In the time of slavery
Island of women or island of flowers—which for a romantic mind would almost be an analogy—, ancestral Martinique still keeps its secrets. It is only known that it has been inhabited for thousands of years, but it is only in our era that the people who live there are called: Arawaks, Caribs. The legend personifies the inaugural arrival of a European in the guise of Christopher Columbus on June 15, 1502, yet the island already appeared on previous maritime maps. Finally, a mystery again, it is an author whose identity remains unknown, the “Anonyme de Carpentras” (the Anonymous of Carpentras), who cites it for the first time in his Relation d'un voyage infortuné fait aux Indes occidentales (“Relation of an unfortunate journey made in the West Indies”) in which he recounts his adventures between 1618 and 1620, his encounters with the native Indians, a decade before the French decided to seize Matinino, which would become Martinique.
From then on, the conquest by Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, on September 15, 1635, heralded the various waves of immigration that would give rise to a mixed population that today numbers 375,000 inhabitants. Some of these people are descendants of the colonists, who were given the nickname of Béké, but they are also freedmen, because the island was in the grip of slavery until the middle of the 19th century.
If the peoples, sometimes forced and coerced, mingle, the literature is impregnated with these influences and the language in turn is reinvented in Creole. It is from this language that some of the first pages written in Martinique were born, where the oral tradition had until then kept the beautiful part, inventing itself in the tales of the popular heroes, from Ti-Jean to Compé Zamba, from Misyé Li Wa to Manman Dlo. Finally, a translation of La Fontaines' Fables into Creole, Les Bambous : Fables de La Fontaine travesties en patois créole par un vieux commandeur (Les Bambous : Fables of La Fontaine translated into Creole patois by an old commander) was born within a group of friends gathered by François-Achille Marbot. These variations of style were printed in 1846 and initiated publications in Creole that have never ceased until today.
It is impossible, however, to understand Martinican literature without taking into consideration an earlier text, Les Amours de Zémédare et Carina, a work by Auguste Prévost de Sansac de Traversay dated 1806, which, although neglected since its publication, nevertheless serves as an interesting counterpoint to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's famous Paul et Virginie (1788). In the latter, a world-famous novel that uses the island of Mauritius as a setting where the author could just as easily have set Martinique, which he knew from having traveled there with his uncle in his early teens, the fantasy of a lost paradise is born, an idealized vision of a Metropolitan on the islands at the end of the world and, undoubtedly, a partly utopian vision of the colonies and the relationships, though recognized as tainted by domination, that those who live there maintain.
Underneath its sentimental overtones, Traversay's novel advocates another ideal, a patriotism that asserts itself in the union between the West Indies and France and is embodied in the destiny of Josephine de Beauharnais, born in Trois-Îlets in 1763, future Empress of France. These two authors, each at the height of his horizon, had perhaps envisaged that the situation could not last without a crash, and history proved them right. Abolition was not without difficulty: proclaimed on April 27, 1848, when Minister François Arago signed the decrees drafted by Victor Schœlcher, it was to come into effect two months later, but riots precipitated its implementation in Martinique. From this fracture, and from the reflection on slavery and then on colonialism that followed, will come the great literary movements that will be invented here during the 20th century.
Time for reflection
Until the 1920s, two fairly consensual currents emerged. On the one hand, Béké literature was resolutely inspired by French writers, both in form and in content; on the other hand, “exotic” texts were written that ignored realities and preferred conventional clichés that pleased metropolitan France. This truncated vision was to be found in all the overseas territories and was henceforth designated by a rather pejorative term, “doudouism”, to which is attached, for example, the work of the poet Daniel Thaly who, during his life, oscillated between English-speaking Dominica, where he was born in 1879, and Martinique, where he held the position of curator in the Schœlcher library. But in May 1921, a book was to appear that would make this literature evolve by giving it a more political turn.
René Maran was born on the ocean in 1887, raised successively in Martinique and Bordeaux. After becoming an administrator in Oubangui-Chari, a French territory in Central Africa, he abandoned poetry for a while to write a novel, Batouala, which was awarded the Prix Goncourt the year it was published by Albin Michel and made Maran the first black author to be crowned with this distinction. Under the guise of a love rivalry, in his story there is a violent denunciation of the excesses of colonialism, yet it is probably not by principle that the author will eventually leave the administration for which he worked, but to devote himself to writing journalism and literature. Although in his private correspondence he sometimes showed himself to be critical of France, the man remained no less patriotic. He will have, in fact, all the more difficulty to recognize himself in a new movement emerging, that of the Négritude, which will attribute to him a role of precursor that he will refuse to endorse, declaring himself humanist and fearing, above all, the rejection of the other. The conversations that Paulette Nardal (1896-1985) had in her living room at 7 rue Hébert in Clamart were certainly fascinating when, in the 1930s, she introduced René Maran to a young man, Aimé Césaire, who was born in 1913 in Basse-Pointe and came to France to pursue his studies.
At the same time, in 1932, the single issue of a magazine was published, which was to confirm that a new turn had been taken: Légitime Défense. Initiated by a group of young Martinican intellectuals who claimed to be communist as well as surrealist, this publication was intended to be a manifesto denouncing the dangers of assimilation, that is, the contortion of the “white soul in a black body,” a direct consequence of colonization. Among the signatories - Étienne Léro, Simone Yoyotte, Thélus Léro and Jules-Marcel Monnerot - stands out the name of René Ménil (1907-2004) who, a few years later, in 1941, will spearhead a new editorial project, Tropiques, together with Aimé Césaire and his wife, Suzanne. Aimé Césaire, in fact, pursued the ideas he had developed in the literary circle created by Paulette Nardal. In 1934, surrounded by Léon Gontran Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor, he founded the newspaper L'Étudiant noir, in which appeared for the first time the term “négritude”, a concept that encompassed the refusal of assimilation but was also tinged with a claim of black identity. Repeatedly used in various parts of the world, it will become under Sartre's pen a famous formula: “the negation of the negation of the black man”, that is to say the recognition of the attempt to annihilate, by slavery and then by colonization, a culture which from now on intends to impose itself.
Aimé Césaire and his family were once again confronted with censorship when the Vichy regime slowed down the publication of Tropiques, but the writer was resourceful, he was a brilliant orator, and the post-war period saw him take on political responsibilities, since he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 and, subsequently, member of parliament, a mandate that he would hold until the 1990s. In this new field, he was supported by a young Martinican, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who intended to become a psychiatrist. The period during which Fanon lived in Algeria encouraged him to reflect on the consequences of colonization, on the “depersonalization” that made the colonized person a person oppressed by the prejudices of the colonist, and on the feeling of inferiority that became a neurosis to which an answer had to be found during the period of decolonization. His two main works, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth, published a few days before his early death in 1961, still offer food for thought. A literary prize will bear his name and will be awarded in 1994 to a Martinican who, although more discreet, is certainly one of the most representative of West Indian literature: Joseph Zobel (1915-2006) who made his childhood the substance of his famous novel La Rue Cases-Nègres published in 1950.
Other writers and philosophers will continue the course of the reflections started. Thus, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) will develop the concept of antillanité (“Antilleanity”) and open the way to “relation” by elaborating the Tout-Monde (Every-Body), a shared knowledge opened to the differences which bring closer. After him, three writers will explore the notion of creolité (“Creoleness”). They will work concretely for the recognition of a language and a culture, thus Jean Bernabé, linguist, will intervene so that Creole enters university and will found in 1973 the GÉREC (Group of studies and research in Creole space), while Raphaël Confiant will publish the first Martinican Creole dictionary and will use this language to write his first novels. Their Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) (1989) was criticized for being too elitist, an argument to which the third signatory, Patrick Chamoiseau, was particularly sensitive and which brought him closer to the theses of his friend Édouard Glissant. Patrick Chamoiseau, born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, also won the Goncourt Prize in 1992 for his novel Texaco.
