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In the Belly of the Beast: Irony, Opacity, Politics

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Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean

Part of the book series: New Caribbean Studies ((NCARS))

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Abstract

Focusing on projects that seek to make political interventions and bring new communities into being, this chapter examines the importance of literary genre or form, paying particular attention to the concept of opacity. Analyzing the 2009 Manifeste pour les “produits” de haute nécessité and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s 1979 folktale-inspired novel, Ti Jean L’horizon, alongside the theoretical interventions of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau shows that hunger represents for these authors at once a material problem to eradicate and a poetic disposition to cultivate. Irony becomes a means for envisioning utopia and transforming the grounds on which new communities can be built.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 1. (Glissant 1989)

  2. 2.

    Schwarz-Bart, Between Two Worlds, 51 (Schwarz-Bart 1992). Hereafter, references to this text, and to the original French (Schwarz-Bart, Ti Jean L’horizon [Schwarz-Bart 1979]), will be given parenthetically.

  3. 3.

    On this point, see, among others, Condé, La civilisation du bossale (Condé 1978); Bébel-Gisler, Le Défi culturel guadeloupéen, 95–119 (Bébel-Gisler 1989); and Césaire and Ménil, “Introduction au folklore martiniquais.” (Césaire and Ménil 1942)

  4. 4.

    Burton, La famille coloniale, 253–254. (Burton 1994)

  5. 5.

    Ibid, 164.

  6. 6.

    Ibid, 164–165.

  7. 7.

    Loichot, The Tropics Bite Back, xv. (Loichot 2013)

  8. 8.

    Loichot sensitively analyzes the pathologizing media discourses surrounding the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake and the failure of a January 10, 2010 referendum put to Martinican voters proposing increased autonomy for the département. By presenting “their respective states of hunger or overconsumption…as a malediction in a vacuum not influenced by the political and historical circumstances that led these nations to such a state in the first place,” media discourses and commentary defined and linked “the contemporary people of Haiti and Martinique…through a movement that repeats centuries of defining black slaves and their descendants as being controlled by their stomach” (The Tropics Bite Back, ix–x [Loichot 2013]).

  9. 9.

    Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. (Glissant 1997b)

  10. 10.

    Crowley, “Édouard Glissant,” 107. (Crowley 2006)

  11. 11.

    Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 111. (Glissant 1997b)

  12. 12.

    Paul Allen Miller, “Ethics and Irony,” 54. (Miller 2009)

  13. 13.

    Žižek, The Parallax View, 4. (Žižek 2006)

  14. 14.

    Paul Allen Miller, “Ethics and Irony,” 54. (Miller 2009)

  15. 15.

    Glissant, Discours, 14. (Glissant 1997a)

  16. 16.

    Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 4. (Glissant 1989)

  17. 17.

    Žižek, The Parallax View, ix. (Žižek 2006)

  18. 18.

    Glissant, Discours, 17. (Glissant 1997a)

  19. 19.

    Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 2, 1. (Glissant 1989)

  20. 20.

    Crowley, “Édouard Glissant,” 107. (Crowley 2006)

  21. 21.

    Liger, “Patrick Chamoiseau.” My translation. (Liger 2012)

  22. 22.

    Harrison, “Metaphorical Memories,” 50. (Harrison 2011)

  23. 23.

    To Liger’s question, “Is writing, for you, a political weapon?” Chamoiseau responds, “Writing isn’t necessarily. But the poetic approach is” (L’écriture, pas forcément. Mais l’approche poétique, oui). Liger, “Patrick Chamoiseau.” My translation. (Liger 2012)

  24. 24.

    At times, Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s statements seem to suggest that opacity imposes itself with a force that is irresistible or inevitable. Both authors cite examples of opaque texts that, counter to (“Western”) expectations, strike up passion in the uninitiated reader; opacity is framed in these examples as speaking to or impacting readers across barriers to comprehension and clarity. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant remarks, “Western thought has led us to believe that a work must always put itself constantly at our disposal, and I know a number of our folktales, the power of whose impact on their audience has nothing to do with the clarity of their meaning” (107). Chamoiseau gives a stirring example of the “power of reading-writing in extreme circumstances” in Écrire en pays dominé (Writing in a Dominated Land) by recounting the story of Loïc Léry (unnamed in the text, but referred to through the title of his book, Le gang des Antillais), a prisoner Chamoiseau met as a social worker, and who found Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land engaging, despite/because of his lack of familiarity with literature, as well as the poem’s dense style (95–98, my translation). If such claims use particular examples to poke holes in common assumptions about the elitism of opaque texts, Glissant and Chamoiseau more often give attention to history and to the variability of reader’s reactions, insisting not only on the transformative capacity of opacity, but also on its unpredictability and lack of guarantees.

  25. 25.

    Glissant, Poetic Intention, 165. (Glissant 2001)

  26. 26.

    Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 114. (Glissant 1997b)

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 111.

  28. 28.

    As Clare Birchall puts it, transparency “is presented as a technical, rather than a political settlement,” a solution that promises to restore trust by obviating the need for other modes of disclosure, notably “narrative-interpretive forms of disclosure” tainted as less perfect and moral (“Radical” 77 [Birchall 2014]). Transparent governance, in the eyes of many international agencies operating in development, is seen, as Aradhana Sharma similarly notes, “not as an exercise in power, but as apolitical administration, which can be improved through expert restructuring” (Sharma, “State Transparency,” 309 [Sharma 2013]).

  29. 29.

    Gallagher, “Postcolonial Poetics,” 260. (Gallagher 2010)

  30. 30.

    Manifeste pour les “produits” de haute nécessité was signed by nine Antillean artists and intellectuals (Ernest Breleur, Patrick Chamoiseau, Serge Domi, Gérard Delver, Édouard Glissant, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert, Olivier Portecop, Olivier Pulvard, and Jean-Claude William) and published in multiple outlets, including the February 16, 2009 issues of Le Monde and L’Humanité (L’Humanité also published an English translation of the piece by Isabelle Métral titled A Plea for “Products of High Necessity” on March 5, 2009). Page numbers (hereafter cited parenthetically) refer to the print version published by Galaade Éditions (Paris, 2009); translations provided are my own. (Breleur et al. 2009)

  31. 31.

    Žižek, The Parallax View, 354. (Žižek 2006)

  32. 32.

    Puchner, “Manifesto = Theater,” 452. (Puchner 2002)

  33. 33.

    Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 1 (Scott 2004). Despite the genre’s reputed wane in recent decades, French Caribbean writers have regularly authored or signed manifestos of various forms, including those that declare themselves manifestos in their title (including the Manifeste pour les “produits” de haute nécessité discussed here), as well as various essays that employ the genre’s stylistic devices, such as Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant’s 1989 Éloge de la créolité [In Praise of Creoleness] (Bernabé et al. 1993), and Le Bris et al., “Pour une littérature-monde en français,” published in the March 16, 2007 edition of Le Monde des livres and signed by 44 French-language writers. (Le Bris et al. 2007)

  34. 34.

    Puchner, “Manifesto = Theater,” 458–459 (Puchner 2002). As Puchner’s analysis of avant-garde works shows, far from harnessing authority, the manifesto is “a genre deeply unsatisfied with itself, a genre that desperately wants to move beyond language and change the world. The self-critique that ensues from this desire not only accounts for the manifesto’s characteristic impatience, its choppy brevity, its eagerness to stop talking and start acting, but also for the attempt to infuse its own language with the attributes of action” (“Manifesto = Theater,” 451 [Puchner 2002]).

  35. 35.

    Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 2. (Glissant 1989)

  36. 36.

    Žižek, The Parallax View, 4. (Žižek 2006)

  37. 37.

    Schwarz-Bart has spoken on several occasions about the negative reception of La mulâtresse Solitude among both Jewish readers (who felt it represented a turn away from the Jewish people and their concerns) and Antilleans (who reproached what they saw as cultural appropriate on the part of a white, Jewish man), particularly after the posthumous publication of L’Ancêtre en Solitude, a manuscript previously thought lost, in 2015. As she says in an interview with Natalie Levisalles, “We felt abandoned on all sides. We felt that no one left room for us anywhere” (On s’est senti lâchés de tous les côtés. On sentait qu’aucun monde ne nous laissait de place). Though the couple had envisioned this work as part of a much larger “Antillean cycle,” André stopped publishing, feeling that the links he was seeking through writing had been cut off (Levisalles, “Quarante ans de ‘Solitude.’” My translation. (Levisalles 2015). On the Schwarz-Barts’ cowriting, see also Gyssels, Marrane et marronne. (Gyssels 2014)

  38. 38.

    In the blurb quoted on the back cover of the Seuil edition, Schwarz-Bart describes her text as “an identity quest, my own journey to the end of my Antillean night, in an attempt to exorcise it” (une quête de l’identité, un voyage que j’aurais fait au bout de ma nuit antillaise, pour tenter de l’exorciser), and has repeated in interviews that her motivation in writing the book was to “elucidate her night” (éclairer ma nuit). See Spear, “Simone Schwarz-Bart.” (Spear 2010)

  39. 39.

    Glissant, Le discours antillais, 48. (Glissant 1997a)

  40. 40.

    Crosta, “Merveilles.” (Crosta 1998)

  41. 41.

    See Sam Haigh’s study of the gendered character of Ti Jean’s quest and the role of foundational father that he comes to play in Schwarz-Bart’s novel in the chapter “The Continuing Quest for Origins.” Haigh, Mapping a Tradition, 92–126. (Haigh 2000)

  42. 42.

    Crosta, “Merveilles.” (Crosta 1998)

  43. 43.

    This expression, “une nature pure nature,” is omitted in the published translation.

  44. 44.

    Crosta comments,

    At bottom, Schwarz-Bart sheds light on the capacity of the mythic narratives of yesteryear to adapt to the new realities facing Caribbean societies. The narrative of Ti Jean L’horizon contains several other Creole folktale cycles: the Beast with seven heads, the “morphrasée,” she-devils, soucougnans, zombies.…It is inside the Beast, in the long haul through incorporation, digestion, and expulsion that Ti Jean dies and is reborn from his avatars. It is no less true that the figure of Ti Jean is articulated through and enters into dialogical relationships with other figures from the Creole repertory, the most well known of which is Ananzé. In so doing, he creates new significations and takes into account new symbolic systems to break the cycle of undervaluing and devaluing that impede Caribbean societies from flourishing. (My translation). (Crosta 1998)

  45. 45.

    Lyon, Manifestoes, 9. (Lyon 1999)

  46. 46.

    Žižek, The Parallax View, 13. (Žižek 2006)

  47. 47.

    Ibid., x.

  48. 48.

    Jameson, “First Impressions,” 8. (Jameson 2006)

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    Kirkus Reviews, “Between Two Worlds.” (Kirkus Reviews 1981)

  51. 51.

    Suzanne Crosta draws attention to the Christian significance of the pelican. According to legend, the pelican sacrifices its own flesh and blood to feed its young, and became in the Christian church a symbol of charity and transubstantiation. (Crosta 1998)

  52. 52.

    The jardin-bokay is a small garden of vegetables and herbs raised near the house for household needs.

  53. 53.

    The Société Anonyme de la Raffinerie des Antilles (SARA) is an Antillean refining company.

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  1. Dept of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, USA

    Nicole Simek

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Simek, N. (2016). In the Belly of the Beast: Irony, Opacity, Politics. In: Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean . New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55882-4_4

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