Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition
- 1 The Emergence of a Tradition
- 2 Apples and Mimic Men: Patrick Chamoiseau's Une Enfance créole
- 3 The Poetics of Ethnicity in Raphaël Confiant's Ravines du devant–jour and Le Cahier de romances
- 4 Alienation and Estrangement in Maryse Condé's Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer
- 5 Childhood, the Environment and Diaspora: Daniel Maximin's Tu, c'est l'enfance and Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia
- 6 Thwarted Expectations? Stasis and Change in Haiti in Dany Laferrière's L'Odeur du café and Le Charme des après–midi sans fin
- 7 Parental Paradigms and Gender Stereotypes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Poetics of Ethnicity in Raphaël Confiant's Ravines du devant–jour and Le Cahier de romances
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Childhood, Genre and the Scene of Recognition
- 1 The Emergence of a Tradition
- 2 Apples and Mimic Men: Patrick Chamoiseau's Une Enfance créole
- 3 The Poetics of Ethnicity in Raphaël Confiant's Ravines du devant–jour and Le Cahier de romances
- 4 Alienation and Estrangement in Maryse Condé's Le Coeur à rire et à pleurer
- 5 Childhood, the Environment and Diaspora: Daniel Maximin's Tu, c'est l'enfance and Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia
- 6 Thwarted Expectations? Stasis and Change in Haiti in Dany Laferrière's L'Odeur du café and Le Charme des après–midi sans fin
- 7 Parental Paradigms and Gender Stereotypes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the Francophone Caribbean, the process of métissage began in 1635, when Pierre Belain d'esnambuc first established a French settlement in Martinique. Initially, the French colonizers concluded peace treaties with Pilote, a Carib chief who took an active role in supporting and extending the French reign over the island, and as a publication by the priest and early colonial chronicler Jean–Baptiste du Tertre shows, Martinique became divided into two roughly equal parts between the ‘demeure des François’ [sic] who settled along the Caribbean coast, and the ‘demeure des sauvages’ who took refuge in the hilly interior and along the more rugged Atlantic coastline. Violence between the French and the Caribs escalated, however, and it became apparent that this small territory would not be successfully shared. In 1660 the treaty of Basse–Terre (Guadeloupe) decreed that the Carib population would be forcibly removed from the Lesser Antilles. A number of Caribs fled to the island of Dominica, which to this day is home to the only Amerindian reserve in the Caribbean.
Although the Amerindians were all but exterminated from Martinique and Guadeloupe by the beginning of the eighteenth century, contemporary authors repeatedly reassert Amerindian ties. This is an ongoing ‘travail de mémoire’ in the Caribbean, and a particularly fine cultural example is the Musée Départemental d'Archéologie précolombienne et de préhistoire in Fort–de–France. The Amerindian past pre–dates European ‘discovery’, colonization and slavery, and invoking this aspect of Caribbean cultural heritage becomes an important method of resisting European hegemony. In the extended essay Ecrire en pays dominé, Patrick Chamoiseau imagines the conquest of Martinique from a number of perspectives, including those of D'esnambuc and an Amerindian. He notes that Amerindian customs live on in contemporary society, and can be accessed both through archaeological findings and in the more fluid form of everyday language:
les techniques et des mots caraïbes ont traversé les siècles. Les mots désignent surtout des outils de pêche, des poissons et des produits de la mer. J'ai rêvé–mots, coui, yole, mabouya, waliwa, caye, ouicou …, étendre leurs résonances, proroger leurs vibrations, les détacher de ce qu'ils désignent aujourd'hui et des réalités dont ils proviennent, pour les suprendre neufs.
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- Information
- Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean , pp. 83 - 107Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013