Abstract
When introducing the concept of conceptual locus in the opening chapter, I described it as a site in time and mind from which Caribbean authors perceived their world. In my consideration of the Anglophone authors, I have attempted to demonstrate how this locus can be assessed through paralleled analyses of literary texts and I have argued so far that the analogous circumstances of the writers we are considering created aligned perceptions and representational techniques, techniques that are these perceptions’ products. As I hope was clear in my presentation of the Anglophone writers, and was foreshadowed in my description of the origins and circumstances of Césaire, Glissant, and Capécia, what I point to as signs of “aligned” perceptions/representations are not identical; the emigrant authors we are concerned with all replicate some ways of depicting migrant thinker figures but, across the body of their early works, there are some kinships that are much closer than others.
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Notes
Angela Chambers, “Critical Approaches to Literatures of Decolonization: Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” in An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. by Sam Haigh (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 35–50 (p. 39).
Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 328.
A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 147.
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 1995).
Ronnie Leah Scharfman, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1980), p. 30.
Jeannie Suk, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), p. 36.
H. Adlai Murdoch, “Ars Poetica, Ars Politica: The Double Life of Aimé Césaire,” Research in African Literatures, 41 (2010), pp. 1—13, p. 11.
Maryse Condé, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Césaire, analyse critique (Paris: Hatier, 1978), p. 41.
Beverley Ormerod, An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (London: Heinemann, 1985), p. 4.
Doris Garraway, “‘What Is Mine’: Césairean Negritude between the Particular and the Universal,” Research in African Literatures, 41 (2010), pp. 71–86 (p. 71).
Angela Chambers, “Universal and Culturally Specific Images in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire,” in Black Accents: Writing in French from Africa, Mauritius and the Caribbean, Proceedings of the ASCALF Conference Held in Dublin, 8–10 April 1995, ed. J. P. Little and Roger Little (London: Grant & Cutler, 1997), pp. 31–45 (p. 33).
J. Michael Dash, “Postcolonial Eccentricities: Francophone Caribbean Literature and the fin de siècle,” in The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture, ed. Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2003), pp. 33–44 (p. 38).
Gregson Davis, Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 24.
I have mentioned in passing the Cahiers publication in Volontés, a journal founded and edited by Georges Pelorson, a poet who went on to play an important role in the Vichy regime (see Vincent Giroud, “Transition to Vichy: The Case of Georges Pelorson,” Modernism/Modernity, 7 (2000), pp. 221–48, for an overview of the editor’s life and the history of Volontés).
The Cahier appeared in the penultimate issue of the journal and that issue’s editor, “in all probability Pelorson himself,” requested a change to the ending to which Césaire assented (see Alex Gil, “Bridging the Middle Passage: The Textual (R)evolution of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 38 (2011), pp. 40–56). The typescript of the poem housed in the Assemblée Nationale ends not with the flight of the dove but with the earlier image of the liberated slaves standing upward, at a map, about to plot the course of their future. The need for work alongside, even reliance upon, the white world is thus doubled in the context and content of the poem’s ending and in the poem’s broader story.
Helen Hintjens, “Constitutional and Political Change in the French Caribbean,” in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 20–33 (p. 27).
Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 140.
J. Michael Dash, “Introduction,” The Ripening, ed. Edouard Glissant (London: Heinemann, 1985), pp. 1–17 (p. 13).
Edouard Glissant, The Ripening, trans. J. Michael Dash (London: Heinemann, 1985), pp. 29–30, and La Lézarde (Paris: Editions du seuil, 1958), p. 27. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text with the reference to the translated edition preceding that of the original. Where I feel Dash’s translation has diverged too far from the original text, I have adapted his words and placed my own in brackets. In addition, the earlier English translation, by Frances Frenaye, has been used for cross-consultation.
That edition is Edouard Glissant, The Ripening (New York: George Braziller, 1959).
Debra L. Anderson, Decolonizing the Text: Glissantian Readings in Caribbean and African-American Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 38.
Elinor S. Miller, “The Identity of the Narrator in Edouard Glissant’s La Lézarde,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 43 (1978), pp. 17–26 (p. 17).
Ormerod, An Introduction, p. 39; Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 83.
Dash, Cailler, and Hallward all make mention of the space between the heroes in Glissant and the people. See, respectively, Edouard Glissant, p. 5; Bernadette Cailler, “Edouard Glissant: A Creative Critic,” World Literature Today, 63 (1989), pp. 589–92 (p. 590); and Absolutely Postcolonial, p. 86.
Mayotte Capécia, I Am a Martinican Woman & The White Negress: Two Novelettes by Mayotte Capécia (Lucette Ceranus), trans. Beatrice Stith Clark (Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiata Press, 1997), p. 153, and Je suis martiniquaise (Paris: Corrêa, 1948), p. 201. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text with the page number of the French edition included after a semicolon or immediately following block quotation.
E. Anthony Hurley, “Intersections of Female Identity or Writing the Woman in Two Novels by Mayotte Capécia and Marie-Magdeleine Carbet,” The French Review, 70 (1997), pp. 575–86 (p. 577).
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Feminism, Race and Difference in the Works of Mayotte Capécia, Michèle Lacrosil, and Jacqueline Manicom,” Callaloo, 15 (1992), pp. 66–74 (p. 74).
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 139.
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© 2015 Malachi McIntosh
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McIntosh, M. (2015). Migrants as Martyrs: Notebook of a Return to Native Land, The Ripening, I Am a Martinican Woman . In: Emigration and Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543219_6
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