Lost Idyll: Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise

Abstract

In its first four years in print, Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise (1948) won praise for its poignant descriptions of the life of a young Martinican woman discovering her island and negotiating the erotic and economic mire of early-twentieth-century colonialism.¹ Je suis martiniquaise was the first book published in France by a woman of color. It won the Grandprix littéraire des Antilles in 1949. Capécia published a second novel, La Négresse blanche, in 1950. Then, in 1952, Frantz Fanon scathingly dismissed Je suis martiniquaise as evidence of black women’s desire for “lactification.” According to Fanon, Capécia’s novel epitomizes postcolonial subjects who, adopting the mind-set of the colonizer, strive to become whiter.² Fanon excoriated Capécia, whom he regularly called by her first name, because he saw her choice of the “other” for a partner as an attempt to be more “other” herself: “Mayotte loves a white man to whom she submits in everything. He is her lord. She asks nothing, demands nothing, except a bit of whiteness in her life” (42). Women, in Fanon’s reading, can literally take the body of the white man into their own to lighten not only themselves but “the race”: “We have been forewarned, Mayotte is striving for lactification. In a word, the race must be whitened” (29).³ And women writers who describe this process incorporate colonial ideology, reproducing it in their texts.