Postcolonial Slavery : An Overview of Colonialism’s Legacy [1 ed.] 9781443814577, 9781443801034

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Postcolonial Slavery

Postcolonial Slavery: An Overview of Colonialism’s Legacy

Edited by

Charlotte Baker and Jennifer Jahn

Postcolonial Slavery: An Overview of Colonialism’s Legacy, Edited by Charlotte Baker and Jennifer Jahn This book first published 2008 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Charlotte Baker and Jennifer Jahn and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0103-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0103-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Charles Forsdick Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Postcolonial Slavery Charlotte Baker and Jennifer Jahn Part I: (Mis-)Representations Chapter One................................................................................................. 8 The Expositions Coloniales: A Visual Enslavement of the Colonial Other? Kathryn Dale Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Imagining “Freedom”: The Rhetoric of Slavery in French-Language Writing about the Indian Mutinies Nicki Frith Part II: Breaking Silences, Re-Writing History Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 44 Transforming the Silences of the Past: The Writing of “l’histoire à faire” in French Caribbean Literature Aurélie L’Hostis Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 68 Slavery in the Literature of Madagascar: The Case of Raharimanana Claire Riffard

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Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 86 (Re)Writing 20th Century Slavery: Michelle Maillet’s L’Étoile noire Christina Oppel Part III: Postcolonial Slavery Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 108 Capitalism and Slavery in Kateb Yacine and Tahar Ben Jelloun Stephanie Decouvelaere Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 126 A Comparative Analysis of Jean-Robert Cadet’s Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American (1998) & Henriette Akofa’s Une esclave moderne (2000) Sadie Skinner Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 145 Enslaved Minds: The Complexity of Living in Ex-île for Martinican Women Jennifer Jahn Afterword: Slavery in Global Contexts ................................................... 166 Dominic Thomas Contributors............................................................................................. 178 Index........................................................................................................ 180

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover:

Anse Caffard Memorial. The memorial has been erected in memory of a slave ship that on the 8 April 1830 crashed into the cliffs of Diamant, Martinique. Forty-six of the captured slaves succumbed in the waters as they were still chained together. There are fifteen statues made of reinforced concrete, white grit and sand from Trinidad and Tabogo. They measure 2.5 metres in height and weigh 4 tons each. They point 110° to the Gulf of Guinea from where this ship had come and form a triangle. The triangular shape refers to the triangular slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas. The colour white is the traditional burial colour in the Caribbean and is used to mark the funerary nature of this place, where 40 of the shipwrecked slaves were buried.

Fig. 1-1:

Statue of the Empress Josephine in Fort-de-France, Martinique. The statue was beheaded in the 1990s by a group of artists who painted red around her neck. It has now been removed due to renovation works on the Savane and it is still unclear whether the statue will be restored and returned to Fort-de-France or whether, alternatively, it will be moved to Josephine’s birthplace of Trois-Ilets, Martinique.

Fig. 2-1:

Statue of the Nègre marron by H. Charpentier, erected in 1998 in the town of Diamant, Martinique.

Fig. 3-1:

Statue of Victor Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, Martinique. The plaque on the base of the statue is dedicated to him and reads: “Nulle terre française ne peut plus porter d’esclaves”, “No French soil must any longer carry slaves.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We have been working on the Postcolonial Slavery project for over a year now and we would like to thank everyone involved, from the people who assisted in the conception and organisation of the conference, to those who have supported us in the preparation of this volume. The papers in this collection were presented at a Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies conference held in London in November 2007. We are grateful to all those who supported this postgraduate event, in particular the delegates who responded so enthusiastically to the call for papers. We would also like to thank Christine Floreani at the Institut Français for her kind assistance in the lead up to the conference. Several people have helped us during the editing of this volume, notably our patient proofreaders, Susan Dickinson, Annelise Narvaez and Stepfanie Romine. Special thanks to Graham Hoggarth for allowing us to use his photographs and to Alex Hoggarth for his cover design. Our thanks also go to Dominic Thomas, Charles Forsdick, and Adlai Murdoch for supporting us and contributing to this project. Of course, the volume would not have been possible without the research of all the contributors. Thank you to you all. Charlotte Baker and Jennifer Jahn

FOREWORD CHARLES FORSDICK

Comment peut-il être permis de dire “tu dois te souvenir”, donc tu dois décliner la mémoire au mode impératif, alors qu’il revient au souvenir de pouvoir surgir à la façon d’une évocation spontanée. How can anyone be allowed to say “you have to remember”, implying that one must decline the verb remember in the imperative mode, when it is the nature of Memory itself to be able to spring up as a spontaneous evocation. —Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, p. 1061 [I]l n’existe pas une mémoire, mais des mémoires de la traite et de l’esclavage. Elles sont fragmentaires, dispersées, et surtout fortement territorialisées. Elles ne se sont pas élaborées de la même façon en Guadeloupe, en Martinique, en Guyane, à La Réunion, en Afrique, à Madagascar et en France, et l’étude de leur construction respective est nécessaire. Ce travail a été entamé mais beaucoup reste à faire. There does not exist a memory but several, varied memories of the slave trade and of slavery. They were not formed in the same way in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Reunion, Africa, Madagascar, and in France, and it is essential to study the various ways they came about. This work has been started but there is still much to do. —Vergès, La Mémoire enchaînée, p. 137

As an unofficial slogan for the celebrations marking the 1998 sesquicentenary of the (second) abolition of slavery in the French empire, Daniel Maximin, chair of the organizing committee, selected the now widely cited conclusion to Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, truncated and misquoted in the following form: 1

All quotations translated by the editors.

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Foreword Je ne suis pas esclave de l’esclavage qui déshumanisa mes pères. Je ne suis pas venu sur terre pour faire le bilan des valeurs nègres. Je ne suis pas venu sur terre pour faire payer au monde blanc, par mon ressentiment, le malheur fait à mes pères. Mon unique [sic] prière: ô mon coeur, fais de moi toujours un coeur qui interroge!2 I am not a slave to the slavery that dehumanised my forefathers. I did not come to this earth in order to assess Black values. I did not come to this earth to make the white world pay, with resentment, for the misfortune done to my forefathers. My only prayer: Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions!

The meanings and ongoing implications of the original quotation—and especially of the key phrase: “Je ne suis pas esclave de l’esclavage qui déshumanisa mes pères”—have stimulated searching debate, amongst scholars of Fanon as well as in postcolonial studies more generally. The apparent refusal in the early Fanon to be locked into a cycle of victimhood—according to which the brutal dehumanization that characterized Atlantic slavery is seen inexorably to dictate the postcolonial connections between peoples and cultures—is associated with what may be seen as its later corollary, i.e. an internationalist, Black Atlantic perspective that refuses to restrict historical phenomena such as slavery and colonialism to specific geographical locations, nor to reduce their impact exclusively to particular ethnic groups. The liberation towards which Fanon’s subsequent work aimed depended accordingly on a permanent interrogation of the colonial present, exploring the historical circumstances from which it has emerged but focusing at the same time on the possible futures to which it might lead. Central to such a project is the realization—shared with contemporaries such as Sartre—that the then coming decolonization, in its many forms, was to be neither unilateral nor time-ended, but instead an ongoing process whose “success” depended on the involvement of all parties associated with the colonial process—as colonizer, colonized, or those located somewhere in-between. That such a complex and loaded quotation should have been chosen in the context of 1998 is telling, for the tensions between singular event and ongoing process are essential to an understanding of both slavery and abolition—as well as of their impact and afterlives. As the contributions to 2 Fanon 1952, 186. See also Daniel Maximin, “Il faut arrêter d’être esclave de l’esclavage”, Internaute Magazine, December 2006 [available online: http://www.linternaute.com/histoire/magazine/interview/danielmaximin/retranscription-daniel-maximin.shtml]. For the passages containing the original quotation, see Fanon 1952, 186-88.

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the present volume make clear, the historical experience of slavery does not end with abolition and emancipation, but persists as a trigger to legacies of metaphorical and often literal modes of (re-)enslavement. Commemoration of chattel slavery, like the historical phenomenon of slavery itself, is best understood as a transnational phenomenon, but the unevenness of memorial practices, transcending national and cultural boundaries, make it clear that any consensus implicit in—and often intended by—the activity of “remembering-together” becomes increasingly unlikely. The official slogan of 1998, “Tous nés en 1848”, “All born in 1848”, disguised the very different memorial traditions that the sesquicentenary attempted to federate. Tensions between, on the one hand, the desire to share multiple memories and, on the other, the ongoing fragmentation of often divergent narratives of the past have persisted in recent debates in the French-speaking world regarding Atlantic (and, to a lesser extent, Indian Ocean) slavery, with hostility towards the sesquicentenary of 1998 serving as a catalyst in such developments.3 The year 1998 did not of course mark the re-emergence of slavery into the arena of public and academic debate in the French-speaking world: the centenary of abolition, marked in 1948 in the immediate aftermath of Brazzaville and departmentalization, had itself merited official commemorations, in which the young député Aimé Césaire had played a key role;4 more recently, François Mitterrand’s election to the Elysée was accompanied by his solemn, solitary visit to the Panthéon, during which he had laid red roses on the tombs of Jean Jaurès, Jean Moulin and the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher;5 the official bicentenary of the French Revolution, from which any overt reference to the Haitian Revolution was largely absent, nevertheless conscripted Toussaint Louverture to its own celebrations;6 1992 saw the inauguration in Nantes of Les Anneaux de la Mémoire, one of the first major exhibitions in France on the Atlantic slave trade; and, although largely unnoticed in France, the bicentenary of the first abolition of slavery was marked in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1994.7 Slowly woven into the calendar of commemorations by which late twentieth-century France was characterized, memories of slavery became increasingly prominent in 1998—i.e., in the year following UNESCO’s proclamation of 23 August (the anniversary of the Bois Caïman ceremony, 3

Vergès 2006, 90-91 Césaire 2004 5 Northcutt 1991 6 Trouillot 1995. There was also speculation during the preparations for the Bicentenary regarding the Pantheonization of Toussaint. See Forsdick 2005. 7 Dorigny 2003 4

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seen by many as the trigger for the Haitian Revolution) as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition; and the same year that UNESCO additionally launched “Breaking the Silence”, an international project aimed at highlighting, through educational initiatives, the historical significance of the slave trade, and its social, cultural and economic impact on the Atlantic world. Developments in France occurred therefore in an international context, but gained increasing national prominence not least because of the controversies that marked this sesquicentenary, the emphasis of which progressively risked becoming at worst Franco-centric—in Glissant’s terms, an “affaire franco-française”—or at best polarized on different sides of the Atlantic along the predictable lines of divergent memorial practices.8 As the Bicentenary of the first abolition (largely ignored in France, but prominent in the then DOM-TOMs) made clear in 1994, members of formerly enslaved societies tend to remember the long experience of enslavement (and its permanent resistance), whereas metropolitan commemoration is more likely to privilege the process of abolition, often seen as a primarily judicial and parliamentary process dependent on metropolitan philanthropy.9 Political activism regarding recognition of memories of slavery—and acknowledgement of their implications for present experience—became increasingly apparent in France’s overseas departments throughout the 1990s, culminating in the Taubira Law in 2001 (“tendant à la reconnaissance de la traite et de l’esclavage en tant que crime contre l’humanité”, “towards the recognition of the slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity”), a legislative manoeuvre ensuring the imprescriptibility of slavery, voted in response to protests at what Geoffroy de Laforcade dubs the “timorous official commemoration” of 1998.10 Whether this legislation—despite the very real commitment of its proposer (the French Guyanese MP Christiane Taubira) to anti-racism and equality—was viewed officially as a means of appeasing protest remains a subject of speculation. What is clear, however, is that pressure groups based in France and the Caribbean have continued to challenge the sleight of hand implicit in French commemoration of slavery. They refuse to accept that any celebration of the judicial process of abolition should be allowed either to eclipse the centuries of resistance that predated such a move or to ignore the progressive entrenchment of colonization for which emancipation prepared the way. In the most recent (and far from 8

Catinchi 1998 Forsdick 2008 10 De Laforcade 2006, 228 9

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concluded) debates regarding colonial memory and French legislative practice, slavery and its afterlives have accordingly played a key role. This is not least the case in those events surrounding the controversial fourth clause of the 23 February 2005 law, about which Dominic Thomas writes in his afterword to this volume. The signatories of the “appel” of the Indigènes de la République (itself launched in January 2005) identified themselves as “descendants d’esclaves et de déportés africains, filles et fils de colonisés et d’immigrés”, “descendants of slaves and deported Africans, daughters and sons of the colonized and of immigrants”,11 and later in the same year, in a case against the historian Olivier PétréGrenouilleau, another group of activists, the Collectif des Antillais, Guyanais, Réunionnais, was responsible for the first invocation of the Taubira law.12 *** In evoking “postcolonial slavery”, and engaging with the questions that such a concept betokens, the current volume represents a reaction to the evolving contemporary debates outlined above. The essays that follow address the various legacies—tangible and intangible, direct and indirect—of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean; at the same time, they ensure that the persistence of contemporary forms of enslavement— seen, for instance, in the figure of the Haitian restavec, studied here by Sadie Skinner—are not ignored. Approaches deployed in the volume are innovatively cross-disciplinary, illustrating the many ways in which historical approaches to slavery are increasingly complemented by work in other fields. Historiography, representational studies and literary criticism are adopted in the essays that follow to explore a range of textual and other cultural forms—fictional, autobiographical and journalistic—produced in or inspired by traces of slavery and its aftermath in a variety of geographical locations, most notably the Caribbean, but also India, Madagascar, North Africa and France itself. The chapters in this collection engage with and explore a series of prominent key issues, the implications of which are at once social, cultural, political and intellectual. In what remains of this foreword, I intend to outline three principal areas around 11

For the complete text, see The case centred on Pétré-Grenouilleau’s comment, in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche (12 June 2005), that “les traites négrières ne sont pas des génocides”, the slave trades are not genocides”. A petition signed by nineteen leading historians was published in Pétré-Grenouilleau’s defence, and the case was subsequently withdrawn (in February 2006). 12

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which much current research on slavery and its contemporary avatars might be situated: i. slavery and colonialism? The links between the histories (and memories) of slavery, and those of colonial expansion with which they are often simultaneously evoked, are explored in a number of contributions to the current volume. Key events in French colonial history—such as the Haitian Revolution, or the legislation leading to abolition in 1848—reveal that, although closely intertwined, colonialism and slavery are far from synonymous and resist any easy conflation. This distinction is apparent in tensions amongst the leadership of the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint Louverture’s motivation was primarily centred on the destruction of slavery, seen as contrary to the ideals of the French Revolution; historians continue to debate whether the proposal of dominion status for Haiti in his 1801 constitution, seen by Aimé Césaire (1960) as a move towards “un commonwealth français”, “a French commonwealth”, was an attempt to protect freedoms recently acquired through armed struggle, or a step towards inevitable post-colonial independence. For Toussaint’s successor Dessalines, faced with Napoleon’s efforts to re-impose slavery through the Leclerc campaign, the distinction was no longer sustainable: opposition to enslavement was rapidly transformed into an overtly and prototypically anti-colonial war. As Nick Nesbitt reminds us, despite the upheavals experienced by post-independence Haiti, the new state’s citizens nevertheless avoided the implications of the slavery re-imposed elsewhere in the Francophone Caribbean. In quantifying the gains of the Revolution, Nesbitt writes: “they [the Haitians] avoided precisely forty-six years of enslavement”,13 and to this we might add: “…and two centuries of colonial, then neo-colonial, dependency”. For the philanthropic spin to which 1848 has subsequently been subject often disguises the fact that, with slavery abolished in the French Empire, the formerly enslaved remained oxymoronic “colonized citizens” for almost a further century before departmentalization in 1946—a process itself recently described as “the most complete form of colonization possible”.14 Vergès underlines the centrality of these links to current debates on slavery in the Frenchspeaking world: “L’abolition reconduit l’inégalité en organisant la transition de l’esclavage à la servitude”, “Abolition redirects inequality in the transition from slavery to servitude”.15 13

Nesbitt 2005, 8 Dash 2005, 20 15 Vergès 2006, 75 14

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From these complex historical circumstances—and the often misleading narratives by which they are presented in the present—emerge important questions about sequence, and cause and effect: to what extent, for instance, did early Atlantic slavery create assumptions about race that facilitated the ideological justification of colonial expansion? To what extent did New Imperialism perpetuate in France and the wider Frenchspeaking world pigmentocratic prejudices regarding race and ethnicity— and the representational strategies with which these are associated—after formal abolition? In addressing these issues of continuity and discontinuity, Kathryn Dale’s chapter below coins the phrase “visual enslavement” to describe the means whereby indigenous subjects were conscripted to play a role in the exhibitionary order of France’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expositions coloniales. Her argument suggests that the abolition of 1848—enacted in the brief window of opportunity provided by the Second Republic—exists in an uneasy relationship with the consolidation of colonial power by which it was followed. Nicki Frith pursues a related line of inquiry by proposing that, post-abolition, slavery continued to play a rhetorical role in inter-colonial rivalries, with the French-language press equating British imperial activity during the Indian Uprisings of the late 1850s with practices of slavery. In such analyses, slavery and colonialism emerge therefore as distinctive without necessarily being distinct, an observation associated with the fact that the impact, perception and memorialization of each of these phenomena depends on the respective subjectivities—and associated agency—of, on the one hand, those descending from colonizing and enslaving societies, and, on the other, of those belonging to groups that were colonized or enslaved. As I have already suggested (and as critical reactions to the commemoration of slavery, or to groups such as the Indigènes de la République make clear), despite the constructively polemical purposes to which it might be out, any such compartmentalized, even Manichean view of historical process does not bear close scrutiny. Whereas in French historiography, 1848 is associated with (and even celebrated as) a rapid shift in balance away from slavery towards colonialism, the experience (and legacy) of that same moment amongst the formerly enslaved populations of the French-speaking Caribbean has proved to be entirely different. There is thus evidence of a double slippage, not only between the relationships of particular groups to specific but often interrelated series of historical moments, but also between divergent and even contradictory associations with seemingly shared historical phenomena. The former relates to wider debates about multiple, “multidirectional” memories; the latter to questions of memory-sharing,

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and of shared memories, that have for some decades been particularly apparent in the “history wars” relating to Australia’s aboriginal population, but are equally pertinent to and increasingly present in the search for a “mémoire partagée”, “shared memory”, increasingly associated with the afterlives of slavery in the French-speaking world.16 ii. “multidirectional memories”, mémoire partagée? One of the repeated criticisms of the “appel” of the Indigènes de la République (already cited above) is its tendency to conflate historical periods and the different events and phenomena with which they are identified in statements such as: Nos parents, nos grands-parents ont été mis en esclavage, colonisés, animalisés. […]. Nous sommes leurs héritiers comme nous sommes les héritiers de ces Français qui ont résisté à la barbarie nazie. Our parents, our grandparents were enslaved, colonised, animalised. […]. We are their heirs as we are the heirs of those French who resisted Nazi barbarity.

In studying the intersections of the Shoah and the Algerian War of Independence, Michael Rothberg (2004; 2006) has moved away from any potentially damaging notion of competing or conflated memories that such rhetoric may be seen to imply, and focuses instead on interconnections revealing the convergence and divergence of what he dubs “multidirectional memories”. Two chapters among those that follow illustrate the ways in which such a concept might permit careful exploration of the entanglement of memories of enslavement with those of other major historical forces and events: Claire Riffard, in an innovative reading of Raharimanana’s Nour, 1947, suggests how readers might approach the complex layering in that text of Madagascar’s very specific history of slavery and abolition, the experience of Madagascan tirailleurs in the World Wars, and the brutal massacres following the 1947 uprisings on the island; Christina Oppel presents in her study of Michelle Maillet’s L’Étoile noire links between the legacies of slavery (in the Caribbean and North America) and the Shoah. To an awareness of such complex interconnections should, as I have suggested above, be added an acknowledgement of the competing memory traditions that emerge from shared historical events or processes. A recently published collection of essays (Myazhiom, 2006) marking the first official celebration of France’s slavery memorial day presents in its title the tensions that such sharing, 16

Attwood 2005

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related for instance to any such attempts at creating consensus through commemoration, might entail: Esclaves noirs, maîtres blancs: quand la mémoire de l’opprimé s’oppose à la mémoire de l’oppresseur (Black Slaves, White Masters: When the Memory of the Oppressed is opposed to the Oppressor’s Memory). Dichotomized views of memorial practices have recently been challenged by scholars such as Emmanuel Terray (2006), whose distinction between “victimes directes” and “victimes indirectes” has attempted to highlight the transformations and deformations inherent in the transgenerational freighting of the past; at the same time, official French approaches to memorial politics and practice—apparent in documents such as the first report of the Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage—have highlighted the desirability of a consensus-building “mémoire partagée” in relation to traumatic events of the past.17 The risk of a singular “shared memory”—evident politically in decisions such as the choice of a national slavery memorial day—is that it erodes the specificity of different and often divergent memory traditions. In reporting Jacques Chirac’s announcement in January 2006 (shortly before his repeal of the fourth clause of the 23 February 2005 law) that 10 May would be the date selected to “honorer le souvenir des esclaves et commémorer l’abolition de l’esclavage”, “honour the memory of the slaves and commemorate the abolition of slavery”, the French media largely ignored, for instance, the pre-existence of competing dates in the French-speaking world. On 30 June 1983, in the early years of the Mitterrand presidency, Loi n°83-550 (“relative à la commémoration de l’abolition de l’esclavage”, “relative to the commemoration of the abolition of slavery”) had established commemorative public holidays in Mayotte (27 April), Martinique (22 May), Guadeloupe (27 May), Guyane (10 June) and La Réunion (10 December) to reflect regional histories of resistance and abolition. As the various contributions to this volume make abundantly clear, in the field of slavery studies it is essential to ensure that attention is directed to the cultural and geographical specificity of memory, and to the distinctiveness of memorial practices, whether these are related to the

17 For the committee’s reports, see . The presence of a more general policy of “mémoire partagée” can be seen in Jacques Chirac’s October 2006 speech to the inaugural “Rencontres Internationale sur la Mémoire partagée”, read by Hamlaoui Mékachéra, ministre délégué aux Anciens combattants. See

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individual, the collective or the national (and intermediate social groups).18 There is a risk that the goal of a singular “mémoire partagée” may become disabling in terms of potential dialogue, whereas permitting plural “mémoires partagées” or shared memories, can have more unexpected, enabling effects. As Françoise Vergès notes in La Mémoire enchaînée: Cette histoire [the history of Atlantic slavery], partagée par les maîtres et les esclaves, les colonisateurs et les colonisés, dans la mesure où ils l’ont faite ensemble, sur un même sol, à travers les conflits et les négotiations, le rejet et la rencontre, a produit des récits opposés, qui s’excluent. Or, […] ces histoires se croisent, s’interpellent, s’influencent.19 This history, shared by masters and slaves, colonisers and colonised, in so far as they created it together, on the same earth, through conflict and negotiation, rejection and encounter, has produced opposing stories that exclude one another. Yet, […] these stories meet, call out to and influence each other.

iii. colonial and postcolonial slavery: continuities and discontinuities. A final key question regarding the “legacies” or “afterlives” of slavery— concepts often alluded to in both the political and academic spheres, without necessarily being associated with careful reflection on the logic of cause and effect that they may be seen to imply—relates to contemporary forms of slavery. Just as focus on modern forms of global exploitation— such as debt bondage, sex trafficking and forced labour—should not detract attention from the historical role of slavery in the formation of national cultures and societies, so study of memories of the past trade must not obscure the persistence of enslavement in the present. Literature on contemporary slavery is growing rapidly, thanks to the work of pioneering scholars and activists such as Kevin Bales (1999) and Joël Quirk (forthcoming), and of organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, WISE (Wilberforce Institute for Slavery and Emancipation) in Hull and ISM (International Slavery Museum) in Liverpool. Stephanie Decouvelaere’s study in this volume of “disposable people” in Kateb Yacine and Tahar Ben Jelloun suggests how literary texts might be used to explore further the (dis-)continuities between historical slavery and contemporary forms of exploitation and enslavement. The literary text serves as a means of preserving or unearthing those “non-histoires” 18

For a discussion on the practices of memory in Martinique—and in particular of how local memories of slavery have been articulated through the vandalism of official statues—see Curtius 2008. 19 Vergès 2006, 35

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invariably absent from official narratives, but which emerge, in Ricoeur’s terms in the epigraph to this foreword, “à la façon d’une évocation spontanée”, “in the way of a spontaneous evocation”, the study of such material is instrumental in the types of dynamic, multi-lateral “memorysharing” described above, and is increasingly proving itself to be central to avoidance of the reduction of the memory of slavery to something “muséifiée, sacralisée, judiciarisée, banalisée et instrumentalisée”, “sacralised, legalised, banalised, utilized and transformed into a museum piece”.20 *** In the ten years since the sesquicentenary of abolition in the Frenchspeaking world, the attention directed to slavery in France and in the wider French-speaking world has therefore markedly increased, and as this volume amply demonstrates, studies in slavery continue to develop. Many of the chapters that follow, especially those by Aurélie L’Hostis and Jennifer Jahn, make clear that literature—as well as, one might add, the visual arts—has continued to play a key role both in the excavation of memories of enslavement and in reflections on the resonance of such memories in the present. Whilst knowledge of essential empirical and statistical detail continues to be extended, scholars have also begun to explore the cultural impact and legacies of enslavement and abolition, and to address those subjective, “affective” and even sensory aspects of the experience of the slave trade without which our understanding of the lives of individuals can be reduced.21 The rise of awareness of the histories of slavery, in addition to closer exploration of the ways in which such histories permeate contemporary societies, nevertheless continues to attract hostile attention: in France, from writers such as Pascal Bruckner (2005), for whom excessive intellectual attention to questions of enslavement are part of “la tyrannie de la pénitence”, “tyranny of punishment”, dictating the West’s supposedly expiatory relationship to the rest of the world; in Britain, from historians such as Jeremy Black, by whom collective grief and official apologies are dismissed as the “curse of history”.22 Reacting to the risks of such revisionism, Myriam Cottias notes in La Question noire:

20

Vergès 2006, 129 Rediker 2007; Smith 2001 22 2008; see also Black 2006. The Social Affairs Unit, publisher of these two volumes by Black, is a right-leaning think tank based in the UK. For a balanced 21

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Foreword Il n’y a pas d’esclavage heureux, bien que toutes les situations ne soient pas semblables. Il faut donc accepter l’histoire des esclaves dans leurs diversité, leur complexité, dans leurs contradictions dérangeantes; dans leurs phases de révoltes héroïques et triomphantes; comme tout sujet d’histoire.23 There is no happy slavery, although all situations might not be the same. One must therefore accept the history of slaves in their diversity, their complexity, in their disturbing contradiction; in their heroic and triumphant revolt; as with every historical subject.

It is an essential commitment to the exploration of diversity and complexity that inspires and underpins the chapters that follow.

Bibliography Attwood, Bain. 2005. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bales, Kevin. 1999. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Black, Jeremy. 2006. The Slave Trade. London: Social Affairs Unit. —. 2008. The Curse of History. London: Social Affairs Unit. Bruckner, Pascal. 2006. La Tyrannie de la pénitence. Paris: Grasset. Catinchi, Philippe-Jean. 1998. ‘Penser l’abolition’. Le Monde des Livres, 24 April: viii. Césaire, Aimé. 2004. Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage: suivi de trois discours. Lectoure: Bibliothèque du Capucin. —. 1960. Toussaint Louverture: la révolution française et le problème colonial. Paris, Club français du livre. Cottias, Myriam. 2007. La Question noire: histoire d’une construction coloniale. Paris: Bayard. Curtius, Anny Dominique. 2008. ‘À Fort-de-France les statues ne meurent pas’. International Journal of Francophone Studies 11.1-2: 87-106. Dash, Michael. 2005. ‘France and the Caribbean’. In France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, ed. Bill Marshall. 3 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, I, 17-26. Dorigny, Marcel, ed. 2003. The Abolitions of Slavery: From the L. F. Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848. Oxford: Berghahn. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. reflection on official apologies, and on their motivations and implications, see Nobles 2008 (especially 132-35). 23 Cottias 2007, 89

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Forsdick, Charles 2005. ‘The Black Jacobin in Paris’. Journal of Romance Studies 5.3: 9-24. —. 2008. ‘Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship’. Small Axe 27: 1-13. Laforcade, Geoffroy de. 2006. ‘“Foreigners”, Nationalism and the “Colonial Fracture”: Stigmatized Subjects of Historical Memory in France’. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 47.3-4: 21733. Myazhiom, Aggée C. Lomo, ed. 2006. Esclaves noirs, maîtres blancs: quand la mémoire de l’opprimé s’oppose à la mémoire de l’oppresseur. Paris: Homnisphères. Nesbitt, Nick. 2005. ‘The Idea of 1804’. Yale French Studies 107: 6-38. Nobles, Melissa. 2008. The Politics of Official Apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, Joël. [forthcoming]. The Anti-Slavery Project: Bridging the Historical and Contemporary. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press. Rediker, Marcus. 2007. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking. Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Rothberg, Michael. 2004. ‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinéma Vérité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor’. PMLA 119.5: 1231-46 —. 2006. ‘Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness’. Critical Inquiry 33.1: 158-84. Smith, Mark M. 2001. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Terray, Emmanuel. 2006. Face aux abus de mémoire. Arles: Actes Sud. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Vergès, Françoise. 2006. La Mémoire enchaînée: questions sur l’esclavage. Paris: Albin Michel.

INTRODUCTION POSTCOLONIAL SLAVERY—NOW AND THEN CHARLOTTE BAKER AND JENNIFER JAHN

On 22 May 2008, France commemorated the 160th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Incidentally, UNESCO chose this same day to honour Aimé Césaire who had passed away the previous month. In 1946, Césaire headed the committee in favour of the departmentalization of Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique and Reunion Island; a move that would not only economically secure these overseas departments, but that would eventually lead to “le problème de l’identité”, “the problem of identity”.1 One of the main factors contributing to such identity problems, which, as will be seen, are by no means inherent to the DOM-TOMs, is the former empire’s involvement in the slave trade and the ambivalent relationship this creates between formerly colonized and former colonizer. More than six decades later, the problem of identity and the repercussions of the French colonial empire—and more importantly the legacy of slavery— continue to occupy the academic world and have led to a number of important publications.2 Despite almost a decade having passed since France’s sesquicentennial commemoration, debates over the propriety of commemoration continue to pervade political and intellectual scenes, questioning not only the act of slavery, but, moreover, the system behind it: colonialism. This became most obvious in 2005 when then Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a law requiring teachers and textbooks to acknowledge and teach the positive role of French colonialism. This led to such outrage, followed by Césaire’s public refusal to meet with him on a scheduled visit to Martinique, that Sarkozy had to cancel his trip to the island. Martinican lawyer and politician, Marie-Alice André-Jaccoulet states that 1

Césaire 2005, 37 Recent publications include, for example: Miller 2008; Reinhardt 2006; Vergès 2006.

2

2

Introduction

“L’esclavage est encore trop présent dans notre inconscient. Ses séquels aussi”, “Slavery is still very present in our subconscious. Its sequels as well”.3 It becomes evident, then, that colonialism and its legacy still present a burning issue that needs to be addressed in metropolitan France, its overseas departments, the wider Francophone world, and, indeed, globally. The contributions in this collection specifically tackle slavery and its different manifestations, whether past or present, metaphorical, figurative or literal, from varying points of view, encompassing historical, rhetorical and literary approaches, among others. We define postcolonial slavery as the manifestations of enslavement in modern, speak: post-colonial times. This can cover slavery in the form of dependence on certain literary traditions, psychological enslavement, manifest in blind obedience and the absorption of doctrines or behaviour, or such practices as the sex trade and forced domestic labour. Postcolonial slavery can be an instrument of oppression or a socio-economic tool used in the subjugation of citizens. In short, postcolonial slavery represents the continuing legacy and influence that a past of oppression and domination, a past of slavery and colonialism, still has on women and men from former colonies. A wide range of critical approaches are taken by the authors of the papers in this collection to examine different forms of slavery, from types of enslavement during the colonial era to modern manifestations of slavery. They tackle questions such as how was slavery represented in discourse during the time of the empire and how is it portrayed today? Has discourse on slavery changed since the independence or departmentalization of former colonies? What other forms of slavery exist? How do the formerly colonized deal with such questions of enslavement? What are some of the questions and issues that arise when treating the topic of slavery? And finally, what is the legacy of slavery, both for France and her ex-colonies? The question of representation predominates in the first part of the volume. The papers address representations of the colonial other and how (mis)representations in the domain of the Colonial Exposition in Paris as well as French newspapers in the 19th century led to a new form of slavery: the visual enslavement of the colonial other and the silencing of (hi)story and consequent enslaving of Indian voices by French journalists. The volume opens with Kathryn Dale’s examination of the Colonial Exposition in Paris, held in 1889 and 1900. These expositions were a means by which to promote the colonial possessions of the Third Republic 3

Maignan-Claverie 2005, 213 (Our translation)

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3

to its citizens in the metropole, advocating the continuation of colonialism in places as far as the West Indies, Africa and the Indian Ocean. They informed the French about the colonial subjects exhibited in human zoos. Such exhibitions not only misrepresented and tokenized a small group of people to stand for an entire culture, but visually enslaved them and denigrated their status as human beings. Nicki Frith’s analysis of the rhetoric employed in French newspapers when reporting on the Indian Mutinies uncovers similar enslavement. Here, the representation of the British colonial system is used to foil the French system, describing the British as despotic and uncivilized. This French juxtaposition of two systems of oppression and France’s attempt to redress through journalistic channels its failure to colonize India led to the enslavement of the actual protagonists in the mutinies: the Indians. It is their story and their making of history that are silenced in French newspapers; French rhetoric effectively enslaving their voices. The essay by Aurélie L’Hostis marks the transition from representation to the re-writing of history in this following section. Again, the silencing of voices of the past is a central theme. However, this section is more concerned with actively breaking such silences. L’Hostis examines the commemoration of slavery in France, from 1998 onwards and, through the analysis of Edouard Glissant’s work, proposes the necessity for a reimagination of Caribbean history, a history that has thus far been ignored or rather silenced. This erased past needs to be re-established in order to re-constitute a form of collective memory. She calls Glissant’s œuvre a work of rehabilitation of the Caribbean’s suppressed history and proposes that he “tr[y] to define a space where a literature of ‘national consciousness’ can finally emerge.” Claire Riffard’s examination of Rharimanana also explores how this writer tries to break the silences of the past. In this case, it is silence about slavery in Madagascar, instituted in colonial times and widely ignored in literary circles. By writing about such past wrongs, Raharimanana attempts to include slave memory in contemporary Madagascan society, making it a vital part of who Madagascans are and where they come from. Another act of re-writing the past is found in Christina Oppel’s chapter. Through her examination of Michelle Maillet’s L’Étoile noire, she establishes a new genre of the traditional Holocaust novel: the Black Holocaust novel. This contribution to French-Caribbean German history has thus far barely been represented. Oppel proposes that Maillet’s novel delivers an alternative history by responding to white Holocaust discourse through expansion to include a transatlantic interracial context. She calls this act “literary archaeology” and, by placing L’Étoile noire at the intersection of Holocaust literature

4

Introduction

and French Caribbean writing, creates ground for the French Caribbean neo-slave narrative. The final section of this collection takes a closer look at different forms of postcolonial slavery. Stephanie Decouvelaere’s chapter addresses precisely this colonial legacy. Although, as she points out, the Maghreb, or North Africa, does not have a history of French-enforced slavery, the consequences of France’s colonization of the area are highly visible and problematic. The poverty caused by colonialism in Morocco through modernization and the industrialization of agriculture led many to move to France in an attempt to find work during the 1950s and ’60s post-war reconstruction. Kateb Yacine’s references to slavery are pervasive throughout his work and Tahar Ben Jalloun’s writings, although not explicitly referring to it, can be similarly interpreted in such terms. Decouvelaere proposes that the victimization established through a capitalist system of exploitation, resulting in postcolonial migration, can in fact be interpreted as metaphorical slavery. Similarly, as proposed by Sadie Skinner, does metaphorical slavery appear in the works of JeanRobert Cadet and Henriette Akofa, who examine the Haitian tradition of restavecs. Her examination of these modern-day slaves focuses on racial and class differences and places the neo-slave narratives in the context of a modern-day audience. Although these narratives raise “awareness of perpetuation of slavery in the modern era,” she cautions against their marketing for a predominantly white, metropolitan audience in order to avoid the silencing of the other. Finally, the metaphorical slavery in Jennifer Jahn’s paper is concerned with Martinican women’s enslavement by ideals, attitudes and practices of the past as shown in the novels D’Eaux douces and C’est vole que je vole. The protagonists struggle with their sexual identities, influenced by a past of rape and emasculation, and with a subtle form of madness, folie douce, which represents a means of escape from socially oppressive forces. The roots of both areas of conflict can be traced back to the time of slavery and colonialism, as the author proposes. The obsession and awareness with such a past and an inability or unwillingness to come to terms with a present deeply influenced by it, lead to very different results. The papers in Postcolonial Slavery provide a fresh contribution to the field of Francophone postcolonial studies and their subjects could not be timelier than at this moment of commemoration of a past of slavery and colonialism. The authors’ approaches draw out themes and issues that have previously not been considered and place them together in one coherent volume. Combining literary, theoretical and historical perspectives, the multi-faceted nature of postcolonial slavery is laid bare.

Postcolonial Slavery—Now and Then

5

The inclusion and examination of texts from former colonies such as Haïti, Madagascar and Morocco, assimilated colonies such as Martinique, and visual and journalistic sources from the French Republic creates an extensive portrait of the issue of postcolonial slavery and opens up as yet untapped possibilities for the continuing study of Francophone postcolonial texts.

Bibliography Césaire, Aimé. 2005. Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès. Paris: Albin Michel. Maignan-Claverie, Chantal. 2005. Le métissage dans la littérature des Antilles françaises: Le complexe d’Ariel. Paris: Karthala. Miller, Christopher. 2008. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Reinhardt, Catherine A. 2006. Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Vergès, Françoise. 2006. La mémoire enchaînée: questions sur l’esclavage. Paris: Albin Michel.

PART I (MIS-)REPRESENTATIONS

Fig. 1-1. © Graham Hoggarth

CHAPTER ONE THE EXPOSITIONS COLONIALES: A “VISUAL ENSLAVEMENT” OF THE COLONIAL OTHER? KATHRYN DALE

In 1998 France commemorated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the final abolition of slavery. Despite its initial abolition in 1794, under the ancien régime, the slave trade was reinstated by Napoleon in 1802 and its ultimate prohibition was not until 1848, during the Second Republic. Republican values following the end of slavery were built upon the tripartite motto liberté, égalité, fraternité, which was born from the Revolution of 1789, and became the official slogan of France during the Third Republic. Despite these Republican ideals, however, this article will reassess whether the concept of enslavement, commonly associated with degradation, oppression and forced labour as outlined by Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, was definitively laid to rest following the creation of the French Third Republic.1 It will use the example of the human zoos—a mise-enscène of the colonial Other—at the Expositions Coloniales of the Third Republic (herein referred to as the exhibitions) in order to question whether the displays of the colonial Other constituted the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of France’s colonial possessions, and whether the process of enslavement thus continued beyond 1848.2 Building upon a range of essays in the book Zoos humains edited by Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel et al. (2004), which consider the visual displays of alterity at the exhibitions, this chapter will analyse how the human exhibits were visually employed to provide an image of the French empire to the French public. Some of the essays in Blanchard and 1

Modupe Kolawole 2005, 103 For a more detailed definition of the human zoos see Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo and Lemaire 2004, 5.

2

The Expositions Coloniales: A Visual Enslavement of the Colonial Other?

9

Bancel’s compilation engage with the concept of the “monstrous” on display, others concentrate on issues of identity and “otherness”, providing an overall insight into the anthropological, social and racial debates that surround such a controversial employment of humans in France’s ostentatious displays of technological and industrial development, and which demonstrated its prowess on the colonial stage.3 The recurrent theme of the body on show, elements of performativity (as defined by scholars such as Judith Butler), and spectatorship, are applied in a number of the book’s entries to analyse the use of human displays in the promotion of the image of the French empire at the exhibitions.4 Unsurprisingly, the controversial subject of slavery and la traite noire of the ancien régime, which involved “l’asservissement d’un individu ou un groupe d’individus, apparut dès que la supériorité de la force physique d’une personne, d’une association ou des armes dont elles disposent”, “the subservience of an individual or a group, as a result of the superiority implied by the physical force of a person, an association or by the weapons which are at their disposal” is absent.5 The present chapter will similarly engage with the visual displays of “otherness” at the exhibitions, in the form of the human zoos, but will further question whether the notion of enslavement can be applied to the exhibitions, given the connotations of servitude upon which slavery was based. Whilst not denying that some indigenous peoples used their position at the exhibitions to stage protests against their employment in the métropole as at the 1931 exhibition, where they were encouraged by the Parti communiste français and the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, this chapter will expand upon the aforementioned essays to illuminate the ways in which those imported to the exhibitions were exploited in a visual manner.6 Although the Third Republic boasted that it had liberated slaves, controlling and oppressive measures were still employed in the visual displays of the colonial Other for the purpose of advertising France’s colonial possessions. This chapter does not set out to suggest that the human exhibits on display were subjected to physical 3

Ibid. See in particular entries by Robert Bogdan, ‘La mise en spectacle de l’exotique’, 49–59, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomason, ‘Du prodige à l’erreur: les monstres de l’Antiquité à nos jours’, 38–48, both in Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo and Lemaire 2004. 5 Bangou 1998, 15 6 Jonathan Derrick in his chapter ‘The Dissenters: Anti-Colonialism in France, c. 1900–40’, 53–68, in Chafer and Sackur 2002, provides an elaborate investigation into all realms of anti-colonial protest under the Third Republic. 4

10

Chapter One

violence in order to show themselves for the purpose of the French public. Edward Said, writing in 1978, argued that the unequal power exchange that colonization exacerbated is a result of the occupation of a territory— whether it be literal or epistemological.7 With this in mind, the chapter will focus on the binary of unequal power relations between the “civilized” Westerner and the exotic Other, as highlighted by Said, upon which the human zoos—used to provide a carefully constructed image of empire— were founded and will elucidate the metropolitan purpose of the exhibitions.8 Many academics working on the use of colonial photography, such as Paul S. Landau (2002), allude to the concept of visual colonization by outlining how photographs of the colonial subject can be individually possessed, collected and viewed by a Western viewer; all processes of colonization.9 The chapter will acknowledge this concept in the analysis of visual displays of the colonial Other, but will go one step further to show how the colonized subject could not only be occupied and catalogued, but also enslaved through appropriation, the denial of his or her own free will, and the notion of servitude for the purposes of France’s economic gain. This chapter will explore how the concept of the human zoo implies that the colonized were used as a spectacle for the entertainment of the French visitors, analyzing how the indigenous peoples from France’s colonies were visually rather than physically enslaved by putting them on show, in order to boost France’s economy and colonial consciousness at a time when France was facing both an economic slump and resistance against colonization in the mainland and the colonies. In light of the fact that the exhibitees’ performances were silent because they were already sufficiently inscribed into the pro-colonialist script of the exhibitions, this chapter will show how the human zoos denied the representatives of the French colonies the freedom to act or speak—a principal element of the process of enslavement—to highlight France’s despotic control over its colonial possessions for the purpose of the French public.

7

Ibid. 4. For more on the concept of “epistemological occupation” see Marsh 2007, 215. 8 The colonial Other was first outlined by Edward Said’s binary of the negative foil of the East in opposition to the superior Western “self” in the canonical text, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Said 1995 [1978], 38–39 9 Landau 2002, 145

The Expositions Coloniales: A Visual Enslavement of the Colonial Other?

11

Conceiving the Human Zoos Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exhibitions—not only in France, but also in America and throughout the rest of Europe—used human zoos to highlight the differences between the culture of the colonized and the superior culture of the colonizer. While celebrating cultural diversity and promoting contact between races, the exhibitions were structured in such a way as to reinscribe an irreducible difference between colonizers and colonized. The precedent for the exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the jardin d’acclimatation of 1877, which put on display wild animals from Somalia and Sudan along with the indigenous hunters of such animals.10 It was a huge success, attracting over 800,000 visitors in the first year of opening.11 Between 1877 and 1931, which saw the grandiose exhibition at Vincennes and which marked the apogée of French colonial expansion, over thirty exhibitions were held which employed “natives” from France’s colonies. Millions of visitors— the 1900 exhibition attracted fifty million visitors alone—were able to view a representation of the Other, mainly on show in the form of recreated indigenous villages. The French public could visit these zoos to discover the “savage” for the first time in exhibitions which highlighted the colonial exotic. For instance, le village nègre or le village sénégalais, which Blanchard and Lemaire describe as an emblem of France’s colonial period, became the main attraction at the exhibitions and provided the French public with their first glimpse of the colonial Other.12 These cultural displays therefore became products catering to the dream-world of the visitor, who became a tourist or traveller to the colonies for the day. Groups of Africans, often from different countries, were grouped together in reconstructed villages, created with replica mud huts and sand floors. The “natives” on display were dressed in carefully constructed outfits, sometimes leaving them semi-nude in order to highlight their perceived savagery. The habitual nakedness of the human exhibits gave the impression that the colonized country was not ascending the ladder of civilization and was thus in need of French domestication. In addition, the 10

The Dictionnaire historique de la langue française maintains that the name of such a garden derives from the verb acclimater, which means to “accoutumer à de nouvelles conditions de pensée, de vie”, “accustom to new conditions of thought, of life”; in this case the garden was used to acclimatize the French public to the colonial Other. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française 1992, 434. (All translations mine unless indicated otherwise.) 11 Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo and Lemaire 2004, 72 12 Ibid. 65

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Chapter One

live dioramas—a typical nineteenth-century theatrical device, constituting a three-dimensional replica of part of a landscape—that the indigenous peoples were encouraged to perform, were a form of popular entertainment for the viewing French public. The famous Madagascar live diorama at the 1900 exhibition, for example, involved performing Madagascans on a staged background depicting a recreated Madagascan landscape. However, the performances were exaggerated, and faithful reproduction and authenticity gave way to the needs of the spectacle.13 They functioned as a source of amusement, which transformed the exhibitions into a show: the indigenous peoples were employed to demonstrate artisan crafts such as weaving and leather work, and musicians, singers and dancers were encouraged to entertain the viewing public. The exhibitions were also the perfect opportunity for the French to showcase their colonial possessions at the zenith of French colonial expansion, and were thus used by the organizers—colonial administrators such as Maréchal Hubert Lyautey, white entrepreneurs, and to a certain extent the French government, who funded the exhibitions—as a form of legitimization for France’s colonial ventures. The demonstration of indigenous peoples in a carefully structured savage and uncivilized setting highlighted the need for domestication in the colonies, which could be delivered through France’s mission civilisatrice. The human displays at the exhibitions thus acted as a symbolic form of propaganda throughout the era of colonization, and educated the French people about the colonial project—what the twentieth-century critic, Thomas August, describes as “ideological formation and reinforcement”.14 Certainly, the human displays at the exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were racist in tone, and demonstrated manipulative and discriminatory conduct by both the organizers and the viewing French public. The African continent was reduced to a tribalism deemed “uncivilized” at the exhibitions and characterized by stereotypical representations of le village nègre. Founded on the fundamental differences between constructed classifications of race, colour and culture, the human zoos played on stereotypes. Indeed, there was some opposition to the use of human zoos at the exhibitions due to the racist connotations of the displays. The counter-exhibition to that at Vincennes in 1931, La verité sur les colonies, was organized by the Parti Communiste Français to inform people about the abuses of indigenous peoples in the colonies, and 13 14

Cooper 2001, 71 August 1995, 56

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13

was visited by 4226 visitors.15 Informed by André Gide’s criticisms of forced labour in Voyage au Congo published in 1927, following his travels to Africa, the alternative exhibition gave details about colonial oppression and crimes, alongside works of art from the colonies. It objected to the fact that the visual displays of alterity involved importing indigenous peoples from France’s assimilated colonies in order for them to be put on show to create a musée vivant.16 The indigenous peoples participating in the human zoos travelled the exhibition circuit with the entrepreneurial organizers and their dwellings were erected in the exhibition grounds. Often they were remunerated with pay and food, which may have given the impression that their participation in the exhibitions was a fair and equal exchange. However, the very concept that it was the French organizers, as representatives of the Western colonizing nation, who employed the inhabitants of France’s colonial territories for the purpose of educating, entertaining, and ultimately benefiting the French public—in other words, the French colonial consumer—indicates that it was not. Echoing la traite noire of the ancien régime, the exhibitions displayed connotations of degradation and oppression towards the perceived subordinate colonized subject, and the prejudices that were born from the “privilege” of being “white”, which was exploited to manipulate and control the actions of the colonized in the settings of the human zoos. Those exhibited were thus implicated in the oppression of their compatriots. The human exhibits had to act, perform, and be arranged in a way that suited the organizers and the French public. For instance, the participants in the “native” villages were commonly encouraged to perform modified religious rituals in order to accommodate the French visitor’s expectations. At the 1889 exhibition in Paris, la rue du Caire was the main attraction for the visiting French public. It was a reconstructed, yet exaggerated version of an Egyptian street, which included replica buildings featuring minarets, and “typical” Egyptian architecture, which, in fact, was a cliché. To recreate the effect of the Orient, the French organizers imported donkeys for visitors to ride on, and moreover, the street was a stage on which female Egyptian belly dancers were made to perform for the amusement and enjoyment of the French visitor.17 The exhibitions became synonymous with a circus: the organizers or ringmasters orchestrated and monitored the performances of the exhibits 15

Derrick 2002, 53 Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo and Lemaire 2004, 22 17 See in particular the official guidebook of the 1889 exhibition. Léquien 1889, 177 16

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Chapter One

and ensured that the viewing French public gained the appropriate view of the colonial Other. The confinement of the villages and the dioramas, where the indigenous peoples were often exhibited in cages or pens before the French public, meant that they were prohibited any contact with the spectators. The living exhibits were forced to stay within the boundaries of a circumscribed part of the exhibition space; an area that was denoted as their world, despite the exaggerated reconstructions of the indigenous settings. Fences were erected around the villages in order to separate the representatives of the colonies from the French viewer, reiterating the lack of contact between the viewer and the observed. Furthermore, the fences implied that the exhibits were dangerous, and, indeed, the spectacles that they were made to perform, which emphasized notions of “savagery” and lack of “civilization”, furthered the idea that they were right for colonization. The restricted spaces in which the indigenous peoples were displayed, and from which they were observed, echo the lack of freedom that slaves had under the ancien régime. Although la traite noire pre-1848 did not put slaves on display, they were owned, sold and trafficked, and compelled to perform labour or services. Equally, although they did not promote the slave trade, the exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did carry connotations of enslavement as they controlled the actions of the indigenous peoples and put them to work for the benefit of the French, implying the same notion of servitude implicit in la traite noire. Cultural historian, Elizabeth Ezra, describes how the Indochinese representatives in the cité indigène at the exhibition of 1931 were grouped with relatively restricted space surrounded by a barrier, so that the surveillance and control of their activities was more efficient than if they had been scattered around.18 Despite the official abolition of the slave trade in 1848, the exhibitions functioned as a vehicle of the unequal power relations upon which slavery was maintained.

Marketing the Stereotype The human displays at the exhibitions relied on the dissemination of exotic stereotypes in order for the French colonial consumer to instantly recognize the collective identity of the colonial Other. Characteristic of the imperial age of the Third Republic, the colonial subject was utilized so as to convey to the French public a certain perception of the Orient. The 18

Ezra 2000, 24

The Expositions Coloniales: A Visual Enslavement of the Colonial Other?

15

embellished reconstructions of the colonized land were an immediately recognizable code through which the Orient could be represented for the purpose of the French public, what Roland Barthes describes as mythologization, typical of colonial discourses on the colonial Other.19 The indigenous peoples were used as commodities of empire, which contributed to a fiction of the culture of the colonized peoples. Not only were they stripped of any individual identity, whilst being grouped into an exoticized collective used for education about, and promotion of, the French empire, but they were provided with reductive roles for the purpose of the French colonial consumer. In other words, the human exhibits were denied the privilege of displaying any individuality through their dress, the way in which they behaved, their display of religious customs, or their food. Rather, they were given a standardized, stereotyped identity that the French public could easily identify. The circus-like activities that the indigenous peoples in the “native” villages and the live dioramas performed reduced them to the status of caged animals. Indeed, visitors often threw food to the exhibited groups and compared them to primates.20 Such exhibits animalized these apparently “exotic” people and further helped to legitimize the need for civilization and domestication, which the French claimed that they could deliver through colonization. Anthropologist Burton Benedict describes human exhibits as a demonstration of power, which can be applied to the analysis of the exploitation of the human exhibits at the exhibitions: “The display of people is a display of power. It is a symbolic performance demonstrating power relationships, but these are not necessarily real”.21 In this respect, the indigenous exhibits were visually enslaved as a result of playing a certain role, prescribed to them by the exhibitions’ organizers, in order to highlight the colonial prowess of France. The human displays thus acted as a symbolic form of propaganda—a reinforcement of the French colonial idea throughout the era of colonization—and were used as a marketing tool for the promotion of the colonies. While slaves were physically enslaved under the ancien régime, the colonial exhibitions of the Third Republic visually enslaved the colonial Other in order to promote the metropolitan idea of the colonies. The performances of the exhibits were silent, with no need for verbal interaction; they were merely employed for a decorative purpose. They did not need to be able to speak to the French public because their message was written for them. 19

Barthes 1993 [1956] Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo and Lemaire 2004, 69 21 Benedict 1983, 43 20

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Moreover, the animalized and savage roles to which the human exhibits had to adhere portrayed the colonized world as backward, primitive and in need of domestication. The human displays of France’s colonies became real-life advertisements of the benefits to be gained from la plus grande France: an extension of the métropole which would encourage trade to, from and within the country. The visual marketing of France’s colonial possessions through the use of human displays was for the benefit of the colonial spectator—the French public—at the exhibitions, and the visual representation of difference was highlighted for them to see. David Spurr argues that the journalist, in his pursuit for knowledge, relies heavily on the gaze; a surveillance which provides the viewer with the privilege of inspecting the object of observation and by its very nature, excludes the subject.22 Spurr’s theory can be applied to the human zoos at the exhibitions. Used to tell the story of the French colonial missions, the exhibits were scripted and labelled for the purpose of educating the French colonial consumer. In effect, the human zoos became a form of cultural property, which involved removing the indigenous peoples from their own habitats, and recontextualizing their surroundings under material conditions. This concept of “collecting” indigenous peoples echoes the notion of slavery. By removing them from their home country and placing them in a decontextualized and aestheticized setting, which did not truly reflect their lived human reality, the identities of the colonial Other were repressed. Entering into this economy of uneven exchange, where the colonized Other was rendered voiceless and without identity, the indigenous peoples became silent accomplices to the system of authority and control upon which colonization was based. This element of control meant that the colonial representative was exploited, in the manner of a slave, so as to tell the story of French colonization from a purely Western perspective.

The Power of Photography The indigenous representatives from France’s colonies who constituted the human zoos were photographed so that their image could be recurrently used in the advertising campaigns and paraphernalia that accompanied the exhibitions. These photographic images were used in the guidebooks which served as an aide-mémoire for the visitor to the exhibitions, who could refer to them whilst walking around the exhibition site in order to identify the various indigenous exhibits. Housed at the Richelieu site of 22

Spurr 1993, 13

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17

the Bibiliothèque Nationale Française (BNF) in Paris, an extensive collection of photograph albums holds the portraits of the indigenous peoples from France’s colonies who took part in the exhibitions, which were available for use in the promotion of the exhibitions. The catalogues show images of people from France’s litany of colonial possessions, such as the Indian sepoy (soldier), Cambodian ballet dancers and soldiers, and the emblematic Senegalese villagers, all in their respective traditional dress.23 These photographs were easily reproduced, thanks to the invention of la phototypie (the wide dissemination of reproductive techniques) at the turn of the twentieth century, and this meant that images of the indigenous peoples were ubiquitous throughout French-language literature related to the exhibitions. Indeed, the 1889 exhibition catalyzed the invention of the picture postcard portraying France’s colonized subjects, and the 1900 exhibition was responsible for a significant link between the event, mass production of imagery of the exhibition, and the dissemination of the picture postcard, which used the photographic images of the human zoos, all contributing to France’s nationalistic self-promotion on the colonial stage. By its very nature, photography is about capturing a certain moment in time; it is about providing an everlasting memory of that point in time. The photographic evidence of the human zoos, which developed as a result of the colonial exhibitions, provided a permanent reminder of the human exhibits, to both celebrate France’s colonial possessions at the height of its colonial expansion, and to commemorate France’s colonial ventures beyond that époque. It was used to demonstrate France’s authority over its colonized territories and consequently its control over the colonized peoples of those territories. Therefore, this photographic proof of the French colonial possessions constituted yet another medium through which the exhibitions visually enslaved the human exhibits. The photograph albums demonstrated a “collection” of France’s colonies which were all subjected to France’s colonial rule, and helped to reinforce the idea of an extensive French Empire. The colonized subjects who were photographed were not only perceived as objects belonging to the French colonial regime, but their images also became the property of the French, who could control how and where they were used. Scholars including Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson have discussed how photographs assist in the creation of colonial culture and how colonial photographs of colonized subjects function as theatres of power.24 They 23 24

See for instance Bonaparte 1889a, 1889c. Hight and Sampson 2004, 1

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examine the ways in which colonial subjects were manipulated to highlight racial inferiority between them and the Western viewer, and how they were used as subjects of fascination for the purpose of what I have subsequently labelled as the French colonial consumer. Analysis of the photographs in the catalogues at the BNF Richelieu supports this assertion. It is noteworthy that many of the images of the indigenous peoples depict the subject looking away from the camera. Referring once again to Spurr’s work on the colonial gaze the photographs reiterate the subordinate status of the colonial subject.25 The averted gaze of the photographed person has the effect that the viewer and photographer can scrutinize the subject yet the regard cannot be reciprocated, which reinforces the unequal balance of power between the Westerner and the colonized, reminiscent of elements of la traite noire. As previously mentioned, the subjects of the photographs are all depicted in stereotypical dress. Taking the photographs of the Indian representatives into consideration, which are catalogued in the album entitled Hindous, each Indian man is photographed wearing a turban and has a full beard.26 As a result the identity of the Indian peoples is essentialized to simple and stereotypical cultural codes that enable the French public to easily interpret the image of France’s colonial possessions. Furthermore, it is of significance that none of the exhibits are individually named: they are collected together as “Hindus”. Such stereotypical portrayal of the Indian man as a Hindu provides a caricature of the colonized subject, without providing any counterpoint or alternative, in order to provide an easily recognizable image of India to the French exhibition-goer. These metonymic tendencies, which represent a monolithic image of France’s colonized territories and peoples, highlight the ways in which the human exhibits were visually employed to disseminate the colonial message to the French public. The photographic evidence of the human zoos was yet another medium through which the identities of the indigenous peoples were modified and repressed in order to suit the expectations of the colonizing country. The images of the human zoos were used to represent and commemorate France’s colonial ideology: an ideology which ultimately benefited France and rendered the indigenous peoples of France’s colonial possessions, what David Scott labels, “icons of French nationhood”.27 Not only metaphorically enslaved to provide the French visitor with an idealized image of the colonies, the human exhibits were also visually 25

Spurr 1993, 13 Bonaparte 1889b 27 Scott 1992, 215 26

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employed as economic servants to benefit the French economy. The exhibitions were a big attraction during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attracting millions of visitors and proving a great source of revenue for the organizers and shareholders. The thirty three million visitors that passed through the entrance gates of the 1931 exhibition to experience the human zoos accrued a profit of 30 to 35 million francs.28 In addition to the initial entrance fee, once inside, visitors could spend money on buying crafts made in front of their eyes by “natives” housed in the indigenous villages, or watching dances performed by the human displays. In la rue du Caire at the 1889 exhibition, for instance, Egyptian women could be paid to dance with young men in the coffee houses that provided refreshments for the French public. In the Indochinese section, the French viewers could watch Cambodian ballet dancers within the reconstituted Angkor Wat temple. Tourist rides on camel back around the exhibition site were given, and visitors could buy “authentic” Egyptian goods at the bazaar. The exhibitions were transformed into a commercialized spectacle at which the French visitor would pay for the privilege of experiencing “le tour du monde en un jour”, the slogan of the 1931 exhibition.29 The human zoos played an imperative role in creating such an event. The travelling “natives” ensured the “authenticity” of the exhibition and brought the “savagery” to it that attracted the French public in droves. Given the popularity of the exhibitions, and especially that of 1931, they were a primary tool in bolstering the French economy. France had fallen into an economic crisis following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which dragged down national economies and destabilized international relations, having a massive impact on the French economy. Stock markets collapsed and France endured mass unemployment, a fall in agricultural prices and a drop in exports of 40% between 1926 and 1932.30 The Empire became a bargaining counter, then a rallying point for a wounded pride, and the 1931 exhibition, with its human displays, was used as a promotion of French colonial ventures, which would be recognized internationally. The human exhibits at the exhibitions were a key factor in the campaign to gain international recognition for France’s colonial missions. Furthermore, the representatives of France’s colonies were employed by the exhibitions to attract visitors to the exhibitions and, hence, revenue, which would be generated from them. Thus, the human zoos were made use of just as

28

Derrick 2002, 53 Cooper 2001, 68 30 Neville 1995, 41 29

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slaves had been under the ancien régime; to ultimately benefit the finances of France as a colonizing nation. Having discussed how the colonized Other was employed by the exhibition’s organizers in a reduced and essentialized manner for the purpose of the French colonial consumer, is it possible to say that the Third Republic perpetuated notions of enslavement beyond the abolition of slavery and la traite noire in 1848? Indeed, the term “enslavement” is an extremely powerful one and has proven to be particularly controversial, given the afterlife of slavery and its occlusion from the public memory of metropolitan France, having been discussed in both French academia and the French press following the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the abolition. Certainly, the exhibitions did not force physical violence upon the human exhibits, which was so characteristic of la traite noire of the ancien régime. However, what is significant is that the human zoos were employed in an exploitative manner in order to demonstrate the colonial mastery of the French. The individual colonised subject was forced to become part of a collective identity, transcribed into a narrative with which to convey the monolithic French story of the orderliness of empire. Moreover, the exhibitions were governed by a fundamental opposition between the civilized Western spectator and the barbaric colonial Other, whom the French assumed to be in need of their mission civilisatrice. This binary founded upon differences in power helped the French to legitimize their colonial ventures to the public of the mainland whilst exploiting the indigenous peoples as a marketing tool for the French empire, and consequently, economic servants to bolster France’s national wealth. Reminiscent of la traite noire of the ancien régime, the human zoos exploited the resources of the colonies for the economic motives of Western nations; that is to say that they were part of an economic exchange. The indigenous peoples were used as a form of colonial currency founded on representations of the colonial Other as “savage, yet the most obedient and dignified of servants; the embodiment of sexuality and as innocent as a child; mystical, primitive and simple-minded”.31 By presenting the colonial Other in the carefully constructed environs of the exhibitions, the organizers were able to fix the image of French colonial authority in the minds of the public of the hexagone. Through their assigned roles in the human zoos, the colonized were locked into a circle of interpretation, which relied upon the dissemination of carefully created stereotypes, and which rendered them silent and inferior. The photographic images of the human zoos helped to perpetuate France’s 31

Bhabha 1994, 83

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colonial ideology, and the recurrent use of these images in French cultural production at the time of the exhibitions meant that even photographic representations of the colonies were controlled by France. In light of this treatment of the human exhibits at the exhibitions, and drawing upon the notion of servitude and unequal power relations, the human zoos at the exhibitions were visually enslaved. It becomes clear that the exhibitions of the Third Republic perpetuated the notion of enslavement by encouraging the indigenous peoples to act without liberty, and without a voice with which to speak, all for the economic, political and socio-cultural benefit of the métropole.

Bibliography August, Thomas. 1985. The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda 1890–1940. Westport: Greenwood. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascel Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. 2004. Zoos humains: Au temps des exhibitions humaines. Paris: La Découverte. Bangou, Henri. 1998. A propos du cent cinquantenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage. Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique: Ibis Rouge. Barthes, Roland. 1993 [1956]. Mythologies. London: Vintage. Benedict, Burton. 1983. The Anthropology of World’s Fairs. London and Berkeley: Scolar Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bonaparte, Roland. 1889a. Exposition de 1889: Cipayes. Paris. —. 1889b. Exposition de 1889: Hindous. Paris. —. 1889c. Exposition de 1889: Soldats Cochinchinois. Paris. Cooper, Nicola. 2001. France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters. Oxford: Berg. Derrick, Jonathan. 2002. The Dissenters: Anti-Colonialism in France, c. 1990–40 in Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, eds. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur. 53–68. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. 1992. Paris: Le Robert. Ezra, Elizabeth. 2000. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Hight Eleanor M., and Gary D. Sampson. 2004. Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place. London and New York: Routledge. Landau, Paul S. 2002. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkley: University of California Press.

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Léquien, Emile. 1889. Les Merveilles de Paris en 1889: Guide du visiteur à l’Exposition Universelle dans Paris et ses environs. Paris: BernardinBéchet. Marsh, Kate. 2007. Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolonization 1919–1962. Oxford: Peter Lang. Modupe Kolawole, Mary E. 2005. ‘An African View of Transatlantic Slavery and the Role of Oral Testimony in Creating a New Legacy’ in Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, eds. Anthony Tibbles, 101– 112. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Neville, Peter. 1995. France 1914–1969: The Three Republics. Wiltshire: Hodder and Stoughton. Said, Edward W. 1995 [1978]. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Scott, David. 1992. National Icons: The Semiotics of the French Stamp. French Cultural Studies. 3: 215. Spurr, David. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER TWO IMAGINING “FREEDOM”: THE RHETORIC OF SLAVERY IN FRENCH-LANGUAGE WRITING ABOUT THE INDIAN UPRISINGS (1857–59) NICKI FRITH

The Indian uprisings of 1857-59 represent a period of concentrated turmoil within the history of British colonialism in India. Within this context, the violent and hyperbolic reactions of the English-language press to the news of Indian revolt, paralleled by the brutality of the British army’s response in India, suggest at once the ease with which the illusion of British dominance could be shattered, the degree of shock that this realization produced, and the inherent barbarity of colonial systems and discourse. However, if British newspapers, along with politicians, colonizers and the military, were wrong-footed by the strength of Anglophobia among their colonized subjects, other European nations were far less so.1 Several French metropolitan newspapers, for example, considered the Indian uprisings to be the logical outcome of a century of British rule and oppression in India, which, beginning in 1757, could be defined as little more than the enslavement of an entire nation.2 It is these responses, rather than those of British and Indian writers, that form the central interest of this chapter. Examining Parisian newspaper articles written between 1857 and 1859, and a novel written by Alfred Assollant, entitled Les aventures merveilleuses mais authentiques du Capitaine Corcoran (1867), this paper 1

A recent conference hosted by the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Delhi, 30–31 October 2007, considered the variety of “European responses to the 1857 Rebellion in India”, including papers on Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Spain and France. 2 The Battle of Plassey between Clive and Siraj-ud-Daula (1757) is traditionally used to date the beginning of British rule in India; Wolpert 2004, 180–81; Ferro 1994, 90.

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considers how the notion of “esclavage” or “slavery”, and its related terms—“oppression”, “tyranny” and “despotism”—have been co-opted into a Franco-centric critique that defines its main colonial competitor, the British, as the enslaver of Indian peoples only a few years after France had abolished slavery for the second time in 1848 under the Second Republic. By contrast, French colonialism could be imagined—even under Louis Napoleon’s retrogressive Second Empire—as a liberating force, based ideologically on the catechism, liberté, égalité, fraternité.3 Initially, this chapter will sketch out a historical context in which to situate French-language responses to the Indian uprisings by considering, in particular, how the marginalization of the French colonial presence in India, after the Treaty of Paris (1815), has continuously affected Frenchlanguage writing on India. Next, it will analyse how the violent responses of British journalists to the 1857–59 revolts, paralleled by the British military’s acts of revenge against the Indian populace, generated a barrage of criticism from the French-language press. This provided French journalists with an opportunity to define British colonialism as an enslaving and despotic regime, thereby gaining a vicarious and moral victory over the frère ennemi. By placing these reactions within the context of France’s own colonial atrocities and, most importantly, the relative tardiness of the Second Republic’s decision to abolish slavery, this chapter will then analyse the inherent hypocrisy and “double-talk” of the French-language press that rhetorically criticized Britain’s enslavement of India with one hand while promoting its own slaving practices with the other. Finally, by shifting from the imaginings of the French press to the fictional world of Assollant’s adventure novel, this chapter will demonstrate how the Indian uprisings have provided a space in which to fantasize about a French-led military victory over the British in India. Collectively, these examples demonstrate the extent to which FrancoBritish rivalries have been played out in the figurative space of India and upon the figure of the enslaved or colonized “other”.4 It argues that 3

The Second Empire (1852-70) ended the liberalism that had permitted the press to flourish following the July Revolution and during the Second Republic (1848– 51). To summarize, “La période de 1852 à 1860 est celle durant laquelle la presse a été, depuis le premier Empire, la plus asservie au pouvoir”, “Not since the First Empire had the press been so severely restricted by the government as between 1852 and 1860”; Bellanger, Godechot, and Guiral 1969, 249 (all translations mine unless indicated otherwise). 4 Marsh’s work on Indian decolonization finds that “French-language narratives of India’s liberation from colonial dominance by the frère ennemi reveal that ‘India’ remained an important site for epistemological occupation in the twentieth

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French-language texts employ the rhetoric of slavery and emancipation, and champion the cause of the “enslaved’ Indian, not from any sense of philanthropy, but in order to gain an ideological advantage over their competitors during a period of prolonged anti-British action and British colonial weakness. Ultimately, it shows that “India” is “re-enslaved” within a Franco-centric discourse that paradoxically defines the British as enslavers and the French as libérateurs.

The Language of Violence: British Responses to the Uprisings The Treaty of Paris in 1815 left France with only a marginal foothold on the Indian subcontinent, which, until 1954, continued to be represented by its five comptoirs (trading posts) scattered around the fringes of British Indian territory—Pondichéry, Chandernagor, Karikal, Yanaon and Mahé.5 Throughout this long history, as Marsh states, the French in India can be described as a “subaltern colonizer”, meaning that they were “a subordinate or marginal group […] whose voice has been constantly elided by the dominant Anglophone grand récit of British domination”.6 That French-language writing on India is structured around the existence of an “other” colonizer, the British, challenges the commonly accepted east-west binary between colonizer and colonized, and suggests (when considering French texts on India) the need to engage methodologically with “a triangular model composed of the colonized (India), the “subaltern” colonizer (France), and the dominant colonizer (Britain)”.7 This inquiry into the rhetoric of British enslavement contrary to French liberation is, therefore, underpinned by the premise that French-language representations of the 1857 uprisings attempt to redress (on an imaginative level) the failure of France to colonize India at the end of the eighteenth century. It is, perhaps, unsurprising to find that the mid-nineteenth-century French-language press is filled with references to Britain’s enslavement of India since British responses to Indian revolt, both at a military and discursive level, lend themselves to such criticisms. For example, the century”; Marsh 2007, p. 215. This argument can also be applied to Frenchlanguage narratives of the Indian uprisings. 5 Marsh states that “the French political presence persisted upon the Indian subcontinent until 1954, and the Treaty of Cession which ended French colonization de jure was ratified only in 1962”; Ibid. 21. 6 Ibid. 13 7 Ibid. 13. Marsh’s work challenges Said’s East-West binarism; Said 2003 and 1994.

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initial response of the British Indian authority to the first mutiny in Meerut (10 May 1857) was to sentence its 85 Indian sowars to life imprisonment and then to shackle them publicly before a crowd of European and Indian soldiers and civilians.8 Ostensibly, what had caused this catalytic mutiny was the introduction of a new greased rifle cartridge that had to be bitten by the gunmen before being inserted into the Enfield rifle. Rumours that this new regulation cartridge was encased with beef and pork tallow, a concoction abhorrent to both Moslems and Hindus, alarmed many Indian sepoys since their use would have resulted in either being defiled (Moslems) or outcaste (Hindus). Moreover, it was suggested that the decision to implement the use of these cartridges was a British ruse to forcibly convert the Indian army. That these rumours should have taken root so quickly and spread so widely says much about the psychological state of many colonized Indians who were already deservedly suspicious of British underhandedness.9 For example, in February 1856, Lord Dalhousie (Governor-General of India, 1848–56) disregarded a long-standing treaty made in 1773 between Warren Hastings’ administration (1772–85) and Shuja-ud-daulah, the Nawab Wazir of Oudh, by annexing Oudh to the East India Company.10 Although Dalhousie’s betrayal is often cited as having instigated the uprisings, it culminated a century of unlawful annexations, aggressive taxation and the gradual impoverishment of Indians.11 In 1857, the excessive reactions of the British authority, for example to the soldiers’ refusal at Meerut to use the cartridges, became a common trait of the uprisings. As Flora Annie Steele later suggested in her Indian mutiny fiction, On the Face of the Waters (1897), the public and controversial use of shackles and its immediate connotation with slavery incited, in part, the ensuing revolts. The narrator describes the scene in which the sowars are being shackled and comments, For this, surely—this sense of injustice to others, must be the strongest motive, the surest word to conjure with?—that dull dead beat of iron upon the fetters of others, […] the surest call to battle?12

8

Indian cavalrymen. For a detailed analysis of the power of rumour preceding and during the uprisings, see Guha 1999, 251–277. 10 Wolpert 2004, 230 11 Mukherjee 2002, 63 12 Steele 1897, 158 9

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Thus, by symbolically enslaving and physically humiliating their faithful sepoys, the British had inadvertently created a martyred figurehead for the mutineers—that of the slave—, which would go on to incite and motivate the revolts.13 Like the British authorities in India, the English-language press was similarly heavy-handed in its response. Hero-worshipping and deifying the British while demonizing the insurgents, The Times’ editorial columns, to name one prominent example, used a reductive and hyperbolic language to transform Indians into “merciless fiends”, “Indian ruffians” and “monsters”, who have “murdered in cold blood” and “violat[ed…] English ladies in the presence of their husbands”, and therefore warranted an appropriate revenge:14 It is not, then, only because blood cries from the earth for vengeance, or because a thousand British families are plunged into grief […], but for the more substantial and paramount reason that we are the Providential governors of India, that we must now inflict a terrible retribution and purge the land of its crimes.15

Thus, by foreshortening the complex issues that substantiated the revolts, these editorials could justify a violent God-sanctioned response to anticolonial action.

The Rhetoric of Morality in the French-Language Press: Defining British Colonialism as Slavery Such militaristic and linguistic violence generated mass criticism in France. As Bellanger, Godechot, Guiral have pointed out, En 1857, la presse [française] fut remuée par la révolte des Cipayes et dans son ensemble condamna la cruauté des méthodes anglaises dans l’Inde. 13

On the Face of the Waters does not suggest that the revolts were only motivated by this one incident, but also cites annexation (metaphorically) and the colonizers’ racism and ignorance of Indian customs as key causes. It remains, however, a distinctly Anglo-centric text that celebrates British victory in Delhi over the threat of Indian decadence. 14 Anonymous 1857c 15 Anonymous 1857d. Sharpe argues that, “When articulated through images of violence against women, a resistance to British rule does not look like the struggle for emancipation but rather an uncivilized eruption that must be contained. In turn, the brutalized bodies of defenceless English women serve as a metonym for a government that sees itself as the violated object of rebellion”; Sharpe 1997, 7.

28

Chapter Two L’Angleterre rencontra à peine quelques défenseurs, le Siècle, les Débats, la Revue des Deux Mondes.16 In 1857, the [French] press was moved by the news of the Sepoy revolt and generally condemned the cruelty of British methods in India. Those who championed Britain’s cause, such as le Siècle, les Débats and la Revue des Deux Mondes, were few and far between.

Throughout 1857, French journalists closely tracked the revolts as they unfolded across the northern provinces of the Indian subcontinent. However, their attention was not drawn to the potential threat of insurgency in their own trading posts, but rather to the opportunity that this action presented to denounce British colonialism as an enslaving regime. For example, Langlé, writing for the imperialist and proNapoleonic newspaper, Le Constitutionnel, described British subjects in India as little more than “slaves”.17 “La vieille Albion” (“Old Albion”) was just a latest in a long line of tyrannical and despotic leaders that had subjugated its people in order to reap the financial rewards: Seule l’Inde, avec ses immenses richesses, ses royaumes plus immenses encore, son faste orientale, ses populations esclaves, offrait un large 18 partage entre les magnifiques marchands de la Compagnie. Only India with its extensive riches and vast kingdoms, its oriental splendour and its enslaved populace, is capable of offering booty large enough to divide between the magnificent Company merchants.

These comments can be seen as part of a long-standing tradition among French writers of stereotyping the British as avaricious, perfidious and despotic.19 By 1857, such commonplace terms underpinned the accusation 16

Bellanger, Godechot, Guiral 1969, 276. Criticism against British colonialism and its enslaving practices was heard in Britain, Europe and America. In Britain, for example, Mr Kinnard stated in Parliament that “an amount of suffering and debasement existed [in Bengal] which probably was not equalled, and certainly not exceeded, in the slave States of America”; Anonymous, 12 June 1857. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also wrote a series of articles criticizing the British. These were published in the New York Daily Tribune and are now collated in one volume, entitled The First Indian War of Independence, 1857–59 (1960). 17 Langlé, 26 November 1857 18 Ibid. 19 As Robert and Isabelle Tombs point out, “French commentators […after 1688], and many historians since […] have blamed the insatiable greed of the nation of shopkeepers, harnessing the power of the State to their grand ambition of pillaging

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that British power had merely usurped the Mughal Empire, maintained its corrupt systems and in some cases exacerbated the harm inflicted upon the Indian populace.20 This idea was explicitly stated in a series of articles written by Barrier for L’Univers: Union Catholique, a staunchly Catholic ultramontane newspaper: Les Anglais n’eurent qu’à se substituer aux Musulmans, et l’oppression, devenue plus savante et mieux régularisée, n’en fut que plus onéreuse et plus funeste pour les populations.21 The British government has simply replaced that of the Muslims with a more skilful and better organized system of oppression that had merely created a more costly and grievous situation for the Indian peoples.

The editor of L’Univers, Veuillot, even likened British colonialism to the past Roman Empire, both of which, he claimed, had been built upon the backs of slaves. Although admissible in the past, such despotism in modern-day empire building was no longer viable since, “[C]ette condition [d’esclavage] n’est plus celle des nations chrétiennes”, “This condition [of slavery] is no longer part of being a Christian nation”.22 Le Constitutionnel’s Langlé similarly believed that such a system was doomed and would lead to the “Ruine inévitable!” of British colonialism in India: Nul ne […] connaissait [les Anglais] que par ses rigueurs, ses punitions, et ses impôts. Il avait été maître; il n’avait eu que des esclaves. Il ne trouve plus que des révoltés.23 The British are known for nothing more than their harshness, their punishments and their taxation systems. Since they have only ever been masters of slaves, they will find nothing more than rebels. the world. The hapless French, according to this view, wishing only to trade peaceably with non-European peoples, were constantly being savaged by the ravening British bulldog”; Tombs and Tombs 2007, 112. Schmidt traces the French use of “perfidious” in relation to the English back to the Hundred Years War (1328–1453); Schmidt 1953, 605. 20 In the eighteenth century, Anquetil-Duperron had similarly criticized the despotic behaviour of European colonialism. For him, “the concept of despotism had simply been made to serve as the instrument of justification for the oppression practiced by Europeans in Asia”; Venturi 1963, 138. 21 Barrier, 9 July 1857 22 Veuillot, 9 September 1857 23 Langlé, 26 November 1857

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Perhaps recalling France’s own revolutionary histories and its recent abolition of slavery, these journalists were suggesting that the fate of all corrupt and tyrannical regimes was to incite a people’s revolt.

The Language of Hypocrisy: “Double Talk” in the French-Language Press Given that France had only recently abolished slavery and was hardly innocent of committing its own colonial atrocities, the accusatory and moralizing tone taken by Le Constitutionnel and L’Univers in criticizing British colonial practices can be seen, especially with retrospect, as ironic and contradictory.24 It was only on 27 April 1848 that the hastily established Second Republic abolished slavery under the influence of Victor Schœlcher, finally rectifying Bonaparte’s decision in 1802 to reinstate slavery and renege on the abolition law of 1794.25 As both Bangou and Reinhardt have argued, although metropolitan-based abolition societies, such as “La Société des Amis des Noirs” and politically conspicuous figures, such as Schœlcher, helped to bring this decree into being, its enactment should not be celebrated as a triumph for French republicanism.26 Rather, it was a thriving middle-class economy and the substantial advances in industry that had dictated the timing of the reforms. Thus, slavery was only abolished because it had become

24

For example, France‘s conquest of Algeria was notorious for French troops using razzia methods to “instill terror and destroy tribal cohesion”, seizing property and even “resorting to mass killings of civilians”, such as General Pélissier’s order to asphyxiate people from the Ouled Riah tribe by smoking them in caves; Welch 2003, 237. 25 In Pluviose An II, the First Republic’s Convention decreed that “l’esclavage des Nègres dans les colonies est aboli; en conséquence, elle décrète que tous les hommes, sans distinction de couleur, domiciliés dans les colonies, sont citoyens français et jouiront de tous les droits assurés par la Constitution”, “the enslavement of Negroes in the colonies has been abolished, which means that all men who reside in the colonies, irrespective of their colour, are to be considered French citizens and will enjoy all the rights assured to them by the Constitution’; Bangou 1998, 81. The 1848 decree echoes that of the First Republic; Ibid. 82-83. 26 Reinhardt argues that the Fifth Republic’s official celebrations in 1998 demonstrate the process by which the “abolition of slavery [has become] part of a centralizing perspective of the past [that will continue] as long as the celebrated memory is limited to the glorification of France‘s egalitarian accomplishments” and argues for the need to remember the part played by slaves in their own emancipation; Reinhardt 2006, 5.

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inefficient and overly expensive when compared with using machinery.27 By emphasizing the importance of economics in bringing about social reform, the much-lauded part played by the Republic in bringing slavery to an end is, therefore, relativized. Similarly, care has to be taken when considering French-language texts that defend the Indian mutineers against the tyranny of British colonialism by remembering the important role played by colonial rivalries, which were largely based on a desire for economic hegemony. By recalling that France and Britain were colonial rivals and that France had lost out to Britain in India, the hypocrisy at the centre of these French-language texts is revealed. For example, only a month after Langlé had accused Britain of enslaving its Indian subjects in Le Constitutionnel, the same newspaper could print an article, this time by Dubois, haranguing those “philanthropes anglais”, “British philanthropists”, who had criticized France for its continuing involvement in the slave trade post-1848.28 These so-called “philanthropes” (in fact, the British government) objected to what Dubois preferred to call “le rachat”, “l’émigration”, or the “liberation” of enslaved Africans, meaning to “buy back” slaves and employ them as labourers on French-owned plantations in the West Indies. Undoubtedly, Dubois’ sarcastic use of the term “philanthropes anglais” refers to the fact that Britain (post-1808) repeatedly insisted that both France and Holland halt all involvement in slavery; an insistence that, far from being motivated by any concern for slaves and their migration, extended from a desire to quash its rival competitors by limiting the size of their workforces.29 Indeed, the difficulties France faced in sourcing a competitive labour force were frequently discussed in French-language newspapers, many of which considered le rachat to be a good solution to the problem. For example, Paulin, writing for L’Illustration objected to Britain’s double standards: L’Angleterre, qui peut garnir ses possessions par les émigrations indiennes, jette les hauts cris par l’organe de ses journaux faisant d’une question fort simple par elle-même une difficulté.30 27

Bangou 1998, 46 Dubois, 29 December 1857 29 “L’Angleterre […] poursuit la ruine de son rival français […] en imposant sa suppression [de la traite] à la France et à la Hollande, ses concurrents dans les eaux américaines”, “Britain […] sought to ruin its French rival […] by insisting that France and Holland, its main competitors in American waters, stopped practicing [slavery]”; Bangou 1998, 53. 30 Paulin, 19 December 1857 28

32

Chapter Two Britain, which is able to supply its colonies with Indian emigrants, is using its press as a vehicle from which to make a lot of noise and turn what was a simple matter into a difficult question.

For Paulin, the solution was to “racheter les nègres déjà esclaves dans leur pays et de les employer dans nos colonies suivant la généreuse législation en vigueur”, “to repurchase Negroes that are already slaves in their own country and to employ them in our colonies, as permitted by the liberal legislation currently in force”.31 To return to Dubois’ article, in order to disguise what, by 1857, had become an unlawful and immoral concept (slavery), as well as to embellish the less attractive realities of economic competition, Le Constitutionnel spoke instead of France’s moral and national imperatives by employing and defining a neologism, “le rachat”, “repurchasing”, and a quasi-neologism, “l’émigration”. In this article, Dubois insisted, first and foremost, on the need to distinguish between such terms: [L’émigration], telle que nous la pratiquons, est basée sur l’affranchissement immédiat de l’Africain racheté, et, à la suite de cette libération, le noir émancipé est transporté dans des pays délivrés depuis longtemps de l’esclavage, où il prend place au sein d’une société libre. Ainsi, d’un misérable Africain l’émigration fait un citoyen indépendant.32 [Emigration], as we [the French] practice it, is based on the immediate emancipation of the repurchased African slave. Following this liberation, the freed Negro is transported to a country in which slavery has long been abolished and where he or she will live in a free society. Hence, emigration converts the wretched African into an independent citizen.

Apart from highlighting the slippery nature of such terminologies, especially within journalistic writing, this example also points out that French journalists, such as Dubois, drew clear distinctions between French and British colonial systems, as the phrase “telle que nous la pratiquons”, “as we practice it”, suggests. Clearly, Dubois thought of the French as

31 Ibid. Other French-language newspapers were more critical of this solution—the Journal des débats littéraires, for example, published an article by Buval that openly mocked the idea that repurchased slaves would find “liberté, fortune, bonheur, dans le travail forcé et le baptême [en Algérie]”, “freedom, fortune and happiness in being forced to work and be baptised [in Algeria]”; Buval, 9 March 1858. 32 Dubois, 29 December 1857

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liberators rather than enslavers.33 However, taken together, these two articles by Langlé and Dubois demonstrate that a newspaper could unproblematically support Indian liberation from what they termed British slavery while extolling the virtues of French companies in supplying repurchased slaves to French-owned West Indian plantations.

A Moral Victory: Imagining France as the Voice of European Morality More than just criticizing British colonialism as an enslaving regime, however, the uprisings provided French journalists with the opportunity to gain a vicarious and moral, as opposed to territorial, victory over the British; one that was, arguably, underpinned by the desire to compensate for the memory of what Claude Farrère would later term “l’Inde perdue” (“Lost India”).34 Indeed, by 1857, a surrogate triumph was all that France could hope for. As L’Univers recognized, the possibility of France “liberating” India from the yoke of the British was not a realistic one: “la France n’est pas assez ambitieuse pour tenter une semblable aventure”, “France is not ambitious enough to attempt such a venture”, wrote Barrier.35 Yet, that did not stop such newspapers from wishing it were otherwise. This desire captured the imagination of the French press to such an extent that Le Charivari, a satirical newspaper similar to Punch, mocked the bellicose desires of the French Anglophobic press by envisaging the editor, M. Lourdoueix, of the oppositionist and legitimist newspaper, La Gazette de France, volunteering himself for a military mission to save India: La Gazette est bien de décidée [sic] à risquer elle-même l’aventure. […] M. Lourdoueix, le dernier des paladins de notre âge, se mettrait à leur tête pour aller […] conquérir l’Inde. […] Car ce qu’il importe au fond, C’est d’écraser l’Angleterre, de la ruiner, de la pulvériser, de l’anéantir, parce qu’elle est hérétique quoique chrétienne.36 33

British Parliamentarians (those “philanthropes anglais”) continued to express their disapproval over the involvement of French ships in the transatlantic slave trade post-1848. For example, in July 1857, Palmerston reported that a French company had been involved in the sale of 1200 “freed” Africans to Martinique, which, despite being called “le rachat” (“buying back”), and hence being legal, equated in all-but-name to “la traite” (“slavery”); Anonymous 1857b. 34 Farrère 1998 35 Barrier, 9 July 1857 36 Caraguel, 22 September 1857

34

Chapter Two The Gazette has decided to put its own neck on the line. […] M. Lourdoueix, the last of the paladins, will head the campaign to go […] and conquer India. […] After all, the most important thing is to crush that heretic British nation, to ruin, pulverize and destroy her utterly.

The word “paladin” is apt, demonstrating how the uprisings were used to wage an anti-British crusade that, in the case of La Gazette, was against colonialism based on Protestantism rather than Catholicism. What became something of a “war of words” between the London and Parisian presses took on the characteristics of a French-led moral crusade against British tyranny.37 Importantly, the aim of this crusade was at once to reposition France as the moral watchdogs or “arbiter” of Europe while promoting French colonialism as morally superior to that of the British.38 Heavily loaded terms, such as slavery, abolition and liberation, were employed as rhetorical weapons within this discursive battle. For example, in an article entitled “Esclavage”, “slavery”, printed in the republican newspaper, Le Siècle, Jourdan accused Britain of failing to uphold a Godsanctioned civilizing mission: “la révolte […] dans l’Inde […] signifie que le peuple anglais n’a pas accompli comme il devait l’accomplir sa mission auprès des cadets que la Providence lui avait confié”, “[T]he revolt in India is a sign the British have failed to do their duty towards their youngest family members entrusted to them by God”.39 Jourdan concluded, La révolte de l’Inde anglaise est un avertissement suprême […] si, après la victoire, ils [les Anglais] se montraient aussi inhumains, aussi inintelligens [sic] de leur mission qu’ils l’ont été […] la dernière heure de leur domination aurait bientôt sonné. […] Plus d’esclavage! plus de servitude! plus d’oppression suprême.40

37

There are numerous examples of French- and English-language newspapers responding to each other’s comments, as the article by Dubois cited earlier demonstrates; Dubois, 29 December 1857. 38 From the 1650s to the mid-eighteenth century, as Tombs and Tombs argue, France was considered to be “the pre-eminent power [in Europe] by reason of its population, armed force, wealth and cultural influence. The embodiment of that power was Louis XIV”; Tombs and Tombs 2007, 8. Conversely, the nineteenth century was a period of decline for France: “Britain’s gain had been France’s loss. France too had been an important and successful colonial trader until the 1790s. What changed this were the revolution and its wars, which disrupted the economy and wrecked overseas trade”; Ibid. p. 268. 39 Jourdan, 16 and 17 August 1857 40 Ibid.

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The revolt in British India is a supreme warning [… If] the British continue, after victory, to be as inhuman and as ignorant of their mission as they have been up until now […] the last hour of their domination will soon arrive. No more slavery! No more servitude! No more of this extreme oppression.

This quotation has three layers. First, its republican rhetoric, particularly the notion of “liberté”, “freedom” in opposition to “esclavage”, “slavery”, establishes a difference between the French republican ideology of freedom and Britain’s enslavement of India. Through the rhetoric of republicanism, the notion of “devoir” (“duty”) and the discourse of a colonial civilizing “mission”, Jourdan makes a moral judgement on British colonialism and calls for liberation and reform. Secondly, Le Siècle, as a republican newspaper, was bound to employ the shibboleth, liberté, égalité, fraternité, not only in opposition to the British, but also, at times, to challenge Louis Napoleon’s political autocracy. Thus, it is conceivable that Jourdan’s exclamatory words, “plus d’oppression suprême”, “no more of this extreme oppression”, written as they are in a republican rather than imperialist newspaper, speak against the oppression of both an external colonial rival (the British) and against internal French politics. Thirdly, the equation between British colonialism and slavery allows Jourdan to imagine that British colonialism, like the slave trade, would one day be abolished. Indeed, the uprisings repeatedly provided a space in which French writers could imagine an end to British hegemony in India, thereby enabling France to imagine a victory over their enemy. Imagining such a victory often meant supporting Indian insurgents and their leaders, such as Nana Sahib, Tantia Topi, Bahadur Shah and the Rani of Jhansi. Consequently, Parisian newspapers often produced sympathetic portrayals of these prominent Indian rulers. For example, Nana Sahib, a rajah who was vilified by the English-language press for having reputedly ordered the massacre of British women and children at Kanpur (15 July 1857), was represented quite differently across the Channel. In the métropole, Nana Sahib could be positively reconfigured as a character worthy of French support based on the premise that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”; a point that Le Charivari perspicaciously noted, [Le] mot d’ordre de l’anglophobie est de vanter Nena-Sahib, d’en faire peu à peu une grande figure de patriote cuivré, un homme supérieur.41

41

Caraguel, 26 September 1857

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Chapter Two Eulogizing Nana Sahib has become the watchword of Anglophobia, which has constructed him a great bronzed figure of patriotism.

Since 1857, several French authors have continued this trend, demonstrating, with varying degrees of subtlety, their solidarity to the Indian cause, including Maynard (1857), Assollant (1867), Darville (1874), Verne (1880), Richepin (1883), Marenis (1946) and de Grèce (1984).42 Followed to its logical conclusion, however, an Indian victory would not only mean that Indians were capable of overthrowing the British, but also that they could govern themselves independently. For contemporaneous French writers versed in the rhetoric of European racial superiority, this would have been a highly problematic, not to mention unusual, concept. Rarely, if at all, did French-language texts suggest that India could or should be independent from some form of European governance. Rather, a triangular pattern can be discerned in which the stereotype of the British tyrant is played against the stereotype of the enslaved Indian, which then are contrasted with the image of the enlightened French colonizer. Time and again, French writers have simply appropriated Indian figures of resistance to assign themselves the privilege of being able to speak for and also through them. Implicitly and explicitly, these “puppets” are ventriloquized in order to voice the virtues of French colonialism, nationalism and republicanism. To provide one example, this article will now examine Alfred Assollant’s adventure novel, entitled Les aventures merveilleuses mais authentiques du Capitaine Corcoran (1867).

The Language of Freedom: Imagining French Colonialism as Liberté In Assollant’s fictional text, the figure of the evil British colonizer against which the Indians are fighting serves as a foil to that of the philanthropic French liberator, here represented by the heroic Captain Corcoran. The uprisings merely provide a context in which to fantasize about a French military victory over the British in India. Historical details, such as the first mutiny in Meerut (10 May 1857), provide a plausible setting for Corcoran’s fictional arrival in India. He enters as the libérateur of India, 42

These texts, along with contemporaneous English- and French-language newspapers, form the primary source materials of my doctoral thesis, entitled “Competing Colonial Discourses in India: Representing the Indian Uprisings in French- and English-Language Texts and Images’ (University of Liverpool, 2008).

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rescuing Holkar, the Marathan Rajah of Bhagavapour, and his beautiful daughter, Sita, from falling into the hands of the British. In return for his help, the dying Rajah entrusts Corcoran with his land, people and daughter. Over the course of six years, Corcoran reforms Bhagavapour into a republican state, before returning it to the Indian people and retiring to an island. This final resting place represents both an Indo-French utopia (symbolized by Corcoran and Sita’s marriage and the birth of their son, Rama) against the reality of a divided British India, as well as a republican utopia against the reality of Louis Napoleon’s political autocracy. In this text, attitudes towards slavery and oppression play an important role in distinguishing between the superiority of the eponymous French hero and his British and Indian counterparts. Slaves, which form part of the despotic social landscape of the Indian rajah’s reign, are transformed into “Citoyens libres du pays mahratte”, “free citizens of the Marathan nation” under Corcoran’s republicanism, while additionally being liberated from the threat of British rule.43 The complaints of the servant–slave Sougriva against Holkar and the British are used to promote French republican politics against corrupt British and Indian systems, and, implicitly, against Louis Napoleon. In this exchange, Sougriva’s voice is used to mould Holkar as a stereotypical Indian despot: “il faisait venir des esclaves des cinq parties du monde […] et il faisait empaler quiconque avait essayé de lui dire la vérité”, “he bought slaves from the four corners of the world […] and he ordered anyone who tried to tell him the truth to be impaled”.44 To this, Corcoran responds: Parbleu! […] il faut avouer que si tous les princes de ton pays ressemblaient au pauvre Holkar […], vous avez bien tort de les regretter et de combattre les Anglais qui vous en débarrassent.45 Goodness! […] If all the princes in this country are like this miserable Holkar […], then you are wrong to mourn their demise and to fight the British who are getting rid of them for you.

Yet Sougriva responds, “Je ne suis pas de votre avis […] car les Anglais mentent, trompent, trahissent, oppriment, pillent et tuent aussi bien que nos propres princes”, “I do not agree with you […] because the British lie, cheat, betray, oppress, pillage and kill just as much as our own Indian

43

Assollant 1975, 419 and 420 Ibid. 204 45 Ibid. 205 44

Chapter Two

38

princes”.46 By placing these words into Sougriva’s mouth, the Indian insurgent can then be used to fantasize about India’s need for French intervention and occupation. Hence, once Corcoran decides to accept the challenge of governing Bhagavapour, it is Sougriva’s voice that bestows praise upon Corcoran, deifying him as the saviour of India: Plus je vous entends, dit Sougriva, plus je crois que vous êtes la onzième réincarnation de Wichnou, tant vos discours sont plein de sens et de raison.47 Your thinking is so full of sense and reason that the more I listen to you, says Sougriva, the more convinced I am that you are the eleventh reincarnation of Vishnu.

Ultimately, Corcoran abdicates, moving himself, his Indian wife and his children to a utopian island that is founded on republican ideals. Although this is a fantastical place, it acts as a powerful symbol of Frenchstyle colonialism that counterpoints the reality of British India. Ironically, Corcoran’s island also recalls those scattered French trading posts surrounded by British India. But likewise, from those tenuous footholds, the ongoing fantasy of a French-colonized India “liberated” from the British is maintained. The last paragraph of the novel reads: On prétend […] que Corcoran n’a pas perdu de vue son ancien projet de délivrer l’Hindoustan de la domination anglaise. On m’a même communiqué tout récemment de nombreux détails sur les intelligences qu’il entretient avec les brahmines des diverses parties de la Péninsule, depuis l’Himalaya jusqu’au cap Comorin […]. Au reste, qui vivra verra.48 It is rumoured […] that Corcoran has not given up his mission to deliver India from British domination. There has even been word recently that he has been in contact with Brahmins from all over India, from the Himalayas to the Cormorin cape […]. Who knows what the future will bring.

As this quotation demonstrates, the uprisings offered a context in which Britain’s subjugation of India could be pitted against the imagined philanthropy of French colonial models based, alternatively, on a republican discourse of liberté. Within this counter-narrative, although French texts could imagine a victory over the British, ultimately this 46

Ibid. 205 Ibid. 210 48 Ibid. 448 47

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triumph remains fantastical. However, the final irony is that this ventriloquism simultaneously enslaves Indian voices by silencing their histories under the rhetoric of French national and colonial propaganda. In conclusion, despite the fact that the British government and abolitionists were repeatedly critical of the immoral attitudes of the French towards slavery, the Indian uprisings could be employed by French writers to re-establish France as the vanguard of liberty and morality; a restructuring that attempts to compensate for France’s loss of India and its gradual decline during the nineteenth century.49 Indeed, by adopting the cause of the enslaved subject–revolutionaries, the Indian mutinies and its protagonists were repeatedly exploited by French writers to triumph ideologically over their frère ennemi by imagining France as the libérateur rather than the enslaver of non-European peoples. This tendency is not only evident in the supposedly fact-based Parisian press reports written during the uprisings, but continues long after 1859 in fictional writings, such as the one by Alfred Assollant. Yet, these texts, whether they are ostensibly “factual” or fictional, are less concerned with the question of Indian emancipation than with promoting French colonialism and imagining an Inde française that never would have incited such unrest. As the act of uprising suggests, Indian peoples were not the passive recipients of colonial violence, but actively revolted against its tyranny. However, in this duel between colonial rivals, the colonized and enslaved Indian, as defined by these French-language texts, undergoes a second enslavement, becoming a figure upon which to inscribe Franco-centric colonial fantasies and through which to ventriloquize the virtues of the French nation. The rhetoric of slavery and emancipation is merely employed as a tool with which to gain an ideological advantage over their colonial rival during a prolonged period of vulnerability for British colonialism. Ultimately, this rhetoric re-enslaves “India” within a colonialist and nationalist discourse that paradoxically defines the French as the libérateurs of its colonized peoples.

Bibliography Anonymous. 1857a. Administration of Bengal. The Times, June 12: 7–8. —. 1857b. Parlement d’Angleterre: Chambre des Communes. Le Siècle, July 13: 1. —. 1857c. The Times, August 6: 6. —. 1857d. The Times, August 15: 9. 49

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Assollant, Alfred. 1975 [1867]. Les aventures merveilleuses mais authentiques du Capitaine Corcoran. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions. Bangou, Henri. 1998. A propose du cent cinquantenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage. Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge. Barrier. 1857. L’Univers: Union Catholique, July 9: 1. Bellanger, Claude, Jacques Godechot, and Pierre Guiral, eds. 1969. Histoire Générale de la Presse Française. Vol. 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Buval, Jules. 1858. Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, March 9: 1. Caraguel, Clément. 1857. Un bon coup à faire. Le Charivari, September 22: 1. —. 1857. La proclamation de Nena-Sahib. Le Charivari, September 26: 1– 2. Darville, W. 1874. L’Inde contemporaine: Chasse aux tigres, L’Indoustan, Nuits de Delhi et Révolte de Cipayes. Limoges: Ardant. De Grèce, Michel. 1984. La femme sacrée. Paris: Olivier Orban. Dubois, P. 1857. Le Constitutionnel, December 29: 1. Farrère, Claude. 1998 [1935]. L’Inde perdue. Paris: Kailash. Ferro, Marc. 1994. Histoire des colonisations: Des conquêtes aux indépendances, XIIIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Seuil. Guha, Ranajit. 1999. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham: Duke University Press. Jourdan, Louis. 1857. Esclavage. Le Siècle, August 16 and 17: 1. Langlé, Aylic. 1857. Le Constitutionnel, November 26: 1–2. Marenis, Jacqueline. 1946. La Révolte sans âme. Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1960. The First War of Indian Independence. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Maynard, Félix. 2005 [1858]. De Delhi à Cawnpore: Journal d’une dame anglaise, pages de l’insurrection hindoue. Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Elibron Classics. Mukherjee, Rudrangshu. 2002. Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858: A study of popular resistance. London: Newton. Marsh, Kate. 2007. Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolonization 1919–1962. Oxford: Peter Lang. Paulin, V. 1857. Histoire de la semaine. L’Illustration, journal universel 773 (30), December 19: 402. Reinhardt, Catherine A. 2006. Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean. London: Berghahn Books.

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Richepin, Jean. 1919 [1883]. Nana-Sahib: Drame en vers en sept tableaux. In Théâtre en vers. 27–129. Paris: Ernest Flammarion. Said, Edward. 2003 [1978]. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. 1994 [1993]. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Schmidt, H. D. 1953. The Idea and Slogan of “Perfidious Albion”. Journal of the History of Ideas 14: 604–616. Sharpe, Jenny. 1997. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Steele, Flora Annie. 1897. On the Face of the Waters. London: William Heinemann. Tombs, Robert, and Isabelle Tombs. 2007. That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present. London: Pimlico. Venturi, Franco. 1963. Oriental Despotism. Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1): 133–142. Verne, Jules. 1979 [1880]. Les Voyages extraordinaires: La Maison à vapeur, Voyage à travers l’Inde septentrionale. Paris: Hachette. Veuillot, Louis. 1857. France: De la révolution des Indes (1e article). L’Univers: Union Catholique, September 9: 1. Welch, Cheryl B. 2003. Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria. Political Theory 31: 235–264. Wolpert, Stanley. 2004. A New History of India. 7th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART II BREAKING SILENCES, RE-WRITING HISTORY

Fig. 2-1. © Graham Hoggarth

CHAPTER THREE TRANSFORMING THE SILENCES OF THE PAST: THE WRITING OF “L’HISTOIRE A FAIRE” IN FRENCH CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AURÉLIE L’HOSTIS

Du passé des Antilles, l’essentiel reste à découvrir; mieux, à faire. Most of the Antillean past remains to be discovered; even, to be made. —Placoly, Frères Volcans: Chronique de l’abolition de l’esclavage, 19831

The 1998 French government’s commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery turned into an unprecedented moment of cultural and historical reflection for France and her départements d’outremer. Why do the people of the French Caribbean continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France’s portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are they transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? The first historical reality that Caribbean people are confronted with is the cultural dislocation brought about by colonialism, slavery, and the slave trade. The episode of the Middle Passage has obliterated collective memory and has therefore confined Caribbean people to a historical and cultural vacuum—a “non-histoire” (Glissant)—depriving them of the possibility of retrieving a sense of collective consciousness. This chapter examines the historical dispossession that took place in the Antilles, and explores how départementalisation, the policy of assimilation, and the modalities of the commemoration of the abolition of slavery in 1998 all perpetuated this systematic “silencing” of historical memory. I will then 1

All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

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look specifically at Édouard Glissant’s fiction and show how his idea of a “prophetic vision of the past” creates a cultural space that allows memories of slavery to resurface, opening up infinite potential for “l’histoire à faire”.

The Silences of the Past The French-speaking Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe have known a longstanding tradition of theoretical self-analysis and identitarian debate. They have produced some of the earliest and most influential theorists of colonialism and its effects— Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant—whose work both anticipates and contributes to what we now call postcolonial discourse. Since the early 1990s, these islands have been the sites of heightened and intense debates about historical memory. The current centrality of the concern with Antillean collective memory derives in part from a number of deeply contested anniversaries, notably the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World in 1992, the 50th anniversary of départementalisation in 1996, and the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998. Unsurprisingly, the latter was of particular significance, a fact attested to by several academic publications during this period.2 On 27 April 1848, the Second Republic abolished slavery in its French overseas colonies—well after Britain had done so in 1833—thus ending three centuries of forced plantation labour.3 In 1998 the government of the Fifth Republic for the first time organized extensive official celebrations to commemorate this historical event. French and Caribbean writers, historians, politicians, and journalists debated the issues surrounding the memory of slavery in contemporary society, taking positions both for and against the anniversary celebrations. Questions were raised about who and what should be commemorated. Should it be the three centuries of slave trade and plantation slavery that ended in 1848 or the 1848 decree declaring the emancipation of black slaves in France’s colonies? The French men, most importantly of course French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, who made the signing of this decree possible or the daily resistance and countless rebellions of blacks and the heroes who led their people in these struggles for freedom: Makandal, Boukman and Toussaint 2

See Chalons et al. 2000; Chaulet-Achour and Fonkoua 2001; Vergès 2001. Slavery had already been abolished in the French colonies in 1794, but was then re-established by Napoleon in 1802. France is the only country to have known two abolitions. On that first abolition, see Dubois 1998.

3

46

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Louverture from Saint-Domingue, Louis Delgrès from Martinique, and Ignace and the Mulâtresse Solitude from Guadeloupe, to name a few? The heated debate provoked by the anniversary turned the commemoration into an unprecedented moment of cultural and historical reflection for France and for her remaining overseas départements. The 1998 commemorative events gave rise to a desire to reclaim memory in the public sphere, and on 10 May 2001, the loi Taubira was ratified in the French parliament, recognizing slavery and the Atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity and providing for a day of remembrance in the metropole.4 A “Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage”, chaired by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, was appointed by the French government to make recommendations for the management of the memory of slavery in the French national archive. More recently, the infamous loi du 23 février 2005, which demanded in its fourth article that the “rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer”, “the positive role of the French presence overseas” be taught in French state schools further energized the debate around postcolonial memory.5 The year 2005 might actually be said to be the year in which France finally, although reluctantly, entered the postcolonial era. As Nicolas Bancel notes in a recent article: “nous sommes entrés, qu’on le veuille ou non, dans la postcolonie”, “We have entered, whether we like it or not, the postcolonial era”.6 The loi du 23 février 2005 coincided more or less with the publication of the manifesto of the self-proclaimed Indigènes de la République, followed by the riots of November 2005, when the suburbs of many French towns and cities exploded in violence following the deaths of two adolescents of immigrant descent, prompting the government to grant prefects the power to impose a curfew based on a law dating from the Algerian War of Independence.7 These events coincided with the publication of a number of academic works, most notably La Fracture coloniale (2005), co-edited by members of the Association pour la Connaissance de l’Histoire de l’Afrique Contemporaine (ACHAC), which 4

Christiane Taubira is a Guyanese deputy, representing the “Parti radical de gauche” in the French parliament. 5 For the full text of the “Loi n°2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés” see . On the genesis of the loi du 23 février 2005, see Manceron 2007. 6 Bancel 2007, 12 7 See . The manifesto, posted first on the Internet in January 2005, called for a radical critique of the history of colonialism, and a “decolonization of the Republic”.

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explicitly called for France to address its colonial heritage and to acknowledge the legacies of Empire still present in French culture, society and politics.8 Over the past ten years, a number of critics have drawn attention to the absence of recognition of the role played by colonial expansion in the formation of national and Republican identity.9 Many have raised concern at the marginalization of French colonialism in institutionalized forms of historical knowledge such as school textbooks and academic research programs.10 The debates surrounding the colonial question have revealed a new historical configuration for France, which is now prey to what one could call a “crise mémorielle”—what the French historian Pascal Blanchard identifies as “un tournant majeur dans la construction des mémoires de la colonisation, de l’immigration et de l’esclavage”, “a major turning point in the construction of the memories of colonisation, immigration and slavery”—despite various hostile attempts, emerging across the political and intellectual spectrum, to neutralise the emerging debates on what are known as the “memorial laws” and “repentance”.11 The 1998 commemoration thus brought to light the discord between France’s universalist interpretation of the abolitionary decree and Antillean historical specificity. Silenced for centuries by France’s assimilatory practices, the people of the Antilles had to struggle once again to make their voices heard in 1998. The act of commemoration holds very different meanings for the French and for the Antilleans. For, as far as slavery is concerned, the nation is divided into communities that do not share the same memory of the past. The descendants of slaves entertain a radically different relationship with the past than do the French in the metropole, for many of whom the history of slavery appears as a discovery rather than a memory. For the latter, 1848 can easily be reduced to a date symbolizing the accomplishments of the abolitionist movement of the Second Republic, and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. From the 8

Bancel, Blanchard and Lemaire 2005 Bancel, Blanchard and Vergès 2003; Bancel, Blanchard and Lemaire 2005; Vergès 2006 10 This is exemplified, for example, in the almost complete absence of any discussion of the overseas empire in Pierre Nora’s highly influential collection of essays Les Lieux de mémoire, the seven volumes, which were published between 1984 and 1992. See Nora 1984. The only chapter in this multi-volume work devoted to France‘s colonial past is that of Charles-Robert Ageron. See Ageron 1984. 11 Blanchard 2007, 35. On “memorial laws” and “repentance” see Bruckner 2005; Gallo 2005; Lefeuvre 2005; Paoli 2006; Rioux 2006. 9

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official perspective of the government, the abolitionary decree was commemorated as a founding moment of the much-vaunted principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, reinforcing the foundations of democracy and of the Republic. In his opening speech at the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the “abolition” of slavery on 23 April 1998, President Jacques Chirac presented the abolition of slavery as a building block of the nation: “La démarche retenue pour l’abolition est une démarche d’intégration. Elle contribue à renforcer l’unité de la nation”, “The chosen approach for implementing abolition is one of integration. It contributes to reinforcing the unity of the nation”.12 Emancipated former slaves became members of the nation that had formerly enslaved them. The freedom bestowed upon them further strengthened the principles upon which the nation’s unity was constructed: En mettant fin à une situation inique, les promoteurs de l’abolition de l’esclavage ne faisaient pas seulement œuvre d’humanité. Ils confortaient les fondements de la démocratie et de la République.13 By putting an end to an iniquitous situation, the instigators of the abolition of slavery were not only acting as humanists. They were also reinforcing the foundations of democracy and the Republic.

The abolition of slavery is thus presented as an inevitable point in history when France finally fulfils her destiny as the birthplace of universal freedom. In the interests of a national narrative in which France must not lose face, the Republic simply dictated the erasure of three centuries of slavery from the official historical record of the nation. As Françoise Vergès declares in her acclaimed essay La Mémoire enchaînée: “Défendre 1794 ou 1848 comme date de commémoration révèle le choix d’un récit où l’abolition est à la fois commencement et fin de l’histoire de l’esclavage”, “To defend 1794 or 1848 as a commemoration date reveals the choice of a narrative where abolition stands as both the starting point and the end of the history of slavery”.14 Celebrating 1848 one hundred and fifty years later was far more problematic for the people of the French 12

Discours du Président de la République lors du 150e anniversaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage, see . 13 Ibid. 14 Vergès 2006, 32

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Caribbean who feared that their history would be forgotten yet again. They denounced, for instance, the silencing of the first abolition of slavery in 1794. Its revocation by Napoleon in 1802 had a profound impact on Caribbean history, since it contributed to the radicalization of the Haitian Revolution, eventually leading to Haitian independence in 1804.15 By celebrating the abolitionary decree as the exclusive legacy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the commemoration solely honoured the contributions of French individuals, clearly sidestepping the influence of Caribbean liberation movements. Many articles written at the time when the commemorative events took place drew attention to the fact that the Enlightenment was seen in most cases as the primary source of abolition.16 In his speech, Chirac declared: Comme souvent à l’origine d’une décision légale, il y a la ténacité, l’énergie, le courage d’un homme, qui ose remettre en question l’ordre établi et qui engage le fer contre des intérêts puissants. Cet homme, C’est Victor Schoelcher qui fit de l’émancipation des esclaves le combat de toute une vie.17 As is often the case at the origin of a legal decision, there is the tenacity, the energy, the courage of a man who dares to question the established order and who crosses swords with powerful interests. Victor Schoelcher is that man who made a lifelong battle of the emancipation of slaves.

To see the slaves’ struggles for freedom only as a direct, chronological consequence of Montesquieu’s, Diderot’s, or Raynal’s denunciations of the slave regime, as an ideological product of French thought, fails to properly remember three hundred years of mass enslavement and fails to attribute the collapse of the system to the power of slave rebellions.18 Slaves are not represented as “makers” of historical events: history, by definition, is made in France. In their reactions to the 1998 commemoration, French Caribbean writers, historians, politicians, and journalists primarily emphasized the 15

For a discussion of how the revocation of the first abolition of slavery influenced the course of events in Saint Domingue, see James 1989. 16 See, for instance, Paringaux 1998. 17 Discours du Président de la République lors du 150e anniversaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage. 18 One of the earliest French figures to be remembered during the commemoration was the historian and philosopher Abbé Raynal. His Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, published over the last decades of the eighteenth century, presents European colonial expansion in an increasingly critical light, and is believed by many to have fueled slave revolts in the French Caribbean.

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importance of remembering their slave heritage. Guadeloupean writers, artists, priests, and union leaders in general asked the commemoration not to reduce their history to one day: Commémorer, bien sûr. Dire le fructueux “commerce triangulaire”, qui enrichit la France et ses ports négriers. Dire deux siècles de barbarie couverte par les humanistes, les Lumières, les Eglises. Dire l’ampleur du crime, les chiffres du trafic, l’indemnisation des colons. Et ne pas oublier que l’abolition célébrée ne fut jamais que la seconde, la première, octroyée par la Convention en 1794, s’étant soldée dans le sang. Dire enfin le déracinement, le traumatisme, la quête d’identité.19 To commemorate, of course. To talk about the profitable “triangular trade” that enriched France, and to talk about its slave ports. To talk about two centuries of barbarism concealed by the humanists, the Enlightenment, Churches. To talk about the scale of the crime, the tally of the traffic, the compensations for the colonisers. And not to forget that the abolition which is celebrated is but the second one, for the first one, granted by the Convention in 1794, ended in blood. To talk about the uprooting, the trauma, the quest for identity.

In Martinique, they brought into focus the power of the slaves’ struggle that made abolition inevitable. Alfred Marie-Jeanne, the president of both the Martinican Independentist Party and the Regional Council of Martinique, clearly distinguishes the celebrations taking place on Martinique from those organized in France: Non, madame, nous ne célébrons pas l’abolition de l’esclavage! Nous commémorons l’insurrection antiesclavagiste. C’est différent. Les nègres n’ont pas attendu un libérateur divin venu de la métropole pour mener la révolte. Les esclaves ont conquis eux-mêmes leur liberté. Voilà ce que nous célébrons. Ignorer cet épisode de notre histoire est encore une manière de nous mépriser.20 No, Madam, we are not celebrating the abolition of slavery! We are commemorating the anti-slavery insurrection. That is a different thing. Black men have not waited for a Holy liberator, coming from the metropole to lead the revolt. Slaves have conquered freedom by themselves. That is what we are celebrating. To ignore that chapter of history is, again, a way to despise us.

Yet départementalisation in 1946, the policy of assimilation that followed, and more recently, the 1998 commemoration of the abolition of slavery, 19 20

Cojean 1998b Cojean 1998a

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have all perpetuated a systematic “silencing” of historical memory by imposing a “politics of forgetting”, not only in the metropole, but in the overseas départements as well.21 As Vergès argues: L’histoire de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises fut longtemps placée sous le sceau du déni et de l’oubli. Déni et oubli opèrent tant en France que dans les territoires où a sévi l’esclavagisme. Dans les colonies françaises qui connurent l’esclavage et qui sont restées des territoires français— Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, la Réunion—, l’État a prit soin d’effacer toute trace de cette histoire. Le silence s’organisa dès le décret d’abolition. La France, seul pays européen à avoir connu deux abolitions (1794 et 1848) et un rétablissement de l’esclavage (1802), préféra oublier ce long épisode de son histoire. Aux colonies, celle-ci fut préservée dans la mémoire orale, mais ce fut mémoire honteuse.22 The history of slavery in the French colonies was stamped by denial and forgetfulness for a long time. Denial and forgetfulness are operating as much in France as in the territories where slavery was common practice. In those French colonies that experienced slavery and remained French territories—Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Reunion—, the State took care to erase any trace of that history. There has been an effort to keep everything under cover since the abolition decree came into existence. France, the only European country to have known two abolitions (1794 and 1848), and a re-establishment of slavery (1802), preferred to forget that long chapter of its history. In the colonies, the latter has been preserved thanks to oral memory, but this was a shameful memory.

For Vergès, the conversion of slavery into a history that took place “over there”, without any connection with France’s national history, has induced in many historians and sociologists a certain blindness—what she refers to as “un point aveugle dans la pensée française”, “a blind spot in French thought”—to the emergence of cultural and social demands currently being articulated in public debate.23 Vergès argues that it therefore becomes imperative to reexamine the conditions that made such communal forgetfulness possible, and subsequently to “imaginer son dépassement”, “imagine what is beyond”, for she argues: “dépasser l’oubli, ce n’est pas poursuivre la rature, mais donner à comprendre”, “to go beyond forgetfulness does not mean pursuing the process of erasure,

21

The Martinican historian Myriam Cottias speaks of a “politique de l’oubli” in an article in France-Antilles. See Cottias 1998. 22 Vergès 2007, 67 23 Vergès 2005, 70

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but giving food for understanding”.24 In order to do so, Antillean writers have constantly tried to express their share in the history of slavery, engaging Antillean history through fiction, poetry, and essay-writing, in order to remove the “layer of silence” that has obstructed the memory of slavery throughout the centuries, and bestow upon their nation a sense of historical consciousness.

From “mémoire obscure” to “mémoire consciente” It is not surprising that, whether through the re-writing of historical events in fictional forms, figuring the writer as historian, allegorizing collective history in a character’s story, or positioning history as literary activity, the theme of history is persistently present in postcolonial literatures. The need for literary rewritings of history has been articulated by many postcolonial critics and writers, who equate the search for a lost history with the quest for a collective identity.25 Paradigmatically, the contemporary postcolonial writer speaks for a hitherto silenced collectivity, as Césaire declared in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: “Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n’ont point de bouche, ma voix, la liberté de celles qui s’affaissent au cachot du désespoir”, “My mouth will be the mouth of those griefs which have no mouth, my voice, the freedom of those that collapse in the dungeon of despair”.26 Yet the most general problem with history in postcolonial contexts is that what is known as history is a received account given by the colonizer. The chronologies produced depend upon narratives of the dominant power, narratives that are likely to be seriously flawed when seen from the perspective of the colonized. There is therefore a need to articulate one’s own place in a history that has been previously subsumed by hegemonic “white mythologies”.27 But the relationship with the past remains one of the most fraught aspects in the negotiation of a postcolonial identity. History indeed frequently appears as a restraining force in postcolonial writing: history, the nightmare from which Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus wants to awake, is in Derek Walcott’s words, the “Medusa of the New World”.28 Such images of petrifaction and entrapment testify to the oppressive and debilitating “presence” of the past in the postcolonial imaginary. Antillean 24

Vergès 2006, 22-3 For a discussion on postcolonial literary rewritings of history, see Ashcroft 2001. 26 Césaire 1983, 22; Translation: Césaire 1995, 89 27 Young 1990 28 Walcott 1998, 36 25

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writers thus appear to be oppressed by the overwhelming presence of the past, while at the same time being haunted by its apparent dereliction. For a long time, many have condemned the region to a historical limbo, as the following declaration by the Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul in The Middle Passage testifies: “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told […] History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies”.29 Naipaul’s bitter statement is echoed by Derek Walcott’s affirmation: “amnesia is the true history of the New World”, and by Glissant’s assertion that “le temps antillais fut stabilisé dans le néant d’une non-histoire imposée”, “the Caribbean notion of time was fixed in the void of an imposed nonhistory”.30 The first historical reality that Antilleans must come to terms with is indeed the cultural dislocation and fragmentation brought about by the European conquest of the Americas. It has therefore become quite common to talk about Caribbean history in terms of loss, emptiness, and lack. The violence of the plantation system deprived slaves of shared cultural and linguistic heritages by breaking up ethnic, linguistic, and familial groups to undermine resistance to its domination. Deprived of its cultural background, the transported people could not oppose the resistance of an atavistic community to the cultural annihilation brought about by colonialism, and were therefore faced with the impossibility of retrieving a sense of collective consciousness. If the initial traumas of transplantation, the middle passage and slavery irrevocably fractured the collective memory across the Caribbean, the extreme dependence resulting from the decline of the plantation economy and départementalisation have also accelerated this sense of historical and cultural amnesia. With the abolition of slavery in 1848, and later on with départementalisation and the policy of assimilation, the French Republic compelled its new citizens to throw a veil over their former enslavement. The absolute historical invisibility of the slave, coupled with a willed amnesia surrounding slavery, means that the trail of historical consciousness has been definitively and repeatedly eroded. Unable to see themselves in a historical dynamic constituted by events of their own making, the people of the French Caribbean experience the past passively, as an absence. This confines them, Glissant argues, in a kind of historical and cultural vacuum: Notre conscience historique ne pouvait pas “sédimenter”, si on peut ainsi dire, de manière progressive et continue, comme chez les peuples qui ont engendré une philosophie souvent totalitaire de l’histoire, les peuples 29 30

Naipaul 1962, 20 Walcott 1998, 39; Glissant 1981, 228; Translation Glissant, 1989, 65

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This erosion (what Glissant calls “raturage”) of collective memory prevents the possibility of an emergence of historical consciousness in Martinique and Guadeloupe. This is of course perpetuated by the fact that Antillean history is trapped in the History of the Other. Understandably so, as the writing of Caribbean history was long the univocal discourse of the colonial master, a marginal chapter in the wider European colonial narrative of history, the Caribbean has been widely interpreted as a “historyless” place, where history is always an account of events imposed upon the people, as the Créolistes clearly expressed in Éloge de la Créolité: Notre histoire (ou plus exactement nos histoires) est naufragée dans l’Histoire coloniale. La mémoire collective est notre urgence. Ce que nous croyons être l’histoire antillaise n’est que l’Histoire de la colonisation des Antilles.32 Our history (or more precisely our histories) is shipwrecked in colonial history. Collective memory is the first thing on our agenda. What we believe to be Caribbean history is just the history of the colonization of the Caribbeans.

Yet, for all its success, the imposition of a prevalent dependency and institutionalized amnesia in the French overseas départements has, unavoidably, encountered resistance. Since the 1920s a vibrant literary and critical tradition has developed unique forms of social critique and aesthetic innovation to productively oppose this dependency and communal forgetfulness. And when a Caribbean discourse finally emerged in the mid-twentieth century, it was compelled to reclaim and rewrite the 31 32

Glissant 1981, 223-224; Tranlation Glissant 1989, 61-62 Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1993, 37; Translation Ibid. 98

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region’s tortured history. A touchstone of contemporary intellectual debate, memory has inevitably become a recurrent theme in political and cultural debate in the Antilles over the last twenty years. Despite the frequent proclamations by Antillean writers that memory in the Antilles has been erased, manipulated or repressed, it remains their most persistent concern and is central to their literary production. Antillean writers generally combine a prolific literary output with strong political visibility, and strive to play an active part in shaping Antillean collective memory. Césaire, whose dual role as statesman and poet is of course well known, was the most obvious example of the interaction between literature and politics in the Antilles. More recently, the Guadeloupean novelist Daniel Maximin was coordinator of the commemorations of the abolition of slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1998, and the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé chaired the “Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage”. According to the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who pioneered the concept of memory as a collective faculty, reconstructing the past is the function of social memory.33 Since this collective memory has always been silenced in the Antilles it must somehow be conjured up before it can point the way to the past. In order to mobilize this painful past, to turn it into what historian Pierre Nora calls a “lieu de mémoire”,34 to make it available for the collective memory of the people, slavery must become a part of “conscious memory”. Patrick Chamoiseau argues: Le silence génère une mémoire inconsciente. Une mémoire obscure. C’est la formulation (le dire, le partage et le souvenir) qui métamorphose le crime en expérience, qui en fait un événement utile à la construction positive et harmonieuse de l’être. Le crime subi, transformé en expérience, permet l’apparition d’une mémoire consciente.35 Silence generates an unconscious memory. An obscure memory. It is the formulation (saying, sharing, and remembering) that transforms the crime into an experience, and makes it a useful event that contributes to the positive and harmonious construction of the human being. The crime endured, transformed into an experience, allows for the emergence of a conscious memory.

Collective memory can no longer be taken for granted; rather, it now has to be actively resuscitated, recollected and transmitted. As Glissant 33

Halbwachs 1950 Nora 1984 35 Chamoiseau 2000, 110; original emphasis. 34

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argues: “L’histoire n’est pas seulement pour nous une absence, c’est un vertige. Ce temps que nous n’avons jamais eu, il nous faut le reconquérir”, “History is not only absence for us, it is vertigo. This time that was never ours, we must now possess”.36 However, given that Antillean history cannot be totally accessible to historians, the recovery of Antillean historical experience is bound to occur via the aesthetic production of poetry, theatre, fiction, and theoretical writing. In a recent article, Romuald Fonkoua argues that “l’histoire des ‘peuples sans histoire’ est une chose trop importante pour être laissée entre les mains des seuls historiens”, “the history of ‘peoples without history’ is too crucial to be entrusted to historians alone”.37 Antillean literature therefore strives to engage history and its modes of narration to recover the material of history for subjective experiences. As Confiant, Bernabé, and Chamoiseau argue in their Éloge de la Créolité, it is primarily to the writer that the task of inaugurating a historical consciousness must fall: Notre Chronique est dessous les dates, dessous les faits répertoriés. Nous sommes Paroles sous l’écriture. Seule la connaissance poétique, la connaissance romanesque, la connaissance littéraire, bref, la connaissance artistique, pourra nous déceler, nous percevoir, nous ramener évanescents aux réanimations de la conscience.38 Our chronicle is behind the dates, behind the known facts: we are Words behind writing. Only poetic knowledge, fictional knowledge, literary knowledge, in short, artistic knowledge can discover us, understand us and bring us, evanescent, back to the resuscitation of consciousness.

Historical memory is here figured as a kind of subterranean undercurrent, an organic and intuitive faculty that awaits stimulation and revitalization: “cette mémoire-sable voltigée dans le paysage, dans la terre, dans des fragments de cerveaux de vieux-nègres, tout en richesse émotionnelle, en sensations, en intuitions”, “this sand-memory fluttering about the scenery, the land, in the fragments of old black people’s heads, made of emotional richness, of sensations, of intuitions”.39 Glissant too ascribes a special role to the Antillean writer, who is to become the re-interpreter of history, by means of a thorough “exploration” of the past, so as to invest it with a new meaning: 36

Glissant 1981, 474; Translation Glissant, 1989, 161 Fonkoua 2006, 23 38 Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1993, 37-38; original emphasis ; Translation Ibid. 99 39 Ibid. 38; Translation Ibid. 99 37

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Le passé, notre passé subi, qui n’est pas encore histoire pour nous, est pourtant là (ici) qui nous lancine. La tâche de l’écrivain est d’explorer ce lancinement, de le “révéler” de manière continue dans le présent et l’actuel. Cette exploration ne revient donc ni à une mise en schémas ni à un pleur nostalgique. C’est à démêler un sens douloureux du temps et à le projeter à tout coup dans notre futur, sans le recours de ces sortes de plages temporelles dont les peuples occidentaux ont bénéficié, sans le secours de cette densité collective que donne d’abord un arrière-pays culturel ancestral. C’est ce que j’appelle une vision prophétique du passé.40 The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future, without the help of those plateaus in time from which the West has benefited, without the help of that collective density that is the primary value of an ancestral cultural heartland. That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past.

The re-enactment of historical memory is thus shown to be intricately intertwined with the literary project. In the Antilles, unknown origins, multiple traces, confusion between the factual and the mythical have rendered methods of historical investigation ill-fitted or insufficient. As Nick Nesbitt has shown, the destructive powers of colonialism, slavery, and the plantation system led to a greater political and epistemological power of poetry and fiction.41 The imaginary faculty, a projection of the mind into the future not based on historical facts, intervenes where dysfunctional memory fails. In Voicing Memory, Nesbitt demonstrates that agency and control of artistic representation bridge the gaps in the past for a community broken by slavery and colonialism: [Caribbean writers] have transformed colonial subjectivity, reconstructing a historical awareness lost amidst the repressive violence of slavery, the plantation system, and the colonial control of historical discourse. I argue that this act of recovery occurs through an aesthetic construction of historical experience.42

40

Glissant 1981, 226-227, original emphasis ; Translation Glissant 1989, 63-4 Nesbitt 2003 42 Ibid. xiv 41

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The concept of “postmemory” developed by Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory proves to be particularly valuable here, as “postmemory”, she suggests, is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection […] [and] is not mediated through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.43

This is a notion that chimes with Glissant’s idea of prophetic historiography. Indeed, recent criticism understands memory itself to be a representational construction of the past in the present and thus to some degree an inherently aesthetic process. The aesthetic construction thus provides a space in which to model a historically aware subject that evades the historically preformed society that complexly determines him/her. The history of modern Antillean literature is in many respects an attempt to articulate the interaction between the objectivity of historical facts and the fleeting, subjective experience of colonized subjects, registering the confusion and affirming the resistance of the subject in the face of ongoing colonization. The imaginative creations of Césaire, Glissant, Chamoiseau, and Condé among others, all engage a complex interrogation of the Antillean past. While an attention to the materiality of historical facts allows these works to articulate an immanent situated truth content, their lyrical creativity reinvests historical events with the productive force of subjective memory.

“Vision prophétique du passé” in Glissant’s Le quatrième siècle Glissant’s volume of poetry Boises (1979) is dedicated “à tout pays qui se détourne et s’exaspère de tarir”, “to every country that turns away and dries up in exasperation”.44 The dedication and the final words of the collection’s last poem—“C’est pourquoi dérouler ce tarir et descendre dans tant d’absences, pour sinuer jusqu’à renaître, noir dans le roc”, “that is why to live through this drying and to descend so many absences, so as to work your way toward being reborn, black in the rockface”—refer us to the major themes of Glissant’s œuvre: the need to recapture, but also to 43 Hirsch 1997, 22. Hirsch writes that she has developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but believes that it may be useful to describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences. 44 Glissant 1983, 145

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transcend, a vanished, unrecorded history; and the struggle to preserve a sense of cultural identity in the face of metropolitan French policies that discourage and inhibit the onward flow of a specifically Caribbean tradition in Martinique and Guadeloupe.45 The many “absences” referred to in the poem are those of the slave ancestors, who are doubly absent, since the details of their lives, unlike those of their masters, were not officially registered in the past, and since their memory is ignored, or even rejected, by their present-day descendants. At the heart of Glissant’s writing there is a strong desire to restore and elucidate the vast areas of the Caribbean past that have been neglected by European historians or else recorded with unjust bias. Glissant considers that only an exploration of Antillean collective memory, and access to Antillean historical experience, fundamental for the constitution of subjectivity, can allow a better understanding of the current situation. In the preface to his play Monsieur Toussaint (1961) he writes: Pour ceux qui ne connaissent de leur histoire que la part de nuit ou de démission à quoi on a voulu les réduire, la récupération du passé proche ou lointain s’impose comme une nécessité. […] L’acharnement à dévoiler le passé, par d’autres dénaturé ou oblitéré, permet parfois de mieux toucher l’actuel.46 For those who know from their history only the segment of darkness or abdication to which they have forcibly been reduced, the retrieval of a past, close or far away, imposes itself as a necessity. […] The relentless effort to unveil the past, distorted or obliterated by others, allows us sometimes to have a better grasp of the present.

He therefore sets out to stimulate Antillean collective memory, forcing the reader to re-examine the past, not in a vain quest for dates or facts, but in an attempt to acquire a sense of historical collective memory that is the fundamental basis for the construction of a national model in the Antilles. In pursuing his reflection on the nature of history and on its practice in the Antilles, Glissant tries to redefine a space where a literature of “national consciousness” can finally emerge: C’est en réinvestissant son passé que, dans nos pays, on échappe à l’ambigu traumatique des refus et des rejets inconscients. La mémoire historique dans ces pays où l’histoire a été et continue d’être un combat sans témoins, arme la collectivité d’une décision nouvelle et lui permet de 45 46

Ibid. 186 Glissant 1961, 7-8

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Chapter Three dépasser les rejets inconscients de la structuration imposée, précisément en l’autorisant à réfléchir concrètement sur la nécessité des structures et à décider d’en susciter de nouvelles.47 It is by reinvesting one’s past that, in our countries, we escape the ambiguous trauma of unconscious refusals and rejections. In those countries where history used to be and continues to be a battle without witnesses, historical memory arms the collectivity with the power to take new decisions, and enables them to get past the unconscious rejections of the imposed structure, precisely by allowing them to think in concrete terms about the necessity of structures and to decide on the creation of new ones.

By adopting a strategy for a creative exploration of the past, Glissant’s fiction actively participates in the rehabilitation of Antillean “suppressed history”—not simply by tearing apart the narrative fabric of official historiography and re-inscribing the heterogeneity of historical representation, but also by creating a cultural space that allows memories of slavery to resurface, opening up infinite potential for “l’histoire à faire”. Questioning the boundary between the genres, and the division between the fields of history and fiction enshrined in Western thought— despite a longstanding tradition of the historical novel—Glissant insists on the co-operation of the historian and the poet in order to raise the past to a higher level of comprehension: “Nous devons être des historiens poétiques, nous devons réinventer la périodisation de notre histoire par divination poétique”, “We must be poetic historians, we must reinvent the periodisation of our history by means of poetic divination”, as for him, “l’essentiel de l’histoire de la Martinique, histoire raturée, se lit par hypothèse créatrice”, “the core of the history of Martinique, erased history, can be read by means of creative hypothesis”.48 His definition of the writer-poet matches closely Paul Veyne’s definition of the historian: Les historiens ne sont guère que des prophètes à rebours et ils étoffent et raniment à coups d’imagination leur prédictions post eventum, cela s’appelle la rétrodiction historique ou “synthèse”, et cette faculté imaginative est l’auteur des trois quarts de toute page d’histoire, le dernier quart venant des documents. […] L’histoire est aussi un roman.49 Historians are merely prophets in reverse, and they flesh out and animate their post eventum predictions with imaginative flourishes. This is called 47

Glissant 1981, 156 Bader 1984, 94; Glissant 1981, 279 49 Veyne 1983, 113 48

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historical retrodiction or “synthesis”, and this imaginative faculty furnishes three-fourths of any page of history, with documents providing the rest. […] History is also a novel.

The project of evolving a history through imaginative reconstruction persists in an explicit way in Glissant’s novels. Indeed Glissant’s tendency to move from historical and graphic detail to an intense concentration on associations that go beyond the realm of appearances, lead to the novelist’s spectacular success with prose fiction in the early sixties. In his second novel, Le Quatrième siècle (1964), Glissant attempts not so much to reconstruct but to re-imagine the contacts, intersections and hostilities that abound in Martinican history through the incomplete family histories of the Longoués and the Béluses. Le Quatrième siècle is not a historical novel in the conventional sense, nor is it a family saga about dynasties, descendants and patriarchs. Mathieu, a trained historian and archivist, attempts to complete his formal chronology of Martinican history through the subjective and intuitive memories of the old quimboiseur (sorcerer, healer) Papa Longoué. The plot is centred on the confrontation of two attitudes to time and history. One is epitomized by Papa Longoué who has an intuitive sense of time and pretends that “il ne faut pas suivre les faits avec logique mais deviner, prévoir ce qui s’est passé”, “the events should not be followed logically but divined, foreseeing what has happened”, and the other by the young Mathieu, whose schooling makes him want an ordered sense of history:50 A travers les onomatopées, les réticences, les incertitudes du vieil homme, Mathieu égaré tentait d’avancer l’histoire, de mettre en ordre les événements.51 Lost, Mathieu was trying to penetrate all the old man’s onomatopoeia and reluctance and uncertainty to make the story advance and give some order to events.

It would be tempting to see in Le Quatrième siècle an attempt to retrieve Martinique’s lost past by inventing a family saga that fills in the gaps in French colonial history and that compensates for the distortions of prolonged metropolitan dominance. Yet, in Poétique de la Relation, Glissant has positively voiced his dissatisfaction with any such undertaking in the Caribbean, which he sees as a falsification of the complexities of New World history: 50 51

Glissant 1964, 66; Translation: Glissant 2001, 50 Ibid. 34; Translation Ibid. 22

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Chapter Three La mémoire dans les oeuvres n’est pas celle du calendrier; notre vécu du temps ne fréquente pas seulement les cadences du mois et de l’an, il s’exaspère aussi de ce néant dont la Plantation avait semblé marquer la sentence définitive […] ce qui reste, C’est l’obscur de cette mémoire impossible, qui parle plus haut et plus loin que les chroniques et les recensements.52 Memory in our works is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the Plantation. […] what still remains is the dark side of this impossible memory, which has a louder voice and one that carries further than any chronicle or census.

Glissant undermines any attempt to establish a neat chronology and demonstrates the importance of the present in the discovery and reconstruction of the past. For only a patient, imaginative decoding allows for a full grasp of complex historic-social realities. Le Quatrième siècle opens with Papa Longoué’s evocation of the rising wind of a destructive hurricane, which like the sea is associated with memory, and becomes a metaphor for the narrative method: - Tout ce vent, dit Papa Longoué, tout ce vent qui va pour monter, tu ne peux rien, tu attends qu’il monte jusqu’à tes mains, et puis la bouche, les yeux, la tête. Comme si un homme n’était que pour attendre le vent, pour se noyer oui tu entends, pour se noyer une bonne fois dans tout ce vent comme la mer sans fin…53 “All this wind,” said Papa Longoué, “all this wind about to come up, nothing you can do, you wait for it to come up to your hands, then your mouth, your eyes, your head. As if a man was only there to wait for the wind, to drown, yes, you understand, to drown himself for good in all this wind like the endless ocean…”

For the quimboiseur, historical knowledge is the vertiginous descent into an obscure past, knowledge beyond words: Pourquoi recommencer, pourquoi épeler à haute voix le premier cri puisque toute l’histoire résiste, que nous voilà ici à tourner sans que le jour avance?54

52

Glissant 1990, 86; Translation Glissant 1997, 72 Glissant 1964, 13; Translation Glissant 2001, 3 54 Ibid. 45 ; Translation Ibid. 32 53

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Why begin all over again, why spell out the first cry out loud since all of history is resisting and here we are spinning while the day does not move forward?

Papa Longoué conjures up the living past, eschewing logic, evidence and clarity. His method is the art of divination, uncovering the hidden signs, les traces, in the fragmented, disorderly accumulation of events that constitute the African experience in the New World. Mathieu’s aim is to explore this obscure chronicle, by testing the powers of logic against the quimboiseur’s magic. When Mathieu asks Papa Longoué to tell him about the past, he begins an inquiry into the very nature of history and historical change. Glissant contrasts the quimboiseur’s intuitive vision with Mathieu’s penchant for documents and chronologies. However, neither Papa Longoué’s “magic” nor Mathieu’s book learning are sufficient in themselves. Glissant suggests that historical understanding can only be achieved through a dialogue between past and present that takes place during their meetings in the legendary forest. Glissant thus suggests that a new conceptual order is needed to understand fully the New World and by extension the Caribbean experience. To this extent we can see the parallels between Glissant and other twentieth-century artists of cultural diversity such as Victor Segalen, Paul Claudel, Saint-John Perse, and Derek Walcott. From the chaos of history and the conflicting diversity of the past, new correspondences emerge. Glissant focuses in particular on the transformative power of the Caribbean Sea which he sees as a fertile repository for New World poetics, and argues that this body of water does reveal a hidden, sub-oceanic convergence of histories, thereby echoing Brathwaite’s statement “The unity is submarine”:55 Mais nos histoires diversifiées dans la Caraïbe produisent aujourd’hui un autre dévoilement: celui de leur convergence souterraine. […] L’irruption à elle-même de l’histoire antillaise (des histoires de nos peuples, convergentes) nous débarrasse de la vision linéaire et hiérarchisée d’une Histoire qui courrait son seul fil.56 However our diverse histories in the Caribbean have produced today another revelation: that of their subterranean convergence. […] The implosion of Caribbean history (of the converging histories of our peoples) relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single history that would run its unique course. 55 56

Glissant 1981, 230 Ibid. 230; Translation Glissant 1989, 66

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The New World past is conceived by Glissant as a “féconde Tragédie”, “fecund tragedy”, filled with promises, that only an imaginative grasp of continuities can reveal: “Le rapport minutieux des dates et des faits nous masque le mouvement continu […] de notre passé”, “the meticulous listing of dates and events hides from us the continuous movement […] within our past”.57 The claim to “creatively explore” one’s own history implies a very strong aesthetic position. The imagined history, unlike the official history found in history books, has the advantage of carrying out aesthetic choice that brings forward the powers of imagination, the will to create, more than the conservation of overused models that lead to sterility and ossification. If the physical and epistemic disruption of the Diaspora interrupted linear transmission, then severed links demand an imagination of historical beginnings, which revise and compensate for the original interruption, thus opening up a potential space for Antillean history to be written. Now it is a question of historical “re-insertion”, involving not only the correction of factual inaccuracies and rectifications of colonial bias, but also a re-creation of the past concurrent with the vision of the future: La production de textes doit être à son tour productrice d’histoire, non en tant qu’elle déclenche un événement mais en tant qu’elle ressuscite à la conscience un pan tombé. L’exploration n’est pas analytique mais créatrice.58 The production of texts must also produce history, not in its capacity to facilitate some happening, but in its ability to raise a concealed world to the level of consciousness. Exploration is not analytical but creative.

For Glissant, the poetic intention is a necessary complement to the historical intention, for he sees in “la pensée poétique”, “poetic thought” an investigative tool: “L’analyse nous aide à mieux imaginer; l’imaginaire, à mieux saisir les éléments (non premiers) de notre totalité”, “Analysis helps us to imagine better; the imaginary, then helps us to grasp the (non prime) elements of our totality”.59 Yet, he does not go to the other extreme

57

Glissant 1969, 181 Glissant 1981, 345; Translation Glissant 1989, 107 59 Glissant 1990, 184; Translation: Glissant 1997, 170. The value of poets and poetic systems in advancing thought is considered in the chapter ‘Poétiques’ in Poétique de la Relation, 35-48. In this chapter, Glissant gives a survey of the Baudelairean “poétique des profondeurs” and the Mallarméan “poétique du langage-en-soi” and examines the “poétique de la relation” that emerges in 58

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and suggests that the poet’s vision provides a complete and total explanation. Poetic “discoveries” prove to be as fragile as historical ones. Consciousness is a slow, patient, and painful process, which is destined to repetition: “l’opacité soumise au dévoilement suppose lenteur, accumulation, durée”, “subjecting opacity to the process of unveiling supposes slowness, accumulation, duration”.60 As Glissant admits at the end of Soleil de la conscience: Et s’il [l’art] ne résout pas de problèmes, du moins aide-t-il aussi à les poser dans la lumière trop diffuse, quand la connaissance est possible et toujours future.61 And although it [art] does not solve any problems, at least it also contributes to bring them to a strongly diffuse light, when knowledge is possible and always to come.

Poetry, an essential part of this process, offers at best provisional answers.

Bibliography Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1984. L’Exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial. In La République, Vol. 1, ed. Pierre Nora. 561-591. Paris: Gallimard. Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge. Bader, Wolfgang. 1984. Poétique antillaise, Poétique de la Relation: interview avec Édouard Glissant. Komparatistische Hefte 9/10: 83-100. Bancel, Nicolas. 2007. De la colonie à la postcolonie. Cultures Sud 165: 712. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès. 2003. La République coloniale: Essai sur une utopie. Paris: Albin Michel. Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds. 2005. La Fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Paris: La Découverte. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. 1993. Éloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (bilingual edition), trans. by M.B. Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard.

Rimbaud’s sense of otherness within. He then elaborates on the evolution of that “poétique de la Relation” in the poetry of Segalen, Saint-John Perse, and others. 60 Glissant 1969, 175 61 Glissant 1956, 84

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Blanchard, Pascal. 2007. Histoire coloniale: la nouvelle guerre des mémoires. Cultures Sud 165: 35-40. Bruckner, Pascal. 2005. La Tyrannie de la pénitence. Essai sur le masochisme occidental. Paris: Grasset. Césaire, Aimé. 1983. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence africaine. —. 1995. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. (Bilingual edition), trans. by Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard. Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets, 4. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Chalons, Serge, et al. 2000. De l’esclavage aux réparations. Paris: Khartala. Chamoiseau, Patrick. 2000. De la mémoire obscure à la mémoire consciente. In De l’esclavage aux réparations, ed. by Le Comité Devoir de mémoire. Martinique. Paris: Khartala. Chaulet-Achour, Christine, and Romuald-Blaise Fonkoua, eds. 2001. Esclavage: Libérations, abolitions, commémorations. Paris: Séguier. Cojean, Annick. 1998a. En Martinique, la commémoration de l’abolition est d’abord celle de la révolte des esclaves. Le Monde 25 April 1998. —. 1998b. En Guadeloupe, des voix demandent à la France de reconnaître son passé esclavagiste. Le Monde 26 April 1998. Cottias, Myriam. 1998. La politique de l’oubli. France-Antilles, hors-série, Cent cinquantenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage, 25 May. Dubois, Laurent. 1998. Les Esclaves de la République. Paris: CalmannLévy. Fonkoua, Romuald. March-May 2006. Littérature antillaise et histoire: “écrire l’histoire des peuples sans histoire”. Notre Librairie 161: 17-23. Gallo, Max. 2005. Fier d’être français. Paris: Fayard. Glissant, Édouard. 1997 [1956]. Soleil de la Conscience. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1961. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris: Seuil. —. 1997 [1964]. Le Quatrième siècle. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1997 [1969]. L’Intention poétique. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1997 [1981]. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1983. Le sel noir (1960), Le sang rivé (1961), Boises (1979). Paris: Gallimard. —. 1990. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Transl. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia. —. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Transl. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —. 2001. The Fourth Century. Transl. Betsy Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Halbwachs, Maurice. 1997 [1950]. La mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. James, C.L.R. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books. Lefeuvre, Daniel. 2005. Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale. Paris: Flammarion. Manceron, Gilles. 2007. La colonisation, un passé que la France a du mal à regarder en face. Cultures Sud 165: 29-33. Naipaul, V. S. 2001 [1962]. The Middle Passage: A Caribbean Journey. London: Picador. Nesbitt, Nick. 2003. Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Nora, Pierre, ed. 1984. Les Lieux de mémoire, 7 volumes. Paris: Gallimard. Paringaux, Roland-Pierre. 1998. 1848, la seconde abolition de l’esclavage. Le Monde 19 April. Paoli, Paul-François. 2006. Nous ne sommes pas coupables: Assez de repentances. Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde. Placoly, Vincent. 1983. Frères Volcans: Chronique de l’abolition de l’esclavage. Paris: La Brèche. Rioux, Jean-Pierre. 2006. La France perd la mémoire: comment un pays démissionne de son histoire. Paris: Perrin. Vergès, Françoise. 2001. Abolir l’esclavage - une utopie coloniale: Les ambiguïtés d’une politique humanitaire. Paris: Albin Michel. —. 2005. Malaise dans la République: Mémoires troublées, territoires oubliés. In Culture post-coloniale 1961-2006.Traces et mémoires coloniales en France ed. by Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel. Paris: Éditions Autrement. —. 2006. La mémoire enchaînée: Questions sur l’esclavage. Paris: Albin Michel. —. 2007. L’oubli et le déni. Histoires et mémoires de l’esclavage dans l’outre-mer français. Cultures Sud 165: 65-69. Veyne, Paul. 1983. Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Essai sur l’imagination constituante. Paris: Seuil. Walcott, Derek. 1998. The Muse of History. In What the Twilight Says: Essays. 36-64. New York and London: Faber and Faber. Young, Robert. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER FOUR SLAVERY IN THE LITERATURE OF MADAGASCAR: THE CASE OF RAHARIMANANA CLAIRE RIFFARD

Si on associe généralement la question de l’esclavage au continent africain qui a payé un lourd tribut au commerce triangulaire, il existe pourtant d’autres pages à exhumer du silence et de l’oubli, dans l’océan indien et au-delà. Although the question of slavery is often linked to the African continent, which has paid a heavy price for the triangular trade, other previously silenced and forgotten pages in the history of the Indian Ocean and beyond should be recalled. —Khal Torabully, Africultures N°67, p.1011

According to the Mauritian poet Khal Torabully, historians and writers do not speak enough about the slavery that took place on the islands in the Indian Ocean: Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion. It is true that the literature of this region of the world evokes only rarely this tragic phenomenon. Nevertheless, some writers do venture there and try to break the silence. How do they achieve this and what strategies of writing do they choose? This chapter will explore these questions by analyzing the literary production of Raharimanana and other writers from these islands. The geographical situation of Madagascar is very particular. Madagascar is often considered a microcosm of Africa and Asia, and indeed, the first inhabitants of the island came from African and Southeast-Asian coasts. However, with its diverse flora and fauna, Madagascar looks neither like Africa nor like any other island of the 1

All translations mine.

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Indian Ocean, nor, indeed, like any other place in the world. The people of Madagascar are composed of a great number of ethnicities including the Merina and the Betsileo who live on the High Plateau of the centre, and the Sakalava and the Betsimisaraka who reside on the coasts. However, these different groups are united by one common language: Malagasy. Did Madagascar avoid foreign invasion and influence thanks to its distinct geographical situation? Unfortunately not. Arab sailors had long known about the island and Marco Polo noticed it on his way to China. Madagascar was officially “discovered” in 1500 by Portuguese sailors, the first Europeans to land on the island. They named it Sao Lourenço. However, the presence of Europeans did not last, with the exception of a French trading post at Fort-Dauphin in the south of the island, which was maintained with great difficulty from 1643 to 1674. The Madagascan state formed itself progressively, and in 1828 it was unified; Ranavalona I became the first Queen of Madagascar. In these particular conditions of independence and geographical distance from other countries dealing in and employing slaves, how and why did the slave trade develop in Madagascar? In fact, slavery already existed within the country. Any free man could become a slave at any point as punishment for unpaid debts or theft, or following his capture during war. Madagascan slaves were called zazahova, or children of free men, suggesting that one could easily fall into slavery. Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, a Madagascan scholar, explains: La démarcation entre hommes libres (andriana, hova, mainty) et andevo est clairement établie par l’incapacité de ces derniers à établir des relations sociales, et plus précisément des liens de parenté (mariage, filiation), mais également par leur non-participation aux différents rituels qui marquent le statut de sujets et/ou de membres de la communauté. Ainsi la loi, en cloisonnant les différentes catégories sociales et en maintenant chacun dans son groupe, consacre la position des andevo hors de la société.2 The line between free men (andriana, hova, mainty) and andevo is clearly established by the incapacity of these andevo to establish social relationships, and more precisely parental links (marriage, filiation), but also by their non-participation in the different rituals that mark the status of subjects and/or members of the community. So, the law, by compartmentalizing the different social classes, and by maintaining each one in its particular group, fixes the andevo’s position outside of society.

2

Rakotoarisoa 2005

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The setting-up of a second outlet for the slave market aimed at international trade, instigated a major change. As early as the 17th century, local kings had traded with the Dutch, selling, for instance, ten slaves for ten golden rings in 1646.3 By the 18th century, Arab traders were removing more than 1,000 Madagascan slaves per year. As far as the slaves sent to the Bourbon Island were concerned, they were sold for one barrel of powder, some guns, some pieces of linen and a number of piasters (worth up to 50 French crowns).4 Literary accounts hardly mention this dark period in Madagascan history. However, a young writer, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, would eventually break this silence. Born in 1967 in Antananarivo, the capital city of Madagascar in which he spent his youth, Raharimanana travelled to France at the age of 22 to study at the Sorbonne. He would never again leave Paris. Raharimanana earned a living as a journalist, teacher of literature and literary critic and in 2002 he dedicated himself entirely to writing, going on to earn several literary awards. In a radio interview in 1999 Raharimanana described the difficult realities of his country: “J’étais vraiment scandalisé sur le fait qu’on va toujours parler des lémuriens mais pas des malgaches”, “I was truly scandalised by the fact that we always talk of lemurs, but never of the Madagascan people”.5 His novel Nour, 1947 was published in 2001, following two anthologies of short stories that brought Raharimanana onto the literary scene: Lucarnes and Rêves sous le linceul (Skylight and Dreams under the Shroud).

Slavery in Nour, 1947 Nour, 1947 is a novel representing several voices that recount one of the most traumatic events in the history of the island: the nationalist rebellion of 1947 against French colonisers. Raharimanana summarizes this account as follows: Mon narrateur participe à la rébellion mais doit fuir la répression. Il se retrouve sur une petite île, Ambahy. C’est un lieu hautement symbolique puisqu’il va y retrouver des traces de l’esclavage. Par ailleurs, après avoir avec ses compagnons massacré des missionnaires—ces derniers étant une des premières cibles des rebelles—il avait emporté leurs manuscrits. Une fois dans l’île, confrontant ces manuscrits avec les traces de l’esclavage (ruines, fosse à esclaves…), il entreprend un travail de mémoire, recoupant 3

Grandidier 1908, 198-200 Ibid. 200 5 Raharimanana 1999 4

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la réalité avec les mythes expliquant l’origine des royaumes, la justification de certaines formes de domination de l’homme sur l’homme (le noble sur l’esclave, le colon sur l’indigène, ou le Blanc sur le Noir).6 My narrator takes part in the rebellion but he escapes repression. He ends up on a small island, Ambahy. It is a highly symbolic place, since he will find traces of slavery there. Moreover, having slaughtered missionaries with his friends—one of the main targets of the rebels—he took away their manuscripts. Having arrived on the island, he compares these manuscripts to the traces of slavery (ruins, slave pits …); he begins a work of memory by comparing reality with the myths explaining the origins of kingdoms, the justification of certain forms of domination of man by man (of the slave by the nobleman, of the native by the colonist or that of the black man by the white man).

Slavery plays a significant role in the account, concerning both the content and the non-linear structure of the text. Nour, one of the main characters in the narrative, is the daughter of a slave: Aussi loin que remontait sa mémoire, Nour était toujours esclave. “Mainty”, disaient les hommes de ce pays, noir, un être sans importance, sans terre de son vivant, sans tombeau où se reposer après sa mort. […] Nour se souvenait simplement des traces de chaînes autour du cou de son père: blanchâtres, plus fines que le restant de sa peau noire. 7 As far as she could remember, Nour had always been a slave. “Mainty”, said the men of this country, black, an unimportant human being, without land in her lifetime, without a grave in which to rest after his death. […] Nour just remembered the traces of chains around her father’s neck: whitish, thinner than the rest of his black skin.

When French colonizers annexed Madagascar in 1896, they released the slaves in an attempt—as the narrator of Nour, 1947 suggests—to increase the islanders’ submission to forced labour: Les Blancs nous ont affranchis, nous, la classe des esclaves, mais ce n’était en vérité que pour mieux asservir tout le peuple, le peuple des hommes dits libres, le peuple des hommes dits nobles! Ceci est ma seule consolation: nous ne serons plus les seuls esclaves sur cette île… Tous, nous le sommes des coloniaux!8

6

Boniface Mongo-Mboussa 2001, 35 Raharimanana 2001, 72 8 Ibid. 77 7

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The white men liberated us, the slaves, but that was actually so as to more easily enslave the entire people, the people of so-called free men, the people of so-called noblemen! This is my only consolation: we will no longer be the only slaves on this island… We all are slaves of the colonials!

This comment, as well as the chosen timeframe, suggest that the theme of the novel is closer to that of a nationalist chronicle than to slavery. Dominique Ranaivoson notes that “Les critiques français n’ont en effet retenu de Nour que le contexte colonial et les réflexions sur la colonisation induites par la présence des missionnaires et des soldats”, “Indeed, French critics only noticed in Nour, 1947 the colonial context and the reflections on colonisation induced by the presence of missionaries and soldiers”.9 However, the theme of slavery is at the very heart of the novel. From the first pages of Nour 1947, the narrator goes back to the origins of the history of his country, describing the arrival of the Madagascan people on the island, the allocation of land, and finally, in much more detail, the arrival of the Europeans and their systematic establishment of slavery: Nous leur avons vendu comme esclaves frères et compagnons, avons vidé collines et villages de leurs habitants, réduit nos parents en bétail, forgé des chaînes, acheminé femmes et enfants à travers fleuves et forêts.10 We sold our brothers and friends as slaves, emptied the hills and villages of their inhabitants, reduced our parents to cattle, forged chains, brought women and children through rivers and woods.

Developing the theme of the arrival of pro-slavers, the narrator describes with irony the exoticized perceptions of the Europeans upon their arrival: Les navires accostèrent et ne virent point les hommes. Les navires accostèrent et ne virent que les parures, ne devinèrent que les senteurs. Et, quand ils surent que ni l’or ni les épices n’existaient en cette île, ils partirent ou se tournèrent vers ses habitants qu’ils qualifièrent d’ébène…11 Ships came along and did not see the men. Ships came along and saw only jewels, discovered only smells. And, as they were told that there was neither gold nor spices on this island, they went away or turned to its inhabitants, calling them ebony…

9

Ranaivoson 2003, 3 Raharimanana 2001, 21 11 Ibid. 90 10

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The gaze of the European clearly appears as loaded with stereotypes concerning the distant islands, rich lands, heat and beauty, as shown by the words “jewels”, “smells”, “gold”, “spices”. However, it is also marked by a concern with the profitability of the journey as the sailors track down valuable goods to be stolen. On the other hand, Raharimanana also provides the point of view of the inhabitants of the island, giving their version of the beginning of slavery in their land: Je te raconte l’histoire de cette île. Ont débarqué quelques pirates. Ont débarqué quelques aventuriers. Les rois les accueillirent. Les rois les adoptèrent. Ils s’enfoncèrent dans les terres et ramenèrent des esclaves encore, des esclaves toujours. Les rois grandirent en richesse. Je te raconte l’histoire de cette île. Je te raconte les voiliers qui mouillèrent dans ses baies.12 This is the story of this island. Along came some pirates. Along came some adventurers. The kings welcomed them. The kings adopted them. They disappeared into the lands and again brought slaves, always slaves. The kings became richer. I tell you the story of this island. I tell you how the sailing boats were moored in its bays.

The narrator accuses the Madagascan kings of having contributed to slavery, suggesting that the history of the Madagascans is one of betrayal on the part of its monarchs, and greed on the part of its conquerors: Esclavage. Unification de l’île. Protectorat. Pacification. Notre histoire est celle de notre mort. Les cales ne se seraient jamais remplies si nos rois n’avaient pas vendu nos enfants. Les bateaux ne seraient jamais repartis lourds de plaintes et de douleur.13 Slavery. Unification of the island. Protectorate. Pacification. Our history is the history of our death. Holds would never have filled up if our kings had not sold our children. Ships would never have gone away loaded with moaning and pain.

In this way, Raharimanana presents a narrator obsessed with the attempt to understand the origin of his people’s trauma; an obsession embodied not only in the rhetorical figure of repetition of “our history”… “our history”… “our history”… / “would never have been filled”… “would never have gone away”, but also more extensively through the very form 12 13

Ibid. 131 Ibid. 103

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of the tale. The narrative is not linear, but spiralling, constantly returning to the same themes, the same voices, the same places. Raharimanana explains: C’est le thème de la mémoire qui a imposé cette structure. Notre mémoire, à nous Malgaches, n’est pas linéaire. Certaines choses ont été occultées. Par exemple l’esclavage que l’on évoque généralement de façon idyllique. L’esclave serait un “enfant de la famille”, un hôte en quelque sorte, le maître prenant soin de lui, le considérant comme un de ses propres enfants. Nombre de proverbes y font référence. Mais la réalité était toute autre.14 The theme of memory itself imposed this structure. Our memory, the memory of the Madagascan people, is not linear. Some things have been obscured. Slavery, for instance, which is generally evoked in an idyllic way. Slavery is said to be no more than a “child of the family”, a kind of guest, of whom the master takes care, considering him as one of his own children. Many proverbs refer to it. But the reality was quite different.

This quotation summarizes in a few words the motivations of the author. Having chosen a subject as difficult as that of slavery, he is forced to invent a new and complex way of writing by which to express it. Raharimanana is one of the first Madagascan novelists to break the taboo of slavery. He is on the border of provocation as he locates the character of the andevo, the Malagasy slave, at the centre of his novel.

Why break the silence on slavery? As Ranaivoson reminds us, in Madagascar people do not speak about slavery: La pratique de l’esclavage, officiellement abolie par les Français en 1848, […] est restée ancrée dans la société si profondément qu’une frange non négligeable de la population d’origine africaine reste marginalisée par ces stigmates discrètement entretenus. Or, la philosophie unanimement admise est celle de l’harmonie, d’une unité nationale, patriotique, qui met en avant l’image d’un peuple monolithique et solidaire. Les proverbes et la littérature traditionnelle orale, comme la morale, le discours importé républicain égalitariste et l’éthique chrétienne mettent en exergue ces valeurs et imposent en quelque sorte au nom d’une approbation officielle de tous un silence sur ces questions et leurs conséquences concrètes dans la vie des populations concernées.15 14 15

Mongo-Mboussa 2001, 35 Ranaivoson 2003, 1

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The practice of slavery, officially abolished by the French in 1848, […] is still so firmly rooted in the society, that a not an inconsiderable part of the population of African origin remains marginalised because of this stigma, discreetly maintained. But, the philosophy of harmony, national and patriotic unity, which puts forward the image of a monolithic and interdependent people, is unanimously admitted. Proverbs and traditional oral literature, as well as morals, imported republican egalitarian discourse and Christian ethics, put forward these values and impose in a way, in the name of an official approval of all, silence on these issues and their concrete consequences on the lives of the people concerned.

According to Ranaivoson, Madagascan society is not ready to address these questions. Indeed, people are conscious of the potential danger of social destabilisation. This silence is all the greater as, according to the Madagascan sociologist Jean-Claude Rabeherifara: La parole dans les sociétés malgaches a toujours été l’apanage exclusif des détenteurs des pouvoirs réels, traditionnels puis modernes. Quelle légitimité à parler alors pour l’écrivain, jeune de surcroît? Aucune… Mais l’écrivain Raharimanana a déjà pris la parole depuis des lustres, sans qu’on la lui ait donnée… Lui, pour dénoncer les atteintes aux droits humains à Madagascar.16 Speech in Madagascan societies has always been exclusively governed by the holders of power, traditional and, later, modern. Therefore, how legitimate is it for a writer, and especially a young one, to talk? Not at all… But the writer Raharimanana has been taking the floor to speak for ages, without having ever been given the right to speak… He did so to denounce the attacks on human rights in Madagascar.

Indeed, the topic of slavery at the heart of the novel does not only have a memorial value, for it is mostly aimed at today’s Madagascar. In a sense, the novel reminds us of the first slave narratives, a trend born in the United States in the mid-19th century with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which played a role in the fight for human rights and inspiration for the abolitionist struggle. But in Nour, 1947, Raharimanana fights for his own period, a struggle to which we now turn and which will be examined through the analysis of a recent essay by Raharimanana, L’Arbre anthropophage or The Cannibalistic Tree (2004).

16

Rabeherifara 2005, 15

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L’Arbre anthropophage In the introduction to L’Arbre anthropophage, dedicated to his father Vénance Raharimanana, the writer recounts his return to the landscape of his childhood in 1999 and his failure to comprehend it: Des villages ont poussé, des routes ont été tracées, lorsqu’avant n’y existaient que des herbes hautes, des rochers imposants. Tant de misère. Tant de désillusion.17 Villages have appeared, roads have been opened up, while there used to be only tall grasses, imposing rocks. So much misery. So much disillusionment.

Facing the metamorphosis of these beloved places, he feels the urge to write an essay that will trace and question memory. This is the concern of the first part of the book: “L’écriture des racines”, “The writing of roots”. Writing “pour habiter le silence”, “to dwell in silence”, writing to “transcrire et se taire, sauvegarder les origines des choses et des êtres”, “transcribe and keep silent, save the origins of things and beings”.18 Examining memory, this first part of the essay mixes forms and voices to recount the history of the island and its memory of the violence suffered. But Raharimanana’s words were confronted with reality. Because of the presidential elections in December 2001, a major political crisis began in the country and his father, who used to teach History at the University of Antananarivo, was arrested in June 2002 and tortured. These events forced Raharimanana to re-orientate his writing and he opted for the form of a log in the second part, entitled “Lines in Sweet Lands”. Day after day, while his sick father is in prison, Raharimanana meditates on events, expressing his waiting and anguish. He writes bitterly: “Ces thèmes sur l’identité, sur l’ethnie, sur la pauvreté, sur notre impuissance, nous qui nous trouvons au sud, je les ai abordés, conscient de leur importance. Je les vis maintenant”, “These themes of identity, of ethnic groups, and of poverty, of our powerlessness, that of our people living in the south, I studied them, conscious of their importance. Now I live them”.19 For this reason he returns to the theme of slavery from another point of view, coming back to it as a key that enables him to unlock the pain of modern Madagascan society: “L’esclavage. L’esclavage! Ce pays s’en est nourri 17

Raharimanana 2004, 15 Ibid. 20, 23 19 Ibid. 149 18

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mais semble avoir tout recouvert d’une chape de plomb, ou plutôt qu’il en vit encore”, “Slavery. Slavery! This country has lived it but it seems it has now covered all under a lead coating, or rather, that it still lives it”.20 At this moment, the reflection is no longer theoretical; it is directly concerned with the writer himself: Je traînais. La question ne cessait de me tourmenter, la question traditionnelle, celle que l’on n’arrête pas de poser dans mon île, entre amis, entre gens qui se rencontrent, entre tous: d’où viennent tes parents? Les miens ne sont pas esclaves mais quelle serait la réponse de ceux qui ont jauni leurs pieds sur une terre d’esclaves? Je traînais. Troublé profondément.21 I prowled. The question kept tormenting me, the traditional question, the one people keep asking in my island, amongst friends, amongst people meeting, amongst everyone: where are your parents from? Mine are not slaves but what would be the answer of those whose feet turned yellow on a land of slaves? I prowled. Deeply troubled.

If Raharimanana’s father is threatened by the current political regime, it is, he believes, because of his Sakalava origins. The Sakalava, an ethnic group of the west of the island, have for a long time been the captives of the central power of Antananarivo. The political leaders of the country wish, according to Raharimanana, to silence the discordant voice of the Sakalava historian. Therefore, the writer’s role is to fight for the freedom of speech and democratic pluralism in his country. To underscore his point, Raharimanana uses traditional proverbs, “Andevolahy mikalo hariva: tsy alahelo fa kibo tsy feno”, “A slave was singing plaintively in the evening: it was not due to sorrow but to hunger”.22 The slaves’ cynicism is revealed in this proverb which is strengthened by the following: “Ny andevo toy ny lavenom-potsy, ka raha aingaingaina manditsoka”, “Slaves are like white ash: if you take them up, they get into your eyes”.23 These proverbs show the contempt of the Madagascan free men for the slaves, who are seen as dangerous people. If someone shows them kindness, they will reciprocate with deception or harm. Raharimanana, for his part, likes the comparison between slaves and ash: “Cendre blanche de l’ébène que l’on a calciné. Cendre blanche qui 20

Ibid. 37 Ibid. 40 22 Ibid. 38 23 Ibid. 39 21

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n’attend que le vent pour se dissiper dans les yeux et brûler les consciences”, “White ash with the ebony that has been calcinated. White ash that waits only for the wind to dissipate it into eyes and burn consciences”.24

“Slavery burns consciences” Raharimanana’s thesis, which he defends in a famous open letter addressed to the French President Sarkozy in summer 2007, is that slavery burns consciences: Nous étions au cœur de l’histoire quand l’esclavage a changé la face du monde. Nous étions au cœur de l’histoire quand l’Europe s’est partagé notre continent. Nous étions au cœur de l’histoire quand la colonisation a dessiné la configuration actuelle du monde. […] Laissez-nous vous raconter un peu cette histoire que vous semblez fort mal connaître. Nos pères, par leurs luttes sont entrés dans l’histoire en résistant à l’esclavage, nos pères par leurs révoltes, ont contraint les pays esclavagistes à ratifier l’abolition de l’esclavage. […] Car oui, l’esclavage et la colonisation sont des systèmes totalitaires, et vous avez tort de tenter de les justifier en évoquant nos responsabilités et ce bon côté de la colonisation.25 We were right in the middle of history when slavery changed the face of the world. We were right in the middle of history when Europe divided our continent. We were right in the middle of history when colonization drew the current configuration of the world. […] Let us tell you a little bit about this history that you seem not to know at all. Our fathers entered history through their fights to resist slavery; our fathers, thanks to their battles, forced the abolition of slavery […] Indeed, slavery and colonization are totalitarian systems, and you are wrong to try to justify them by evoking our responsibilities and the good side of colonization.

According to Raharimanana, slavery still weighs terribly on Madagascar’s memory. However, it is not discussed in Madagascan society. Although a very inequitable society, officially it does not acknowledge different statuses for its citizens. M. Aubert Rabenoro, one of the leaders of the Madagascan community in Paris, corrects such homogenising descriptions of Madagascar’s people:

24 25

Ibid. 39 Raharimanana 2007

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A Madagascar, l’esclavage a été aboli il y a plus d’un siècle, mais l’esprit de caste demeure très vivace. On a du mal à passer des relations maîtreesclave à des rapports employé-employeur. A l’étranger, les Malgaches ne voient pas pourquoi on leur reproche telle ou telle pratique. Ils ne comprennent pas, ou ne veulent pas comprendre, que ce qui est admis chez eux devienne soudain répréhensible. 26 In Madagascar, slavery was abolished more than a century ago, but the spirit of caste remains vibrant. It is still very difficult to change from master-slave relationships to those of employee and employer. Outside the country, Madagascans do not understand why they are criticized about this or that way of living. They do not understand, or do not want to understand, why the things that are admitted at home, are suddenly prohibited.

This analysis is substantiated in an article by Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, published in a local journal: Les termes se rapportant à l’ancien système hiérarchique (andriana, hova, mainty, andevo) continuent d’être utilisés, comme montré dans la deuxième partie. Avec une modification cependant. Descendants d’anciens andriana et d’anciens hova sont également désignés par le terme fotsy (“blancs”). D’autre part, les descendants des anciens andevo sont confondus avec les descendants des anciens mainty, pourtant anciens libres, sous la même appellation mainty (“noirs”). A chacune de ces catégories sociales fotsy-mainty sont liées des représentations d’ordre physique aussi bien que moral. Ces représentations sont également liées à la supposée origine. Origine africaine, teint noir et cheveux crépus, paresseux, alcooliques et pratiquant la sorcellerie pour les mainty; les fotsy sont par contre représentés comme de teint clair, avec des cheveux lisses, sachant “comment se tenir”.27 The terms referring to the old hierarchical system (andriana, hova, mainty, andevo) continue to be used, as shown in the second part of my analysis. With one modification however. Descendants of former andriana and former hova are equally denoted by the terme fotsy (“white”). Also, descendants of the former andevo are mixed up with descendants of the former mainty, who are formerly free men, under the same appellation mainty (“blacks”). To each of these social categories are linked either physical or moral representations. These representations are linked to the supposed origins of the people. African origins for the mainty refer to black complexion, fuzzy hair, laziness, alcoholism and sorcery; the fotsy 26 27

Parisot 1998 Rakotoarisoa 2005

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Chapter Four are by contrast represented with a clear complexion, smooth hair, and knowing how to “behave”.

So although slavery has been abolished and is completely absent from these texts, it is clearly present in everyday life and so it will continue until this consciousness can be openly discussed.

Za In Madagascar, slavery has not yet been put into words. That is why, in his more recent novel Za (2008), Raharimanana invents the eponymous Za, a poor man driven to madness by the loss of his little boy. His son drowned in the stagnant waters of a low district of the city, which although never named, regular visitors will recognize as Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. From chapter to chapter, Za, in the first person, describes the chaos of his miserable life, crushed by violence, in a language never read and invaded from the incipit by zozotement. He babbles, transforming all the “g’s” into “z’s” and adding “a’s” everywhere. But Za is also the voice of an ordinary man; an anonymous man seized with the passion to speak, who decides to take language hostage. His name, “Za” is indeed part of the word “izaho” which in Malagasy means “I”. It is also the alliance of the end and the beginning of the alphabet. Za is thus a character who embodies at once the epic figure of the anti-hero, increased by his unending distress and who will be struck by a number of disasters. The novel is based on a linguistic deformation, the zozotement, which frees the creativity of language, allowing—with strength, through irony, word games and double meanings—to express the distress of a country in great suffering. We do not know whether Za is a slave descendant or not, but he has the same attitude, the same way of thinking as the protagonist Nour, the young girl in Raharimanana’s first novel (Nour, 1947). He begins by apologising for speaking: “eskuza-moi. Za m’eskuze”; “excuse-me, I do apologize”, in his particular language. He asks for understanding, but first he asks for the right to use the words, the right to speak, even if he is not allowed to do so. He then explains his social situation: Dîner de seigneur: Za me courbe bien en servant le plat. Dîner de seigneur: les larmes me montent aux yeux. Dîner de seigneur: Za soupire fort en déposant le met. La mouche sur sa montagne reçoit d’autres reines. Za bat

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éventails, illustres parfumées ! Za vous laisse trône et saire ! Za n’a pas le droit. Pas le droit à la pérole: ô tabou […].28 Dinner of lord: Za bends me well by serving the dish. Dinner of lord: tears are welling up in my eyes. Dinner of lord: Za sighs extremely while laying down the met. The fly on its mountain receives other queens. Za beats ranges, famously scented! Za leaves you throne and chair! Za does not have the right. Not the right to speech: Oh taboo […].

The character breaks the speaking prohibition and transcends the taboo. He explains that “La parole à Za se doit de sortir, poussée de l’intérieur, vous n’irez pas, n’est-ce pas, retenir ma langue, ma langue à Za, ma langue à moi?”, “The word of Za must leave, pushed from the interior, you will not go, will you, retain my language, my language of Za, my own language?”.29 After this introduction, the character takes up all the space, invading the language with his story, his words, his guilty pronunciation. And in his own way, he tells the story of “those without a history”. This is a very dark story indeed; a story of violence, of hunger and thirst, of dirt and darkness. But this is the real history of the Madagascan people. This is the real history of all those who are neither kings nor nobles, and all those descendants of slaves or descendants of no-one, whose alternative voices rarely appear in public. The theme of slavery is still difficult to approach in Madagascan literature. Besides Raharimanana, few writers have experimented with it. It is notable, though, that Rakotoson’s novel Làlana (2002), which describes the travels of two friends, asks the question of the place of slaves in present-day Madagascan society several times. Rakotoson was born in Antananarivo in 1948. She currently lives in France where she has resided since she arrived in 1983. She studied Sociology and became Professor of Madagascan Literature, as well as a radio and television journalist. Still a radio journalist, she now organizes literary events. She mostly writes novels and plays. Làlana is not a joyful novel because of its subject, which deals with AIDS. The two heroes of the novel, Naivo and Rivo, are devoured by the illness and flee Antananarivo and its misery, hoping to die by the sea. They will endure a difficult journey, which crosses the island of Madagascar, breaking the idyllic image that one could have of this “exotic” country. But the novel is also a reflection of Madagascan society. During their journey to the sea, the protagonists remind themselves of the slaves who where sold to be workers on Reunion Island. These slaves, 28 29

Raharimanana 2008, 12 Ibid. 13

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chained together, proceeded up to the coast and then embarked for the island. This vision haunts the characters of Lalana, who travel along the same road: “lls vont à la mer, ils partent vers les Mascareignes, C’est un cortège d’esclaves, Naivo, un cortège qui part vers la Réunion”,“They go to the sea, they leave for Mascareignes, it is a slaves’ procession, Naivo, a procession which leaves for Reunion”.30 Why are they anxious to remember these tragic episodes? Because they feel that they are the heirs to this legacy. Indeed, they are directly touched by the segregation. Rivo says: Nous, les cheveux crépus, nous sommes vaincus et les portes du ciel se sont refermées, mais nous, les Noirs, nous sommes aussi durs que nos cheveux, nous résistons à tout, comme nos cheveux, et nous ne voulons pas expier pour des fautes qui ne sont pas les nôtres. Là où les cheveux lisses tombent, les nôtres restent présents, drus, crépus et tenaces. Cheveux crépus, cheveux drus, résistants, violents.31 We, with fuzzy hair, we are overcome and the doors of heaven are closed, but we, the Blacks, we are also as tough as our hair, we resist everything, as does our hair, and we do not want to pay for faults which are not ours. There, where smooth hair falls, ours remains, thick, fuzzy and firm. Fuzzy hair, thick, resistant, violent hair.

The denunciation is explicit and in these conditions, it is not surprising that the books of Raharimanana and Rakotoson have been published in France but not in Madagascar—publishers were afraid of a scandal. But even if Madagascan society does not easily open its ears, these few voices do nevertheless reach the island and its inhabitants’ consciousness, even if they do so slowly.

Non-Madagascan Voices Interesting voices from outside of the country are also speaking up about slavery; voices of non-Madagascan authors who assume this work of memory, such as Monique Agénor, from Reunion Island. Of French, Malbare and Madagascan origin, Agénor was born in 1940 in Reunion, where she lived until her late teens. Les enfants de la colline sacrée (The Children of the Sacred Hill) is set in the 1840s on Madagascar and Reunion. The novel redraws the symbolic route of two children of the 30 31

Rakotoson 2002, 130 Ibid. 75

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High Malagasy plateaux, captured by an enemy clan following a bloody expedition against their village and deported to the island of Reunion where they will live through many cruel years of slavery, up to its abolition in 1848. At the opening of the narrative Nora, who was born in the moonlight and whose first name means “joyful, player”, is eleven years old. Sahy is not much older but is already a young man with a strong sense of responsibility who helps his father in the rice fields. Both live in the peaceful Malagasy countryside until they become victims of a raid on their hill, which plunges them abruptly into a violent and foreign universe. Survivors of the massacre are chained up and taken to Reunion aboard a slave ship under the cruel and eager glance of the slave trader. Both children are sold as a couple to the rich Madam Die, owner of the largest sugar plantation on the island. Nora will be a house slave, in exclusive service to the young ladies Jeanne and Mélanie, and Sahy will work in the fields. Through violence and humiliation, both children learn to carry out their tasks without fail, but their eyes can see and their ears can hear. Rumours circulate behind closed doors among the slaves: a revolt is being prepared, but it is necessary to wait for the right occasion. It will take place on the day of a luxurious feast to be given by Madam Die whilst the surveillance is loosened and the slaves are assembled in the gardens. The uprising is bloody and the freed workers leave on the road to the mountain. At the top, they build a new life, always threatened by the reprisals of the Whites. However, the wheel of history turns and in 1848 the abolition of slavery is proclaimed in Saint-Denis. Sahy and Nora are finally free. This story was written specifically for high school pupils. Young readers will perhaps have some notions of the “triangular” slave trade between Europe, Africa and America, which insured profitability. There will doubtlessly be many who ignore the fact that slavery also constituted a prosperous industry in the Indian Ocean in the 15th century. It is to the merit of this narrative about the inhabitants of Réunion that Agénor suggests the horror, through the romantic intermediary of the story of two Malagasy children captured and deported to Reunion. As the theme of slavery is the central subject of the book, Agénor pedagogically, and even slightly didactically, explains to the young reader the various stages of the draft until final liberation: the capture during an expedition, the routing up to the port of embarkation, the negotiations over goods, the journey in the hold of the slave ship, the sale, and finally the work in the fields or in the house. In such moments of suffering for the slaves, the violence of the slave traders is not based on disguised racism, which is well accentuated in the novel. Agénor likes to recount the following, spoken by a Madagascan

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child during an encounter with pupils: “C’est la première fois qu’on me raconte ma propre histoire”, “it is the first time that I’ve been told my own story”.32 Françoise Vergès suggests that it is necessary to entreprendre un travail sur la mémoire de la traite négrière et de l’esclavage comme phénomène culturel, sur la manière dont les groupes s’emparent de la mémoire pour intervenir dans l’espace public.33 undertake a work on the memory of the slave trade and slavery as cultural phenomenon, on the way groups take possession of memory to intervene in the public space.

Through his novels, Raharimanana, as well as his fellow countrywoman Rakotoson and his neighbour Agénor, a few among many writers, initiate this indispensable reflection on the history of slavery on the island of Madagascar. This project implies a new way of writing. For their part, Agénor and Rakotoson create a testimony by inventing new romantic themes (their narratives speak about slavery, their heroes are slaves or former slaves); Raharimanana, too, is proud of “ce personnage de Za, qui, sous couvert de folie, peut tout dire”, “this character of Za, who, under cover of madness, can say anything”.34 With these new characters, their novels begin to speak about slavery. But for Raharimanana, the question is rather of inventing a new language, a language which can show, which can tell the pain of those who were denied by history, and tell a part of the history that has remained hidden. This is the language of the andevo, the former slaves, and in his novels we can listen for the first time to the moving voice of Nour, the strange voice of Za, so that at last we begin to hear about slavery in the literature of Madagascar.

Bibliography Agénor, Monique. 2005. Les enfants de la colline sacrée. Paris: Syros Jeunesse. Grandidier, Alfred, ed. 1908-1920. Collection des ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar. Tome III. Paris: Comité de Madagascar. Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface. 2001. Les revers de notre civilisation: Entretien avec Jean Luc Raharimanana. Africultures 43: 35-38. 32

Riffard 2006. Vergès 2006, 86-87. 34 Raharimanana 2008 33

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