (1980) which we will examine in
the pages to come, followed by Des cailloux blancs pour les forêts obscures (1987). It
was her intervening publication of Tryptique lesbienne (1980), comprised of three pieces
about growing up and coming out in a traditional closed Roman Catholic-dominated
society that created a stir that could have sabotaged her career. The first of its stories is
bombastically amusing and dissident in its uncompromising declaration of the damage
Marchessault felt had been done to women’s lives during centuries of religious and
sexual colonization. The following two pieces leave aside accusations and negativity and
celebrate a mystic community of female figures who take charge of their own futures and
experiment with creating a matriarchal society.
Marchessault is credited with having been the first female Quebecois novelist to
openly declare her sexual orientation, although male authors such as Michel Tremblay
had been developing homosexual themes in their literature since the late 1960s, and gay
men and lesbian women were at the center of the plots of Marie-Claire Blais’s Le loup
(1972) and Les Nuits de l’Underground (1978). In 1977 the Québec government
enhanced its antidiscrimination charter by adding a sexual orientation amendment which
facilitated the emergence of a more openly gay and lesbien community in the province.
Marchessault’s “coming out” in 1980, which did not destroy her career, helped to change
the artistic image of a province which had previously been steeped in paternalistic and
mysogynistic political, economic and religious repression.
One might wonder if the “Quiet Revolution” in which the Francophones had been
a marginal people resisting dominant Anglophone culture was not still fresh in the minds
of the gay and lesbian activists who undertook, only a few years later, their own revolt
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against the dominant heterosexual culture. The parallels are clear, and the fact that this
was also a fairly “quiet” movement demonstrates an extremely wide shift in policies and
living conditions in a very short period of time in the province.
A second parallel between the two revolutions that is worth noting is the
interrogation of writing practices that accompanied the rise in gay and lesbian-oriented
endeavors. Just as Francophone writers had placed the French language at the center of
their dissent, gays and lesbians revised their language practices in order to declare war
against heterosexist and patriarchal domination. Gay writers often turned to poetry for
expressing their new-found subjectivity and their gay pride. Lesbians who were finally
able to live freer lives, began to revise the French language—its vocabulary and its
syntax—in order to celebrate their sexuality and in order to imagine the creative
possibilities that were now open to them. They rewrote history, they expressed emotions
that had never before been penned, and they created shamanistic protagonists who held
the power to transform society.
As a woman Marchessault can be classified as multiply-marginalized. She did
not come from the educated elite of Quebec society nor from the generation of authors
and political activists who benefited from the first wave of educational democratization in
the province. She dropped out of school to work in a factory, but had such a thirst for
knowledge that she pursued it at the end of exhausting days at menial jobs. Her frank
declaration of her sexual orientation also sets her apart from a majority identity. Finally,
her indigenous heritage provided her with a substantially different collective imaginary
and mythological foundations. In effect, her background and experiences placed her so
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far from ther artistic center of Quebec life that she never really seemed to concern herself
with the priorities and restrictions that impeded the creative processes of other women.
Marchessault’s visionary literature, including La Mère des herbes, draws upon all of
these facets of her personality. Both her autochtonous Canadian roots and her lesbian
orientation are evident in her invention of feminist creation myths. She has been the most
adept at creating a supernatural utopian world of women who nurture one another toward
a new feminist renaissance just as she seems to have immensely enjoyed breaking so
many of society’s restrictions.
Marchessault’s more recent literary efforts, in addition to her artwork, have been
focused on the theater where she has brought together the lives of lesser-known women
artists and created dialogues between them that help to explain their artistic choices in
light of their backgrounds and intellectual environments. Her theatrical productions
include La saga des poules mouillées (1981), La terre est trop courte, Violette Leduc
(1981), Alice et Gertrude, Natalie et Renée et ce cher Ernest (1983), Anaïs dans la queue
de la comète which won the Prix Journal de Montréal in 1985, Demande de travail sur
les nébuleuses, which garnered the Grand prix littéraire de la ville de Sherbrooke in 1988,
Le voyage magnifique d’Emily Carr which won the Prix du Gouverneur général in 1992,
Le Lion de Bangor (1993), and Madame Blavatsky, spirite published in 1998. I have
chosen to study her work because of its wide range of perspectives on creativity.
HÉBERT’S PRISONS
The physical environments in many of Anne Hébert’s novels are depicted as
enclosed spaces dominated by darkness in which her protagonists experience acute
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mental anguish if not outright imbalance. In Les Chambres de bois (1958), the heroine
Catherine is literally immured within the wood-panelled walls of a room which represents
her entrapment within the institution of marriage. In L’Enfant chargé de songes (1990),
Hébert’s male protagonist Julien experiences the surreal invasion of his locked hotel
room by his controlling mother:
Il ne peut s'empêcher de raisonner comme s'il était éveillé et en possession
de ses moyens. Mais comment a-t-elle pu entrer ici, dans cette chambre
fermée à clef? Un chagrin extrême le prend à la gorge. Il se souvient que
sa mère est morte. Brusquement il se réveille dans une chambre noire,
inconnue (1-2).
Even when he awakens and realizes that the apparition was but a dream, he is aware that
years of submission to his mother ruined his childhood. In Hébert’s epic Kamouraska
(1983), Elisabeth awaits the death of her second husband while reflecting upon her
previous marriage which had been so violent that she and her lover resorted to violence
themselves and murdered her first spouse. The author indicts male-dominated society
which is represented by the penetrating presence of the region’s cold and blinding snow.
Viewed at both the beginning and the end of the film made from this novel, Elisabeth is
framed behind an upstairs window which symbolizes her emprisonment within women’s
roles. Violence and oppression, coupled with the repression of sexual desire are almost
palpable in Les Fous de Bassan (1982) in which the reader experiences the death of two
teenage girls—a death that precipitates the disintegration of an entire village. The
community which stifled its younger generation is seen as a trap characterized by
repressed passion and obsessive violence. The one resident who temporarily succeeds in
escaping the village is inexorably drawn back by memories of its malignant atmosphere,
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the sound and the fury of its stormy environment, and the incessant screeching of the
local birds (the fous de Bassan) which incited him to murder his cousins.
At the beginning of Les Enfants du sabbat, we encounter the central character,
Sister Julie de la Trinité, in her convent cell mentally reviewing her past. She is the
daughter of a pair of outsiders who inhabited a drafty cabin in the woods and made a
meagre living by providing home-brewed moonshine and acting out occult sexual rituals
for the poor rurals who lived nearby. The mother, known for the herbal concoctions she
massages into the bodies of the neighbors who attend the sabbat, is nicknamed “the
Goglue”—which is similar in pronunciation to the sound of gobbling or gurgling and
indicative of her voracious bodily appetites. She returns from a holiday in town where
she has mixed business with pleasure—she has wantonly drunken and prostituted herself
so as to provide her children with homecoming gifts—and her husband performs “la
cérémonie d’eau” which figuratively washes away the sins she has committed with other
men and makes her more desirable to him:
Les petits yeux de l’homme brillent. Il y a entre l’homme et la
femme une telle égalité de malice et de plaisir, qu’on ne peut s’empêcher
de croire que la justice et l’amour seront rendus à chacun, selon ses oeuvres,
de façon éclatante et absolue (29).
The satisfaction of physical desires to follow is heralded by the biblical tone of the
preceding description. The father scoops up his newly-cleansed wife, kisses her
backside, and they disappear from the scene for three days. When they reappear, blearyeyed and hungry, the narrator describes them, “Avec leurs dents blanches et leurs
bouches meurtries, on aurait pu les prendre pour deux ogres (29)”—two ogres who
continue to prowl in her imagination and disrupt the serenity of her life in the convent.
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Through Julie’s eyes we see her mother and father (Philomène and Adélard)
preparing for an evening of debauchery to which they have invited the most miserable
inhabitants of the region. Philomène prepares a witch’s salve of moonshire leavings, bird
manure, bizarre herbes and rare mushrooms while they plot how to lure more neighbors
into their following:
... seuls seront admis à la fête les quelques fidèles complices et sûrs qui
régulièrement quittent le village, à la nuit tombée, et gravissent le raidillon
menant à la cabane, en quête de quelques gallons d’alcool. Pour ce qui est
d’autres, il faudra les gagner peu à peu, continuer de les soigner et de les
guérir, et, de temps en temps, les séduire par quelques prodiges, au sujet du
temps et des éléments, avant d’oser les inviter au sabbat (35).
Their guests are described as the unfortunates in life who are “... les plus avides de fête,
gens de désir et de privation, ayant croupi dans l’humiliation du chômage ...” A few
consider returning to farming in order to survive the dire economic conditions of the
1930s, but one woman retorts “... le retour à la terre, c’est être couché dessous avec six
pieds de terre par-dessus” (36). They even grumble that the diocese has recently
forbidden all types of dancing in Quebec, taking away yet another of their favorite
pastimes. Utter desolation marks the assembly before the black mass begins.
Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed has scrupulously compared the rituals of the
occult mass to the holy mass of the Catholic Church in her 1984 article in The French
Review (“La Sorcière dans le texte [québécois] au féminin” 260-8). A sorceress rather
than a priest conducts the ceremony, and she defines this female facilitator as
... cette femme exclue qui possède le savoir non officiel, générateur d’une
praxis durant les périodes de privations et de souffrances individuelles et
collectives ... Le peuple a recours à elle, le pouvoir la pourchasse ... On
accusait d’abord la sorcière de participer au sabbat, fête de toutes
transgressions (261).
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Then, she explores the power a witch exercises in folding collective resistance against
mainstream practices into the personal battle that she wages against authority:
This potential of the witch has been most extensively articulated in the dialogue
of Cathérine Clément and Hélène Cixous, where the witch is figured as openended desire, in a discourse of excess. Unlike the hysteric, who also speaks with
her body, the witch is not a symbol of individualism, but a public spectacle which
the culture takes into account and makes an object of transmission.” (274)
Philomène offers the crowd something to eat and to drink and then offers her body to
their desires, repeating the words usually recited in church as the priest prepares the bread
and the wine for the sacrament: “—Ceci est ma chair, ceci est mon sang!” and
“Bienheureux ceux qui ont faim et soif, car ils seront rassasiés (36). In this particular
chapter, Sister Julie confuses ecclesiastic and worldly ceremonies as her mind flashes
rapidly between the cabin in the woods and the convent chapel on at least seven different
occasions.
It is also in this chapter that Julie remembers being violated by her father who was
disguised as the devil during a similar black mass:
L’homme dit tout d’abord à la petite fille qu’il la tuerait si elle criait.
Il avait un couteau attaché par une ficelle autour du cou. L’homme ajouta
qu’il était le diable et qu’il fallait qu’il prenne la petite fille. Il lui fit jurer
de ne jamais aller à l’église du village se confesser, de ne jamais dire de prière
ni de servir d’eau bénite. Puis il mordit la petite fille très fort à l’épaule, afin
de la marquer à jamais comme sa possession (45).
Following her rape, her personnae seem to merge, and she demands two favors from the
devil—powers which she will later employ to destroy Sister Gemma and one of the
priests at the convent.
A surreal atmosphere prevails. Not only has Philomène “anointed” the guests
with her hallucinogenic balm, but they have ingested litres of the tainted “bagosse” and
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have become involved in sundry sexual liaisons. The full moon appears to have
conspired with the hosts to destroy any lingering constraints imposed by the religious
upbringing of their guests. Philomène’s salve “... délivre l’esprit captif, le rend léger et
capable de voyages hors du monde.” Sister Julie, “[t]oute frontière abolie ...” constantly
readjusting her perspective from the convent to the woods, begins to welcome the
incursion of the past, body and soul: “Je me réchauffe à la source de ma vie perdue,
pareille à une chatte ronronnante s’installant près du feu” (38). Other participants revel
in dancing because it goes against the edict of the diocese and partake in a “... monde
nouveau plus excitant et salé que ce monde de misères et de mort ....” Their heads are
full of visions. One adolescent’s body produces all the sounds of multiple musical
instruments—sounds that then become not only audible but also visible to the assembly.
Dreams of a boss who has been transformed into a tree with ants infesting its feet and
blackbirds nesting on its head delight the salesgirl whom he had recently fired. When a
participant howls “... le rêve et la religion, c’est l’opium du peuple!” (41) we have no
doubt about the politics behind this carnavalesque portrayal of a reversal of the
established order. We realize that the author has created Sister Julie for the express
purpose of repudiating the values of traditional Quebecois society. It is not surprising
that the novel was poorly received in Quebec and censored by the Church.
In watching filmed interviews with Anne Hébert it seems almost inconceivable
that she could have been interested in the subject matter that she broached during her
long and illustrious career, or that she could have become so adept at transgressing and
deconstructing traditional values and cultural myths. Outwardly, she projected the
countenance of her bourgeois upbringing, but freely admitted that the perverse side of
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human personality intrigued her. Whatever her personal attraction to evil may have been,
(and we may never know, because her biography has remained very private, even since
her death in 2000), it surfaced in her fiction which forced otherwise taboo topics out of
the closet and into the public domain where they could be examined and evaluated for the
first time in centuries. In Barbara Godard’s Gynocritics/La Gynocritique ("Symphonie
féministe" 1988), Marie Couillard and Francine Dumouchel assert that Hébert's novel
provides a remarkable model of the textual subversion of the androcentric /patriarchal
model. According to these two critics, she has used the technique of the
magnifying—and thereby deforming—mirror to offer male-centered society an opposing
view of its own mythologies and phantasms. Sister Julie confronts one of society's
spokesmen, a medical doctor who thinks that removing her female reproductive organs
will cure her of her fantasies, and employs the powers she obtained from the devil to turn
Dr. Painchaud into a simpering mass of desire no longer capable of controlling his basest
impulses. She has the same effect upon two priests from the convent, one whom is
forced to leave in disgrace and the other who hangs himself. Marguerite Anderson states
in “Subversive Texts: Quebec Women Writers” (1988) that “Couillard and Dumouchel
regard Soeur Julie as a woman of extraordinary powers, who defies mysogyny and
reveals the basic, unflattering truths of the masculine characters” (Studies in Canadian
Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 13.2 78). This is a fate suffered by most of
the male characters whom Anne Hébert created over the course of her career.
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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION
It is the fictional confrontation of Sister Julie’s two personalities that dramatizes
the roles to which women have been assigned over the centuries in Quebec. Men and
institutions directed by men have persisted in classifying women as either saints or
sinners. Behavior falling somewhere in between the sublime and the perverse was not to
be tolerated! Although the founding mothers of Quebec had been procured and furnished
to the first male settlers, the fact that they were able to protect the French language and
culture and transmit it to future generations valorized their existence as far as the
dominant sectors of societies were concerned. If a woman became disruptive—perhaps
by refusing to acquiesce to her assigned role as bountiful mother and docile spouse—she
was chastened by both the husband and the Church. Giving a daughter to the Church
provided fathers with an acceptable way of ridding themselves of an intractable or
unattractive child and also provided them with a way of sidestepping the responsibility of
“feeding another hungry mouth” in the family. Furthermore, because of the risk involved
in giving birth to so many children and the drudgery involved in caring for them, it is not
surprising that a number of women chose to serve the Church rather than their husbands.
But life inside a convent was not as tranquil and pleasant as novitiates might have
hoped. Hébert paints a sinister picture of women’s life in a sort of prison where their
silence conveys desperation rather than peace:
Corps fatigués qui se tassent sur les bancs ... Silence ... Ici rien ne se
perd, sauf la raison ... Vous n’avez rien à décider par vous-même ... La
vie vient mourir ici, en longues lames assourdis, contre les marches de
pierre” (48-50).
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In circumstances such as these, it becomes increasingly impossible to distinguish events
that might be miracles from events that manifest themselves only in the disturbed minds
of the nuns.
Sister Julie insists that phantoms—“Parfois le Saint-Esprit nous apparaît, masqué
et costumé, souvent méconnaissable et inquiétant, ressemblant au garçon boulanger, à
l’accordeur du piano, ou à Msg l’évêque lui-même”—jump over the garden walls and
pass through the heavy doors of the compound (51). Are these invasions of sacred space
real or imagined? Even the relationships among the nuns are volatile. A few pairs of
nuns fall in love with one another, while the rest seem to be at each others’ throats most
of the time. Even Mother Superior Marie-Clotilde resents the male-dominated power
structure that she is expected to honor:
... supérieure de ce couvent, moi-même dépendant de notre supérieure
générale, qui relève de notre mère provinciale, elle-même soumise à notre
mère générale, qui est à Rome, toutes femmes, tant que nous sommes,
jamais prêtres, mais victimes sur l’autel, avec le Christ, encadrées,
conseillées, dirigées par nos supérieurs généraux, évêques et cardinaux,
jusqu’au chef suprême et mâle certifié, sous sa robe blanche: Sa sainteté
le pape ... (55).
Sister Julie discovers that the desolation of the convent stimulates her mental fugues and
that she can count on these “absences” to revitalise her occult powers: “Plus je macère
dans ma crasse, plus je m’échappe facilement du couvent, plus je mérite des compliments
ailleurs et plus je suis contente et joyeuse dans un autre monde” (57). By contrast, in the
locked and airless compound, the Mother Superieur’s authority evaporates, and she is
haunted by the childish fear that a devil is hiding under her bed. The author has
succeeded in turning even the female authority figures of the Church upside down. Sister
Julie declares: “Telle est la loi : l’envers du monde” (65).
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The irony and the comedy of the scenes in which the author destroys patriarchal
power are very entertaining. A prime example of this practice occurs in a scene in which
Dr. Painchaud decides that Sister Julie is suffering from le mal des cloîtres (just another
name for hysteria) and decides to become the “maître absolu” of her life by performing a
hysterectomy. However, while he is sleeping, she invades his home and wields the
typically masculine “droit de cuissage” over him. He awakens to find a suffocating
weight on his chest and discovers Sister Julie astride him, urging him “... au-delà de la
mort, à la fois redoutée et désirée.” She proclaims that she is his “... night-mère, his night
sorceress ...” (73) and vows to ride him to death.
Sister Julie boasts that her heritage can be traced back through through a line of
sorceresses “... aux yeux vipérins, venues des vieux pays, débarquées, il y a trois cent ans
avec leurs pouvoirs et leurs sorts en guise de bagages, s’accouplant avec le diable de
génération en génération ...” (92). Her recitation recalls the “begats” of the Bible, except
that in her litany, the traditional privilege of tracing inheritance through male ancestors is
reversed.
Félicité Normandin (dite la Joie) engendrée, d’une part, par Malvina
Thiboutôt, engendrée, d’une part, par Hortense Pruneau, engendrée,
d’une part, par Marie-Flavie Boucher, engendrée, d’une part, par Céleste
Paradis (dite la Folle), engendrée, d’une part, par Ludivine Robitaille,
engendrée, d’une part, par Marie-Zoé Laframboise ... engendrée, d’une
part, par Barbe Hallé, née vers 1645, à la Coudray, en Beauce, France
(son mari n’a jamais pu “ménager” avec elle parce qu’elle était une
sorcière) ... (103-4).
What finally precipitates the downfall of the family is the mother’s failure to initiate
Julie’s brother Joseph into sexual debauchery before a crowd of revelers in the same way
that her father had done to her. Even Philomène’s
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... répétition, lancinante, de certains mots toutefois l’exalt[ant] et
le réconfort[ant] ... Taureaux, aigles, coqs et serpents sont invoqués
comme des dieux, instamment priés de lui prêter leur force virile, afin
que s’accomplisse la loi et qu’il couche avec la mère,”
fail to accomplish their goal. Deprived of their spectacle and disgruntled, the guests
leave declaring that the la Goglue has lost her powers and that her son is a weakling. Not
long afterward, Adélard abandons his wife, and anonymous representatives of the village
set fire to the cabin in hopes of destroying all evidence of the sins they committed there.
Julie and her brother are orphaned and homeless. He goes to war and she enters the
convent.
I wonder how many times, from inside her self-imposed solitude, Anne Hébert
might have repeated words similar to Nicole Brossard’s in the second epigram at the
beginning of this chapter.
I write and I no longer want to do it alone. I want us.
To crack, to grind up, to grind up history. (La Nef des sorcières)
Hébert chose a life that conformed to neither of society’s stereotypes concerning women
in the 1950s—she never married nor bore children and she did not enter a convent.
However, from her self-imposed exile in France, she enunciated women’s desire for
equal rights in Quebec and stepped outside the boundaries of the status quo in her
literature. We may ask what her connection is to the strategies adopted by so many of her
sisters in Quebec in the succeeding years. I believe that after weathering the storms of
winter, she is the one (or perhaps one of a significant few) woman who ploughed the
clogged roads of the Province making them passible so that other women could
congregate and experiment with writing in a framework of cooperation and mutual
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respect. Her one-woman stand emboldened and enabled others to break down the social
and the intellectual walls that history had built around them.
JOVETTE MARCHESSAULT’S BENEVOLENT SORCERESSES
As we have seen, it is a malevolent sorceress that Anne Hébert has created to
confront the historic and social inequalities brought about by the male domination of her
world. We are amused by Sister Julie’s split personality and by her embodiment of the
opposing forces of good and evil in Quebec society. But Hébert’s repertory of
sorceresses fails to include a positive role model, one that might inspire women readers to
go beyond identifying the inequalities of society and encourage them to take charge of
their futures. By contrast, Jovette Marchessault writes about her own grandmother who,
through her native background, is heir to the entirely benevolent powers of a wise old
elder. Trafficking in folklore and folk medicine she is every bit as effective in explaining
the world’s evils as she is in encouraging her family to avoid them. Her singular
personality, her humor, her total enjoyment of life and her concern for others all
contribute to her grandaughter’s eventual creation of a mystical and utopian
imaginary—a world where women encourage other women to band together and create
accepting and nourishing environments and models for progressive and free societies.
Marchessault’s early tales are full of the hopelessness that dominated her social
sphere in the early 1940s. At the dinner table, the men in the family were wont to remain
uncommunicative. They had seen first hand the destruction that the bombs they were
assembling would bring to soldiers on the front. A clumsy movement on the factory line
had more than once resulted in the remains of a fellow worker being shoveled into a pail:
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“Quand un obus vous éclate dans les mains, vous faites un sacré bond dans les airs et ce
n’est pas l’épaisseur d’un plafond qui va vous arrêter” (40). Like Roch Carrier’s
stationmaster, her grandmother, usually the harbinger of optimism in the house,
harangues the men, wanting to know why Canada is fighting a war on foreign soil, “Vous
pensez, vous aussi que cette guerre n’a aucun sens ... nous sommes des milliers, des
millions à le penser ... et elle continue ... et ce n’est pas la dernière” (41).
Perhaps more than any other experience, the family violence witnessed in her
neighborhood saddened the author and contributed to her early realization that girls
seemed destined to bear more than their share of the brutality. Not only did the
frustration of the fathers lead to the battering of their wives, but there seemed to be
nowhere a woman could go to find relief from a persecutor. If she were to complain to
the police or her priest, both would send her back to her husband and children and remind
her of her responsibilities. The author relates the nearly daily beatings of her young
friends in the neighborhood—always more girls than boys—by their drunk or demented
fathers who were also known to become sexually stimulated by the thrashings they
administered.
LA MISÈRE NOIRE
Marchessault employs the same terminology used by Michelle LaLonde in her
political poem entitled “Speak White” to describe the atmosphere in her community
during the last months of World War II: “la misère noire.” Because the war was coming
to a close, their was no longer a need for the bombs her father and grandfather had been
making, and the return of soldiers from the war plunged society into “... un gouffre”
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(108). The “misère noire” of her own family meant that they had to relocate to a poor
district in the center of Montreal: “Dans ces rues se rassemblait un surcroît de détresse, de
maladie, de mort” (113). Calling their new quarters “le trou,” they would have to get
accustomed to a dark place that was sure to “retarde[r] ... l’évolution de [leur] esprit, de
[leur] âme de quelques milliers d’années-lumière” (114).
Let us begin the analysis of Jovette Marchessault’s transgressive autobiography
with a quote from the Bible which she uses to illustrate the yoke of guilt that each
practicing Catholic woman in Quebec in the 1940s was forced to bear: “On ne peut pas
faire autrement que de vivre sous le joug du Verbe, de ses psaumes. ‘Je suis née dans
l’iniquité. Ma mère m’a concue dans le péché.’ C’est la psaume cinquante, verset sept”
(169). She paints the picture of a society in despair, and of women who never find a
moment’s rest. Her description of the old adage that “a woman’s work is never done,” is
expanded upon in a long paragraph which details her mother’s duties in this new and
unpleasant environment:
Les mamans sont à la tâche depuis l’aube: frotter, décrasser, nettoyer, lessiver,
assécher, étendre le linge sur la corde, les poteaux téléphone, refrotter et cirer,
ranger, se boucher le nez parce que ça sent la pisse, la merde, tirer les draps làdessus, peler les pommes de terre, brosser le linge, aspirer les poussières,
décrocher les toiles d’araignées, remettre un morceau de fromage dans la
trappe à rat, sortir faire les courses à l’épicerie du coin, revenir à la hâte,
préparer le repas, moucher les enfants, enlever les miettes de la table, secouer
la nappe dehors, laver la vaisselle, réparer une fissure dans le mur, le plafond
est à la veille de nous tomber sur la tête, relancer le propriétaire, subir ses
doléances, pire, sa main chercheuse, rentrer le linge avant qu’il pleuve, repriser
les bas, recoudre les boutons, sortir les ordures, me laver les cheveux. Préparer
un repas, papa s’en vient harassé, fatigué (118).
By stringing together such a list of chores, the author reinforces her charge that women
are doomed to shoulder more than their share of society’s tasks because of their
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primordial roles as mothers. No wonder that when women who already had five, eight,
or even a dozen children were forbidden by their parish priest to refuse conjugal rights to
their husbands, they often sank into a deep depression, attempted to abort the child they
were carrying, or even committed suicide to escape their plight. The telling of tales like
these represents an act of revolt against the patriarchal systems established by both the
Church and the government.
Even though her mother had been caught in a generations-long web of
submission, the author still resented her lack of resistance. Why didn’t she rebel or speak
out? Moreover, why didn’t she warn her, teach her how to circumvent the power
structure, even flee it herself and escape with her daughter?
Maman, j’ai peur! Maman, ils ont tué notre temps sur la Terre, eux, eux, eux
tous, les tribus catholiques, les anges morfondus aux pieds plats et sans cambrure,
ventre descendu, doigts crochus, souci constant de logique, raison, raisonnement
majeur, double croche, crescendo, chacun gravite dans la même orbite de mort,
veut entraîner tout le monde ...Vu de l’extérieur cela vous à l’air plein de bonté,
d’équilibre, de science infuse, instincts profonds et sacrés, pacifisme. Mais
dedans c’est le camp d’extermination, l’abattoir planétaire. Ils ont toujours
raison, ils en savent toujours plus que vous ... Nous les aurons sur le dos tant que
personne ne sonnera la sonnette d’alarme, tant que personne en perdra l’appétit
(129-30).
Deciding that Hell already existed in this life, and that no threat of a future damnation
could be worse than what life already had in store for her, the protagonist waited until the
family was asleep, stole out to the kitchen, turned on all the gas knobs on the range and
retired to her room to await death. Fortunately, her grandmother had an acute sense of
smell and thwarted her plan. The fact that makes this such a poignant story is that the
author was only four years old at the time she tried to kill her family.
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NATURE AS REDEEMER, GRANDMOTHER AS GUIDE
It is in her third chapter that the author borrows the title of one of La Fontaine’s
fables and recycles it. In “Troisième chant, Les animaux malades de la peste,” she
vigorously contrasts her grandmother’s autochtonous respect for Nature and belief in the
strengths and mystic powers of her female ancestors with the Catholic Church’s
conception of the nature of Satan and the “original sin” for which all women since Eve
have been held accountable.
Marchessault recounts a spring outing with her grandmother and equates the old
woman’s gathering of herbs and her dissemination of knowledge about them with a
mythical Mère des herbes who serves as a conduit of traditional lore between generations
of women:
Grand-mère récolte! ... cueille avec des gestes millénaires les herbes de la vie
perpétuelle. Elle touche avec ses mains des gousses, des sommités fleuries,
des bourgeons. Chaque vie a son nom, son identité, son lieu sur une pierre
immobile ou aux abords de l’étang dans l’humidité exaltante d’une nappe d’eau.
Chaque fille de la Mère des herbes a son temps irrémédiable d’épanouissement,
son temps de rupture. Elle nous le fait comprendre, le désigne du doigt ...
Grand-mère nous ensemence! Et cela se fait malgré l’atroce douleur qui circule
sur la terre (76).
The protagonist contrasts her grandmother’s affinity with Nature to the virtual ignorance
of it evinced by her Catholic neighbors and their exceptional distaste for snakes. She is,
herself, fascinated by them, “Regarder des couleuvres!” but relates that “Entre les
couleuvres et les tribus catholiques la relation est définitivement rompue depuis
longtemps” (79-80). In the internal monologue which ensues, the narrator offers a
childlike explanation of life informed by her grandmother’s beliefs which conflict sharply
with Catholic dogma.
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She relates what she has heard about the great snake “powwows” which
sometimes occur spontaneously in Nature and realizes that snake behavior doesn’t
conform to any rational or scientific argument:
Certains disent qu’ils se rassemblent ainsi pour la fécondation, l’accouplement
... En fait, ils se rassemblent peut-être pour une toute autre raison, une raison,
un besoin primordial, un acte culturel qui échappent à notre raison raisonnante,
à notre rigidité de pensée (82).
Not even the creation story from the Bible in which most of her neighbors believe makes
any sense to her, and she procedes to create her own myth which overturns the teachings
of the Church about the evil of snakes: “Ainsi le Serpent réside partout, à tous les niveaux
de l’être, dans nos têtes d’enfant de la Terre.” She goes against doctrine by ascribing a
positive value to the Serpent’s role as Eve’s temptor and admirer in the Garden of Eden
as she recreates the story of Man’s fall from grâce.
Il fut le premier révolté! Fomenta la première révolution lucide, dévastatrice.
Il a osé! Il a osé! Et seul encore, tout seul contre le courroux du Père. Il a tout
risqué par amitié, par tendresse pour une femme et un homme qui vivaient
autrefois dans un jardin et aussi parce que lui, le beau Serpent, avait une
imagination exaltée, une imagination qui disait qu’un jardin c’est peut-être trop
peu pour une femme, trop petit pour un homme, qu’il est bon d’aller faire un tour
ailleurs, plus loin dans le vaste monde, en croquant de fruits, en flânant jusqu’aux
portées d’une vision plus large, plus circulaire, une vision qui deborde la nuit de
sa genèse (84).
As the author retells the story, she quotes the “official” Biblical version of the serpent’s
revolt, “... le Serpent se dressa contra Dieu... (85)” and finds the act of standing up to the
first Oppressor very courageous, “Il a parlé le Serpent! Il a pris la parole le Serpent!”
(86). Then, “Le Père s’est mis du tonnerre dans la gorge, des éclairs dans les yeux, un
étendard dans la bouche (87)” and he chased them from the Garden.
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She concludes that God’s punishment was unnecessarily severe since it resulted in
Woman being blamed for the sins of all future generations, “Il a levé le petit doigt de sa
main droite, de sa main adroite, le flic-père ... A levé sa main autoritaire et les a chassés
en attendant de les juger une fois pour toutes ... [le] Père du testament qui les dépouillait
de tout” (87-8). By setting her retelling of the Fall against the official version, the author
furnishes a redemptive alternative to the Creation story which frees women (and men as
well) from spending life on Earth already damned. She proposes replacing the
thunderous male authority figures of the past with affectionate and generous Mother
figures.
Gloria Feman-Orenstein, a professor of Comparative Literature and Women's
(and more recently, Men’s and Shamanistic) Studies at the University of Southern
California has long appreciated the role that the unconscious mind plays in inspiring an
artist. Her interest in the connection between the unconscious and mysticism has evolved
during a thirty-year career from her earliest publication, The Theater of the Marvelous:
Surrealism and the Contemporary Stage (1975), through The Reflowering of the Goddess
(1990), and leading up to her current emphasis on ecofeminism with the publication of
Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990). Her most recent project
has been a memoir charting her personal study of shamanism entitled Illuminating the
Invisible: The Life and Times of a Feminist Scholar on a Spiritual Quest. Her 1980
“Preface” to Marchessault’s novel La Mère des herbes, reflects a need that she felt
existed for women to explore their childhood, the women who have encouraged them,
and the paths they have followed in “coming to writing” in order to show the way to
future generations of women and to,
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“... célèbre une nouvelle vision mythique de la renaissance spirituelle et
de la résurrection historique de la femme accomplies par la revendication
de son héritage matriarcal ancestral et de ses racines sacrées qui remontent
à la tradition de la Grande Déesse, la Mère des herbes (9).
She asserts that a patriarchal (and religious) explanation of the creation of Earth and its
inhabitants places the desires and needs of women and the environment on a lower
priority than the maintenance of power in the hands of the Church and the State and
advocates,
... le voyage mythique [qui] sauvera l’humanité de la Chute, exorcisera
le christianisme, le colonialisme et le patriarcat et amènera une ère
révolutionnaire nouvelle où l’image originelle et tellurique de la
femme sera rétablie (11).
Orenstein seconds Marchessault’s reversion to the ancient memories and myths of the
Great Goddess, incarnated in significant women role models, such as the grandmother, so
that “... l’ordre naturel du monde ... puisse réssusciter ... la planète ... dans un cycle de
renouvellement et de régénération.”
After surviving the most painful years of her life, the author finds her voice in La
Mère des herbes, and at the end of the novel she files away her unpleasant memories of
tyranical male landlords, factory supervisors, angry fathers and frustrated clergy and
begins to build a network of mothers, aunts, cousins, lovers and grandmothers who band
together to support and encourage each other. The Grandmother becomes the model for a
Savior/Goddess that Marchessault would like to place at the center of an utopian universe
where every citizen would have the right to self-expression and the responsibility to look
after the Other.
In another important episode, Marchessault relates a theatrical production that she
and her cousins animated when they were children in which she highlights the power of
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women to devise new solutions for old problems. Her retelling very appropriately
reflects the innovative uses to which language can be put and probably presages her adult
attraction to writing for the theater. As soon as the girls decide to put on a play in three
acts, the boys’ interest begins to wane. They begin to feel awkward about the frankness
and passion of the girls’ pursuit of a topic and decide to abandon the enterprise:
“Guindés, effrayés par la virulence des filles qui mêlent tout dans cette pièce. Du délire,
de la folie furieuse, voilà ce qu’ils pensent mais ils diront que ça n’a pas de bon sens
votre histoire!” (93) The boys cannot tolerate the excess of words and emotions that the
girls invest in their project.
In short, the cousins write a revolutionary text, and the boys (like little men) don’t
approve of their scandalous behavior. One might perhaps have expected the boys to be
more rebellious at this age, but it is the girls who make trouble!
Elles écrivent une pièce démentielle! Une pièce dangereuse pour tout le
monde. Une pièce sous pression, à ne pas mettre entre toutes les mains
sinon elle va vous éclater en pleine face ... Elles proclament qu’il y a un
au-delà de la vie, qu’on ne peut pas rentrer dans l’ordre, dans l’obéissance
permanente sans tenter sa chance ailleurs. Faut un peu palper le pouls de
la révolte avant d’entrer dans les ordres, le régiment, le groupement, les
associations de l’Énorme-normal. Faut se mettre en péril, tenter de vivre
ailleurs et autrement et manifester une indépendance surprenante vis-à-vis
les lois (93).
Out of the mouths of “babes” comes a tale of bravery and resistance, and a political
statement by a small group of little women which indicates a possible solution to a
fictitious crisis. Isn’t this the sort of creative genius that has the potential to change
society?
The play begins with a celebration in the Ursuline Monastery in Montreal and
ends with a miracle in the remote cabin of the Iroquois sage-femme Kateri Tekakwita
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outside of Montreal. Sister Marie de l’Incarnation invites Sisters Marguerite, Jeanne and
Madeleine to help her prepare a feast for sixty of the neighboring “savages,” although she
has been advised by the Monseigneur “... de consacrer désormais tout son temps à
l’évangélisation des filles indiennes car sa Majesté de France désire qu’on francise peu à
peu tous les sauvages et les sauvagesses afin d’en faire un people poli.” Marie responds
rather insolently to his order by complaining that French men behave themselves more
savagely in the colony than the Indian men do.
Marie rétorque que l’ame indienne est trop fière, trop indépendante pour se
soumettre au joug de la civilisation française mais que par contre les filles
françaises en ce pays sont plus savantes en plusieurs matières dangereuses
que celles du pays de sa Majesté le roi de France parce que les soldats de ce
même roi, les colons de ce même roi et tout le gibier de potence de la colonie,
les violent, en usent à leur guise avec violence et luxure (95).
Thus concludes the first act. The outrage of the some of the adults in the audience is
tempered by their pride in the girls’ enormous undertaking.
The second act begins with the four Sisters swapping recipes for the dishes they
are preparing for their guests. Their domestic conversations are interrupted when the
governor’s messenger arrives with bad news: after “examining” an Indian on Monday,
the Reverend Father Chaumonnot had him burned at the stake. The women demand to
know, “Quoi, nos pères se mêlent de torture, se permettent de conduire des guerriers à la
mort?” and wonder if “C’est le démon qui leur montre cette nouvelle direction” (97).
How can the attack of eight thousand Indians in response to this murder be averted? The
Sisters have always dreamed of becoming Saints. Perhaps this is their lucky day! “Les
quatre femmes se jetèrent dans les bras l’une de l’autre pour se féliciter de leur chance de
martyre comme on se félicite d’un héritage.” However, a problem presents itself: they
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wonder if they have the right to condemn the rest of the settlement to martyrdom and
decide that it will take a miracle to save the colony. Where do they go to find a miracle?
In choosing their savior, they place their trust in a spirit grander than the Church and a
negotiator more skillful than the governor. They choose the Indian medicine woman
Kateri Tekakwita, since neither the government nor the Church has shown itself capable
of bringing peace to the colony in the past.
The wise woman Kateri, Mistress of Fire, is described as living alone, outside of
both the Indian and the French compounds, rejected for having refused to marry or have
children. She is an outcast who has even been accused of practicing sorcery:
[Elle] avait mécontenté tout le monde en décidant un jour de ne rien faire
d’autre que prière et méditation. Plus de chasse et pêche, malgré les
pierres qui sont lancées par les siens contre son corps de femme, et les
ricanements, l’ironie, les chuchotements. Elle ne sera rien d’autre qu’une
flamme ardente, une chose qui se consume d’elle-même ... l’inépuisable
richesse de l’amour ne cesse de la hanter. Ainsi apparaît Kateri Tekakwita
dans sa cabane longue, maîtresse de son feu (101).
The Sisters have chosen an effective savior. Kateri carries a burning pine torch to a
neutral spot between the Indians and the French and reaches into the flames and releases
a host of doves, firebirds and other symbolic species revered by the Iroquois who believe
they have seen a vision. They abandon their attack against the French and go off
peacefully in search of their visions.
Within the scope of this drama imbedded in the novel, the Marchessault creates an
alternate display of power, completely peaceful and satisfying—admittedly
utopic—which subverts and out-performs the violence and domination practiced by
empires and powerful religions. Kateri is the sort of nurturing and magical feminist
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figure that Marchessault regularly creates as an antidote to masculine violence and
domination.
COMMON GROUND
There are a number of creative practices employed by Anne Hébert and Jovette
Marchessault that will benefit from a common appraisal. Both authors shared a desire to
expose unsavory living conditions and discriminatory policies that begged for
improvement in 1940s Quebec society. Coming from a working-class background,
Marchessault’s story is clearly autobiographical. Her family lived simply but
wholesomely alongside Nature, but were forced to migrate to a shoddy neighborhood in
Montreal, where the author was witness to a myriad of social problems including
unemployment, poor housing, and spousal and child abuse. Large sections of her text are
realistic and documentary.
Hébert’s imagination—since she had very little personal experience of being
oppressed—creates a pair of characters—alter-egos—who share the same body but quite
different behaviors. One of her protagonist’s personalities becomes the conduit by which
the poverty and hopelessness of rural and village populations are conveyed to the reading
public. Her alter-ego is a nun, whose convent life is invaded by visions of witchcraft,
incest, and intercourse with the devil that come from her past. In these works we see
both men and women suffering from the economic and social conditions of the era.
Both author’s use the strategies of irony and humor, similar to the carnavalesque
techniques employed by Roch Carrier, in attempting to upset existing power structures.
Just as Carrier did, they can blame the war, the English, the economy and language
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politics for their misery. As Bouchard emphasizes “... en remplaçant le sérieux par le
rire, les structures elles-mêmes se sont trouvées soumises à un renversement plein et
entier” (374). He calls Les Enfants du sabbat “un roman grotesque de la misère
économique et morale,” and describes Hébert’s techniques in this way:
Anne Hébert s’évade par le comique, mais aussi par le style déchaîné, par
les structures hétéroclites, par la juxtaposition des mots allitératifs ... en
chapitres parallels et linéaires, par la création de l’anti-personnage
merveilleusement allégorique, soit par maintes contrefaçons glorieusement
rassurantes (376).
He concludes that “... les oeuvres d’Anne Hébert passent toutes de l’intérieur vers
l’extérieur, de la séquestration vers la libération,” (377) thus signaling her will to expose
the evils of society by unveiling the human motivations that drive them.
Marchessault’s humor also hinges upon the structure of the passages in which the
status quo is mocked. She depends on a litany of examples that reflect oral speech
patterns, incomplete sentences, actual repetition/reiteration of ideas, exaggeration and
plays upon words. An example of this combination of techniques in a single paragraph
can be seen in the following passage which expresses her family’s fear about moving to
Montreal because there is no longer work for the men in the county.
La peur, la quête mystérieuse et terrible, la fuite en avant quand on ne
sait plus, quand on ne peut plus. C’est le premier jour d’un nouveau
cycle, cycle infernal, il va sans dire. Un cycle qui peut durer une journée,
une semaine, une année ou une vie, à moins, à moins d’opérer une
profonde réorientation ... Ville en vue! ... Et grand-mère, et ma mère, et
le chat, et le chien, et tout le monde! ... Nous changeons d’état, nous
crépitons. Une artère géante se met à saigner quelque part en nous ...
“Maman, au secours!” (112).
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The reader can appreciate the pathos of the situation and can understand the narrator’s
fear of the unknown. We accompany her family in the old truck packed with all of the
family’s worldly possessions. It’s a roller coaster ride for the emotions—from its
beginning in fear—to the excitement of spying the first lights of the city—to the
reassuring thought that “Everyone is here (“Even the cat and the dog,” make it
humorous).” The passage concludes with a return to terror with, “Maman, au secours!”
Both authors create characters that exhibit savage or untamed behavior. Anne
Hébert’s multifaceted protagonist is the daughter of a sorceress and the devil who has
found refuge in the convent but cannot forget her past. Homebrewed “bagosse,” bizarre
herbal and mushroom concoctions, wild dancing, and the orgies of the “black mass”
organized by her parents attracted the destitute and bored rurals from the surrounding
area who attended in their “... vieilles Ford, récupérées au cimetière des voitures” (Les
Enfants de sabbat 35). During one of these masses she is raped by her father in the
presence of the entire community. Thus, she inherits evil powers that she learned in
childhood—sometimes willingly, sometimes spontaneously—to revolt against the stifling
atmosphere of the convent.
Jovette Marchessault’s “sorceress” is actually her half-native grandmother whose
wisdom comes from a mystic past that Marchessault has invented. The grandmother’s
powers are used benevolently for healing her family and neighbors, her clan. The
surrounding families are referred to as “les tribus catholiques,” and their attitudes and
pastimes seem to be universally obsessed by eternal damnation, “... l’idée de jugement
dernier, du gros livre de la fin, où tous les comptes sont rigoureusement tenus à travers
les siècles et les siècles par le comptable en chef et ses subordonnés” (31). Growing up
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between these two cultures the narrator learned to appreciate the bounty of Nature and to
distain the fear instilled by Catholicism.
Both of these authors organize their work by first documenting the inequalities of
Quebec society, especially those that have oppressed women. Then, by using a plethora
of strategies, they turn the fictional world upside down. Humor and irony subvert male
authority, and women become the rulers of society. In Les Enfants du sabbat, Hébert
condenses the growing pains of an entire society and situates the battle for liberation
within Sister Julie’s body. The priest attempts to exorcize her devils, and she destroys
him. In La Mère des herbes, Marchessault undertakes a personal exorcism supported by
her grandmother’s special store of native wisdom and an indomitable spirit of resistance
that she has to learn how to mobilize.
SURREALISTS? IDEALISTS? FEMINIST OUTLAWS?
In Automatic Woman Conley compares some of the outcomes of feminist writing
in Quebec to results that she believes the French Surrealists achieved earlier in the
century:
Surrealism demanded that we question our fathers, our prejudices, our
society, our religion, all our assumptions, including the proper role of
women in society. It contributed to a climate of challenge to the patriarchy
that also included significant work by feminists and that set into motion
the changes in social norms that took place after the war, in the 1960s
and 1970s” (25).
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Katherine Conley’s Automatic Woman (1996) examines the thesis that Surrealist
practices could be—and, in a few cases—already have been used successfully by a
women writers in Quebec to gain access to inspiration for their feminist works:
Beyond the groundbreaking feminist theory from the 1970s, whose
intentional aim at social subversion could be seen as a counterpoint to the
similar aims of the surrealists, there continues to be contemporary writing
that extends aspects of the surrealist project in its valorization of the
unconscious, of dream states as sources of creativity, and of experiments
with form (24).
She specifically mentions the work of authors such as Nicole Brossard, Marie-Claire
Blais and Anne Hébert, as particularly adept practitioners of automatic writing and of
other innovative techniques for expressing the feminist agenda. Although she is quick to
note that Brossard is not a surrealist, she does characterize some of her iconoclastic
adventures and her penchant for supporting the literary efforts of other women writers as
consistent with the spirit of Surrealism. She also believes that Brossard, undoubtedly
familiar with Breton’s writing, has made
... more than one inter-textual reference to Breton’s writings, including a
re-writing of Breton’s definition of convulsive beauty from Nadja and
L’amour fou: from “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be” to
“Vision is aerial or will not be” ... Brossard substitutes, therefore, the
notion of Vision for Beauty ... For convulsive Brossard has substituted
aerial, another adjective that suggests movement, but that also describes
a soaring movement, allied with the hologram, Brossard’s symbol for her
desire to write multi-dimensionally. Breton’s use of convulsive tends to
characterize more the reaction to Beauty than any movement engendered
by it. From a dictum describing a desired surrealistic response, Brossard
has created one describing a desired conscious movement in space, in
time, and through writing (143-4).
Although, I agree with Conley that Brossard and some of the other Quebecois women
authors have become involved in artistic activities that coincide with the earlier projects
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of the Surrealists and the Automatists, I believe that it is less in their theories than in their
practices that we are the likely to notice coincidences and actual correspondances.
Karen Gould, author of Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental
Writing in Quebec (1990), outlines the itineraries of the Quebecois women writers,
Madeleine Gagnon, Louky Bersianik, France Théoret and also Nicole Brossard whose
encouragement of women’s writing (and in politics) is nearly legendary in Quebec. She
believes that,
Their influence is due primarily to the innovative nature of their
individual writing practices and to complex ways in which they have
woven contemporary feminist thought into the language, thematic
considerations, and structure of their texts (xviii).
Gould emphasizes the experimental character of their work and their contribution to the
efforts of a growing community of women artists. The authors in Gould’s study found
that their own abilities thrived as they encouraged the artistic unfurling of the talents of
their compatriots.
I have to agree that a portion of the goals of the two groups were similar,
however, I feel that in comparison to the experiments of the Surrealists in the 1920s in
France, the innovative feminist practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Quebec have
managed to surpass those of the first generation. In a very short time, Quebecois women
have overcome the poverty and sequestration inflicted by centuries of repressive politics
and have burst into the business and academic worlds with fresh ideas that belie the
intelligence and social skills that had long been stifled in their private lives.
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CONCLUSION
The province of Quebec shares a colonial history with the other Francophone
regions I have discussed in previous chapters—only the specific details of its domination
differ from the others. The English Commonwealth and the French Empire are
practically interchangeable when one considers the absolute power that they wielded over
their colonies and the destruction of natural and human resources that they sanctioned in
the name of Progress. From the perspective of the present, the Holy Roman Catholic
Church joined by other evangelizing Protestant sects, have been sentenced to the pillory
rather than set up on the pedestal they had occupied for two millenia for professing to
save the souls of the masses while colluding with the empires to deny physical and
intellectual freedom to its followers. Patriarchy, paternalism, and nationalism have come
under close scrutiny for their role in supporting centuries of androcentric privilege and
wasting the talents and energies of the other half of the World’s population.
Before the Quiet Revolution began to publicly redress the inequalities that were
rampant in the Province of Quebec, an even subtler spirit of rebellion and refusal began
to fester. Involvement in World War II provided the catalyst that exposed Canada’s
provincial mentality and opened the floodgates to modernization. What sets the
development of Quebec’s identity apart from the revolutions that broke out in the
Maghreb and the Mashrek and the non-revolution that exists in the French DOM
departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique is the intense spirit of cooperation that
various sectors of society have been able to mobilize which has led to comparatively
rapid improvements on the social, political and economic scenes in the Francophone
province.
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In the beginning, a few laborers stood up to their Anglophone foremen, and one or
two bourgeois families determined that their daughters deserved an education as much as
their sons. Anne Hébert began to reveal the repressions of a people who had survived too
many years in the dark. Her passion to write replaced her childhood fascination with
religion. She refused to marry or to have children. So did Jovette Marchessault, MarieClaire Blais and Nicole Brossard who discovered that the company of women satisfied
their need for companionship and heightened their desire to create a world—not
dominated by women as their former world had been dominated by men—but in which
women supported and encouraged one another.
The province of Quebec has lived a parallel story, in many aspects, to other
previously-colonized countries, and its first contact with Surrealism corresponds fairly
closely to its arrival in other Francophone countries. Hal Winter, correspondant for the
Montreal newspaper The Gazette, is the author of a review which sings the praises of
André Bourassa’s survey of the movement entitled Surréalism et littérature québécoise:
Histoire d’une révolution culturelle which appeared in 1986.
Le livre constitue un voyage à travers l’inconscient collectif du Québec
français: André Bourassa fait l’examen du surréalisme non seulement comme
forme d’art moderne mais comme état d’esprit cherchant à renverser les concepts
traditionnels de la culture occidentale.
Bourassa describes in detail the attraction that Surrealism had for some of the Quebecois
intellectuals and their influence on society as a whole. The Automatists, a uniquely
Quebecois avant-garde movement contributed a manifesto enunciating their complaints
and goals, and their works of art have continued to garner a modicum of praise. An
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abundance of other writing groups and experimental journals have come and gone from
the literary scene, all of which have emphasized the value of experimental writing.
Although the writing of many Quebecois novelists has illustrated the entire slate
of Surrealist practices over the past half century, it is more difficult to situate a coherent
trend in this region than it is to do so in Africa or the Caribbean. Undoubtedly, a few
soldiers must have attempted to neutralize overseas war experiences by writing about
them, but wars fought on one’s own soil always create the most trauma. Therefore,
women’s accounts of domestic violence in Quebec far outnumber men’s war stories in
the region. The scandals that French Surrealists loved to create are rather few in number
compared to the hundreds of minor transgressions that Quebecois authors had to commit
in order to extricate themselves from the grasp of Catholic doctrine. As soon as the
Quebecois “roman de la terre” fell from fashion, an inter-penetration of genres became
more and more common on the literary scene, just as the cooperative character of the
Automatists’ theater production had displayed the wide range of skills of its participants.
The imaginary of the region is rich with folklore and myths indicative of its
French origins. Jovette Marchessault writes stories with their bases in native beliefs.
This data is supplemented by the strong influence of biblical tales and proverbs due to the
prominence of the Church in everyday life. Superstition and beliefs in the occult, such as
Anne Hébert exploits in Les Enfants du sabbat spring from an opposition to the
domination of the Church and the sheer expanse of unexplainable experiences that
humans are bound to encounter in the wilderness.
Quebec has been the site of extraordinarily rapid societal changes during the past
sixty years. A religious system that had reigned for four hundred years and an
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Anglophone government that had held the French-speaking citizens of Quebec hostage
for nearly three hundred years were replaced by a more responsive secular government.
Men whose histories reflect centuries of manual labor have taken up intellectual tasks.
Women whose mothers were doomed to domesticity have worked together to provide a
myriad of possibilities for future generations. None of these changes came about so
quietly as the name “Quiet Revolution” seems to imply. The works of Anne Hébert and
Jovette Marchessault, along with an important group of feminist Quebecois literary
critics, have created literary strategies that have literally devastated the “father figures”
whom they held responsible for retarding Quebec’s progress. They began by enunciating
the same refusals as did the first generation of Surrealists but have succeeded in
surpassing the Surrealists—elaborating their goals and practices and supplementing them
with positive proposals, experimentation and inspiration.
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CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION
THEORY AND PRACTICE
A common thread runs through the Francophone literature that I have examined in
this dissertation, seaming together the private and political spheres of the lives of the
women who have created it. Religious and political subjugation, the nightmare of family
and community disintegration, war and exile, and the anguish of mental illness have
impelled these women novelists to venture beyond narrating conscious experience and
employing realist writing techniques and toward experimenting with alternative aesthetic
practices in order to express the humiliation and horror of their experiences. These
feminists have surveyed the (sur)reality of their surroundings and taken decisive steps
toward reconciling their pasts with their presents and their yet-unexplored futures. The
political and social conflicts in the zones from which they write have prompted them to
employ a number of creative practices that were first promoted by the Surrealist
movement in its search for inspiration in the period between the two World Wars.
The first Surrealists were conditioned either by their bourgeois upbringing or by
the customs of the times from which they emerged to think of their female companions as
subordinates in their revolt against society's mores. For them, women existed only to
facilitate their lives and to be adored and idealized, the passive objects of male
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mystification—the Muses who might stimulate automatic, excessive, obsessive and
inspirational reactions meriting further exploration. These men were eager to explore the
realm of unconscious impulsions and motivations that the advent of psychoanalysis had
opened up. Looking for innovative ways to express themselves, they revolted against the
conventions they had inherited from previous literary movements by investigating
automatic writing and dream transcription which psychoanalysts had found useful in
treating patients suffering from mental illness and battle fatigue, by advocating genre
fluidity in literature and the inter-penetration of artistic domains, and by looking to
unsophisticated sources such as folklore and the artwork of indigenous peoples for
inspiration. They countered logic and reason with iconoclasm, the quest for the uncanny,
and an appreciation for what the fantastic and marvelous might unexpectedly contribute
to life. They revolted against authority in the form of restrictive laws sustained by
governments and religious hierarchies by practicing anarchy, the destruction of all
societal taboos and eroticism. The Surrealists prized collective and collaborative
endeavors for their potential to multiply artistic perspectives and to provide a ready-made
audience for testing new schemes and experiments. Finally, they personally engaged
themselves in revolt against a whole range of authoratative institutions which sought to
maintain the status quo of everyday French life.
Looking beyond the chiefly European context of the founding current, we find
that Francophone authors, whose native lands had historically been dominated by French
rule and the French educational system, began to discover the relevance and utility of
Surrealist practice in their revolutionary struggles at approximately the same time that its
attraction was beginning to wane inside the Hexagon. In the 1940s through the early
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1960s, the colonial elite who had come into contact with Surrealism during their studies
in France began to borrow its practices to document the untenable social and economic
conditions that existed in their homelands and to register their resistance against
prolonged overseas dominance. Several studies have focussed upon the male
postcolonial authors who chose to re-employ surrealist techniques in their writing.
Until now, no one has formally investigated the surreal practices of dissident
women authors who became active in their nations’ struggles for independance alongside
the men. In this study I have scrutinized the similarities between two bodies of work that
might, at first glance seem to have little in common. Because of the eras in which they
emerged, the origins of their authors, and the gender concerns (or lack thereof) of their
creators, one could easily have overlooked the characteristics they share. By comparing
the motives, methods, and products of the two groups, I have established a link between
the surreal practices found in the work of important Francophone women authors and
those of their male precursors. I have examined the novelistic output of seven women
from three geographic regions—the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the province of
Quebec—and compared their concerns and techniques with those of the early Surrealists
in order to document the capacity of surrealist practice to express human experience
beyond the time period in which it was first employed in Europe by the followers of
André Breton.
THE MAGHREB AND THE MASHREK
André Breton declared in a 1942 lecture at Yale University that “Surrealism can
only be understood as a function of war ... in relation both to the war it came from and the
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one it returned to” (10 December). I have found Breton’s assertion concerning the two
World Wars relevant for analyzing the novels of Yamina Mechakra and Assia Djebar
which were set during and immediately after the Algerian war for independance and the
multi-faction civil wars in Lebanon described by Evelyne Accad which have recurred
periodically since the 1950s. As female combattants in these conflicts came to realize
that their active participation alongside fellow maquisards was not to be rewarded by
equal access to personal liberties, they began to inscribe their protest in literature,
particularly in novels that represented the mental and physical trauma and the
fragmentation of male/female relationships in times of combat. I have examined the
physical and psychological effects of war on their work and the surreal aspects of the
worlds they inhabited and attempted to express.
Danielle Marx-Scouras has speculated that women’s writing about war
deconstructs a typically male approach—their “fiction of war”—in which the accounts
dwell on violence, submission and physical action. She contends that women, while they
may also employ realistic practices, also add the emotional elements of love and hope to
their narrations—a supplement that Julia Kristeva postulates has been missing from maledominated theories of both language and dissidence. I go beyond both of these
hypotheses by demonstrating how the novelists I have studied have appropriated
practices first employed by the Surrealist movement in order to subvert colonial and
postcolonial restrictions on women’s autonomy and how they have expanded upon
surrealist practice by contributing additional positive elements to their predecessors’ slate
of disavowals and refusals.
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A common challenge that these authors have had to overcome is bridging the gap
between literacy and illiteracy in order to “translate” the lives of their illiterate sisters for
their readers. They did not deem conventional and realistic prose flexible enough to suit
their purposes and had to invent a variety of other methods, the results of which
ressemble the “anti-novels” created by the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s and the
experimental works classified as the “New Novel” in France in the 1950s and 1960s. The
authors’ personal memories are intertwined with historical happenings and lurid
imaginary tales. Yamina Mechakra, whose primary profession is psychiatry, Assia
Djebar, whose academic training was in history, and Evelyne Accad, whose involvement
in feminist issues has spanned several decades, have interwoven their own
autobiographies with those of the women they speak for in order to illustrate how
psychology, history, economics, and aesthetics join hands to create an alternate sort of
novel. Their introspection, their "exploding" of realistic description, their demolition of
genre constraints and their melding of personal with political issues parallel and surpass
what André Breton and his collaborators wished to characterize when they employed the
term "engaged."
The poetic language of these authors includes modes of expression distinct from
the sort of language reserved for ordinary communication or literary prose. According to
Kristeva, it is the “language of movement between the real and the non-real, and it
transcends the laws of logic and is present at the production of meaning” (Kristeva 2). It
bridges the gap between unconscious and conscious thought—between the real and the
surreal. By juxtaposing traditional medias of expression, such as orality, dance and
music with writing these authors point out the deficiencies of language and take
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advantage of a synthesis of traditional and modern, non-literate and literate practices to
relate their stories. Their introspective investigation of the suitability of language to
translate life is an authorial practice that begs for a re-evaluation of accepted genre
definitions, and we see that it brings them to atypical choices and admixtures insofar as
their practices are concerned.
Yamina Mechakra’s protagonist endures years of nightmarish frontline horrors
which culminate in the destruction of the cave in which she has been living with the
soldiers she has come to consider as her family. Her world explodes, and the physical
and mental trauma of the blast cause her to lose complete touch with reality. As a
novelist, Mechakra uses her medical expertise to fuse realistic and surrealistic styles and
to subject her readers to a disorientation similar to a psychotic patient’s confusion of
reality and insanity. She mediates the gap of suspicion that pain always creates between
the sufferer and the observer by representing the surreal aspects of the protagonist’s prelinguistic reaction to pain. When the heroine recovers, the author restores her language.
Demonstrating how women’s writing about war differs from men’s, the protagonist
becomes capable of celebrating life and the future through her love poems to her son and
her emerging nation which begin to overshadow the pain and the violence she has
endured.
Just as Yamina Mechakra's writing reflects her own traumatic childhood and her
training as a psychiatrist, Assia Djebar’s texts reveal her academic interests in North
African history and Algerian culture. In L'amour, la fantasia, she chronicles the French
colonization of her homeland and Algeria's struggle for liberation from an indigenous
prospective and from a woman’s point of view. She deftly glides back and forth between
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the historical and autobiographical elements of the novel producing a counter-narrative
which contradicts the European version of Algerian history which also indicts the
phallocentric customs of her own country that exclude women from official history and
public life.
Her story subverts the dominant male plot structure of history by portraying the
traumatic events of the Algerian resistance, war, and daily life from a woman’s
perspective. She compiled accounts that survived by word of mouth alone as generations
of grandmothers and aunts passed down their experiences and folded them into a
narrative that includes both her male and female ancestors. Like Mechakra, she values
the language of the body and of traditional folkways—trances, dances and
vociferations—used by women for expressing the history, the suffocation and the insanity
of their domination—as a supplement to written language. In her research Djebar does
not privilege early chronicles written by men over data emanating from collective
feminine oral traditions.
In an episode from L’Amour, la fantasia the French artist Fromentin tells of
having discovered and then discarded a severed woman’s hand on the battlefield. Did he
consider the putrifying hand (and the woman it represented) too ugly or unimportant to
comment upon or was he frankly unable to describe the horror of it? From Djebar’s
perspective, he essentially disposed of the thread of history belonging to half of humanity
when he threw down the hand. Either unwilling or unable to write the story it might have
offered him, Djebar imagines that he held out the hand to her—“[il] me tend une main
inattendue"—figuratively, he "gives her an unexpected hand." Over a century later,
Djebar picks up this hand and uses as a guiding image in her "war stories" about the long
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unheralded participation of the female population in the defense of their country. By
bringing stories like this to light, Djebar encourages women to keep a firm hold on the
freedoms they enjoy and empowers them to resist oppression.
Evelyne Accad can be compared to both Yamina Mechakra and Assia Djebar in
that her project entails writing for those who cannot about the problems that women in
Lebanon experience because of the political decisions made by the men who surround
them and oppress them. Accad is convinced that the war in Lebanon is “… closely
connected with the way people perceive and act out their sense of love and power…”
(Sexuality and War 228). In a culture where men dominate women and think of them
only in terms of possession, this aggression spills over as a desire to dominate territory as
well. She believes that it is necessary to temper nationalist discourse with feminist ideals
if the Lebanese are ever to improve their family and national structures.
As a critic, Evelyne Accad questions the forms that feminist literature should take,
and as an author, she chooses to adopt a mixture of styles and genres. She has observed
that the exigencies of war sometimes impel writers to choose certain genres—for
example poetry and surrealistic description—rather than others. In Sexuality and War
she asserts that, "... war novels include a blend of poetry and prose, realism and
symbolism, but they delight in surrealism, in the absurd, in extreme irony" (7). It is
because of these attitudes and practices that her work often resembles that of the earlier
male Surrealists.
Just as the French Surrealists reacted to the inhumanity of World War I, the
citizens of Beirut in L’Excisée endure the unabated stress of living in a partitioned city.
The protagonist is a teenage girl whose personality has been fragmented by continual
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exposure to violence at home and in the street: her father’s Christian evangelical
fanaticism rules her every action, and the daily specter of war permeates her existence
outside of the home. The novel’s fantastic tale unfolds, sometimes in prose and at other
times in free verse. Excerpts from both Christian and Islamic scripture are pasted into the
narrative to explain each sect’s particular fundamentalist beliefs. It is difficult to
determine whether poetry, prose or song predominate as the reader becomes acquainted
with the protagonist’s state of mind. One cannot decide whether E. is conscious or
hallucinating some of the events; we are not sure if she is dreaming or awake.
It is through her protagonist’s allegorical journey that Evelyne Accad intertwines
a fictional saga with a political statement that belies her commitment to feminist and
peace issues. Punctuated by rebellion against religious prohibition of all kinds, and the
rejection of all taboos in subject matter, she brings the rite of female circumcision
defended by Muslim fundamentalists under scrutiny. Her imaginative inscription of
dreams and fantasy facilitates her reporting of the emotional and physical abuse
experienced by women in societies where they are held in bondage. Her narrative is
marked by a fluidity that traverses the commonly accepted boundaries between prose,
poetry and song. Her message extends from the particular—the feminist struggle for
autonomy—to the universal—war and its effects upon those who wage it.
Kateb Yacine's noteworthy description of Yamina Mechakra’s La Grotte éclatée:
"Ce n'est pas un roman, et c'est beaucoup mieux: un long poème en prose qui peut se lire
comme un roman," (Preface 8) could just as well refer to Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la
fantasia and Evelyne Accad’s L’Excisée. This trilogy of novels illustrates how three
Arab women from different geographical regions have borrowed surrealist tactics,
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elaborated upon them, and added others to their inventory of practices useful for resisting
domination and promoting freedom.
THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN
In my analysis of Maryse Condé’s Célanire, cou-coupé and Simone SchwarzBart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle, I have illustrated how Antillean literature draws
its vitality from the heterogeneous cultural inheritance of its peoples and resources itself
in their oral tradition and supernatural beliefs. Their works reflect the tangled heritage
and the creolized language that characterize a people which has been dominated by
outside forces for over four hundred years. Because their personal dignity and social
structures were destroyed by slavery, their sense of identity has continued to languish and
their feelings of powerlessness have not abated in the postcolonial or neo-colonial world
that they inhabit nowadays. Neither author has lost sight of the fact that the DOM status
of Martinique and Guadeloupe, adopted at the close of WWII, has yet to furnish effective
solutions to the distress of its people or to be replaced by more independent and
functional political and economic relationships with France and other nations.
Like the Surrealists, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé are the products of
the French system of education, begun in the colonial schools of Guadeloupe but finetuned in the universities of the Hexagon. However, their earliest cultural memories
originate in the colonies, and their awareness of racial and social problems are
attributable to their Caribbean backgrounds. I show how Condé’s and Schwarz-Bart’s
contributions to the literary canon can be traced back through a community of male
participants in the Negritude, Surrealist and Magical Realist movements and through
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talented and atypical artists such as Suzanne Césaire. It was not just for its polemic uses
that she favored the practice of Surrealism in Martinique; she argued that it was not just
an ideology but also state of mind, a “permanent readiness for the Marvelous.” Like
Mme Césaire and Alejo Carpentier, who believed that Surrealism was always at play in a
region where magic is an integral part of everyday life, Condé and Schwarz-Bart have
studied the folklore and the religion of their region and recounted folktales and everyday
occurrences that could not be empirically proven.
Instead of taking up a search for less regimented and more shocking ways to tease
inspiration to the surface as the Surrealists did, our Guadeloupean authors have delved
into the collective unconscious of their ancestors to find the sources of the sometimes
unexplainable events that make for good fiction. Their folklore and their culture is rich
with such oral tales and fantastic happenings. They have, perhaps, as Carpentier
advocated, divorced Surrealism from its critical roots and recuperated it into the tales
they tell with humor and respect.
Their works exhibit a special appreciation of their heritage because these authors
evaluate their culture from the inside, as opposed to their Europeans forebears who could
only look upon the fresh inspiration of the ''primitive'' with an eye to the exotic.
Furthermore, their practices go beyond their predecessors in that Maryse Condé's incisive
humor and ironic treatment of West Indian problems and Simone Schwarz-Bart's
documentation of noteworthy black role models and vestiges of positive lore surpass
what other authors in the region have depicted in the format of the novel. Through their
fictions based on the strengths of Caribbean culture, they empower women as well as
men to fight against domination by Western ideals and politics. They have, in effect,
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developed their tales by constructing surreal and fantastic bridges between the oral
traditions and religious beliefs of the largely illiterate inhabitants of the Caribbean islands
and a sophisticated literary cast of readers throughout the world.
THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC
In my chapter about the feminist authors from the Province of Quebec, I have
catalogued an inventory of repression that came close to rendering French-Speaking
Canadians an endangered species in the land which they had established. After the
French ceded the territory to England, the remaining inhabitants were forced to endure
more than two hundred years of economic and social discrimination by the Anglophones
in power, the stifling cultural paternalism of the other English-speaking provinces of
Canada, and the cultural and economic dominance of the United States. Perhaps more
than any other factor, the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church postponed Quebec’s
entry into the modern world—but, on the other hand, the Church’s encouragement of the
use of the French language was the main reason why their culture survived in the region.
The scandals that French Surrealists loved to create were replicated by the
offenses that Quebecois authors had to commit in order to extricate themselves from
multiple hegemonies. After World War II, a group of artists and writers calling
themselves Automatists formed a coalition somewhat parallel in purposes to that of the
Surrealists. Their manifesto, the Refus global, denounced the authority of the Catholic
Church and the stifling domination of the government, and reiterated many of the refusals
enumerated in the Surrealist Manifesto. One essential element which sets Quebec’s
mutiny apart from the revolutions that broke out in the Maghreb and the Mashrek and the
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spirit of contention that prevails in the French DOM departments is the intense spirit of
cooperation that various sectors of society have been able to mobilize which has resulted
in comparatively rapid improvements on the social, political and economic scenes in the
Francophone province.
I have examined a number of creative practices employed by Anne Hébert and
Jovette Marchessault in order to document the problems which attracted their attention
and the ways in which they approached societal inequality and the atmosphere of
repression that hovered over the province. I have also investigated these female authors'
preoccupation with the occult and the surreal at specific moments in their careers, thus
linking their works to the novels of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart and the
movements of Magical Realism and Surrealism in the southern hemisphere of the
American continents. The collective imaginary of the region is rich with folklore and
myths, distant relatives of the medieval fairy tales and lais which accompanied Quebec’s
first settlers from the northwest quadrant of France. Fabulous tales of saints and sinners
are imbedded in the religious teachings that mark Catholic doctrine. Native spirits
inhabit the vast wilderness of the country. Responding to these stimuli, both novelists
created protagonists who exhibit savage or fractious behavior and dwell on the margins
of “ordinary” communities. Anne Hébert’s multifaceted heroine is the daughter of a
sorceress and the devil who attempts to repress her carnal desires by taking refuge in a
convent which provides a unique theater for playing out the hostilities between her alteregos. Jovette Marchessault’s autobiographical novel sets her grandmother’s refreshingly
aboriginal appreciation of nature, her free-spirited joy in creative enterprises and her
nurturing Mother Earth personality against the social, economic and religious repression
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of the era. Both authors use the strategies of irony and humor—along with techniques of
the carnavalesque—to upset the existing power structures. Marchessault’s humor also
hinges upon the structure of the passages in which she mocks the status quo and subverts
male authority. Their women take responsibility for their own destinies just as Hébert
and Marchessault learned to do.
Quebec has been the site of extraordinarily rapid societal changes during the past
sixty years. An ethical system that had endured for four centuries was overturned in the
space of a few years, and the “foreign” government that had held the French-speaking
citizens of Quebec hostage for nearly three hundred years was defeated. Men whose
histories reflect centuries of manual labor in the forests, in the factories, and in the mines
of Canada, supervised by Anglophones who were no more intelligent than they were,
have taken back their language rights. Women whose mothers were exported from
France like merchandise and sold into domestic slavery have worked together to provide
a myriad of possibilities for future generations. None of these changes came about so
quietly as the name “Quiet Revolution” seems to imply.
Is it really true, as the some experts have proclaimed, that surrealism is dead? I
think not! As long as violence, domination, and alienation exist, militants will avail
themselves of surrealist practice in order to subvert the powers of the oppressor, the
tyrant and the status quo. These aesthetic tools, and perhaps some yet to be formulated
by future generations of Surrealists, are capable of provoking political reversals as well as
enhancing and illustrating the language in which the revolt is framed. Human kind’s
eternal search for inspiration and the equally troubling enigma of representation require
frequent forays into the unconscious mind where practicing Surrealists have indicated
246
that our individual and collective imaginations dwell. Throughout this dissertation, I
have shown that the female decendants of the once passive Muses in the Surrealist
movement have taken up its tools and become militants in the arts and in politics by finetuning its theories and remolding its practices. Rather than disintegrating after the death
of Breton, the movement has continued to evolve at the hands of talented women from
the postcolonial francophone world as they have sought to portray and overcome the
surreality of their oppressive living conditions.
247
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