A. Arnold the Erotics of Colonialism in Contemporary French West Indian

A. Arnold The erotics of colonialism in contemporary French West Indian literary culture Argues that creolité, antillanité and Negritude are not only masculine but masculinist as well. They permit only male talents to emerge within these movements and push literature written by women into the background. Concludes that in the French Caribbean there are 2 literary cultures: the one practiced by male creolistes and the other practiced by a disparate group of women writers. In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 68 (1994), no: 1/2, Leiden, 5-22 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl A. JAMES ARNOLD THE EROTICS OF COLONIALISM IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WEST INDIAN LITERARY CULTURE The créolité movement has inherited from its antecedents, antillanité and Negritude, a sharply gendered identity. Like them, it is not only masculine but masculinist. Like them, it permits only male talents to emerge within the movement, to carry its seal of approval. And, like them, it pushes literature written by women into the background. This characteristic is not, however, unique to the French West Indies. It can be found, mutatis mutandis, across the Caribbean archipelago with its variations on the "repeating island," in Antonio Benitez-Rojo's (1992:1-29) felicitous expression. In a word, créo- lité is the latest avatar of the masculinist culture of the French West Indies, which is being steadily challenged by the more recently emerged, less theo- retically articulated, womanist culture, to borrow a term from the Anglo- phone West Indies. These two sharply gendered cultural visions are cur- rently in a state of competition and struggle. Discussion of the problem has rarely proceeded beyond a (usually muted) recognition that the two cultures exist. An important, and quite recent, exception can be found in the linguistic field work conducted in Guadeloupe during 1981-82 by Ellen M. Schnepel (1993:243-68). Schnepel has found in Guadeloupe a sharply gendered relationship to language that is directly applicable to the represention of gender roles by the male authors I discuss here. The present investigation of this cultural field will lay out a theoretical model derived largely from the créolistes themselves, and from the predecessors to whose works they, or the culture at large, regularly refer.1 Beginning with the publication of Edouard Glissant's Discours anüllais in 1981, and running throughout the programmatic writings of the créolistes (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant), the origins of créolité are traced to New West Indian Guide/'Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 68 no. 1 &2 (1994): 5-22 6 A. JAMES ARNOLD plantation society. A generation earlier, however, the salient characteristics of an erotics of colonialism are stressed in the phallogocentric discourse of ~Aimé Césaire's vision of Negritude. A rereading of his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1983) will suffice to quell any doubts.2 His dramatization of the male agon in Et les chiens se taisaient {And the Dogs Were Silent) (1990) _which requires the stereotyped representation of the Mother (symbolic of a universal humanism) and the Lover (symbolic of maternal submission to Jriological necessity), illustrates nicely the ideological thrust (pun intended) of Negritude.3 The suffering male nero of Negritude must transcend these jepresentations of feminine weakness in order to realize his salvatory male- ness in the radiant future that beckons beyond his present sacrifice of self (Arnold 1981:113-24). Public discussion of this problematic, and the very recognition of its exist- ence, began only about a dozen years ago. It was the Guadeloupean novelist Daniel Maximin who first articulated it in his novel L'isolé soleil (1981). Little attention was paid when Clarisse Zimra (1977) published an article pointing out the suppression of women writers of the French West Indies by Erantz Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon (1971:33-50) had effec- tively silenced Mayotte Capécia - author of the novel Je suis martiniquaise ,(1948) - in the chapter "La femme de couleur et Ie blanc," under the crush- ing weight of psychoanalytic theory. He had called Anna Freud in to con- sult, as well as Alfred Adler and Jacques Lacan, who have not been seen together since. In "La femme de couleur et Ie blanc" these big guns of psy- ^hoanalysis relay one another to prove that Mayotte Capécia was a hope- lessly neurotic mulatto and therefore not a true martiniquaise. The inade- i^uacies of Fanon's argument as literary and cultural criticism have yet to be forcefully stated, as indeed they must be for the gendered nature of his thesis to be finally understood and rejected. In terms of the theoretical model I shall dévelop in this essay, I see Fanon as having been unable to .recognize that there exist two gendered visions of French West Indian culture. His tactic was to brutally reduce the (as yet unrecognized) womanist ^ision to the masculinist vision. Given the new importance Fanon has assumed within postcolonial discourse, further attention to this aspect of his jposition will be necessary. A good beginning can be found in the positive concept of métissage that Francoise Lionnet put forward in her book Auto- Jiiographical Voices (1989:1-29). Beyond reaffirming métissage, however, it is necessary to deconstruct homosocial masculine desire in the figure of the mulata, as Vera M. Kutzinski (1993:163-98) has done in Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics ofCuban Nationalism. Before leaving Fanon, who has much to answer for in this department, I should like to point out his suppression of homoerotic desire in Peau noire, CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WEST INDIAN LlTERARY CULTURE 7 masques blancs, since it has caused as much damage as his silencing of women's voices and has further shored up the fortress of heterosexual male erot- icism in French West Indian literary culture. Readers of Peau noire, masques blancs can be forgiven for not recognizing the importance of Fanon's ideological investment, since it is buried in note 44 of the chapter entitled "Le Nègre et la psychopathologie." In it Fanon (1971:146) dismisses out of hand the possibility of homosexual desire in Martinique. Having observed that there exists in Martinican society a phenomenon of male cross-dressing, he quickly and peremptorily affirms that "I am persuaded that they have a normal sexual life. They drink their punch like the other guys and are sensi- tive to the charms of the ladies - fishmongers or sellers of vegetables." What should concern us here is not whether these male cross-dressers were indeed heterosexual in their desires and practices but the fact that in Fanon's world view they had to be heterosexual. He goes farther. Having noted that "On the other hand, in Europe I have seen some comrades become homosexual [he uses the term péderastes, like other writers of his day], and always passive," he is quick to add that even these Martinicans are not real homosexuals. The true purpose of these examples becomes clearer when Fanon (1971:146) states: "But this wasn't neurotic homosexuality [the real kind]; it was for them merely an expedient, like becoming a pimp [note the heterosexual twist at the end, which evacuates the possibility of homosexuality.]" Why must this be so? The reasoning, such as it is, reveals the circularity deriving from an axiom fundamental to an ideological position: "The French West Indian is not a homosexual, even when he appears to be, because the French West Indian male cannot be a homosexual," Fanon seems to be saying. End of argument. Ultimately what we can derive from Fanon's insistence on this point is that homophobia is so strong as to short- circuit rational argument. Why is this the case? No real progress was made on this point until Glis- sant published Caribbean Discourse in 1981. In an essay entitled "History and Literature," which he initially gave as a lecture in 1978, Glissant (1989:72-73) engaged the problem as one of discourse analysis. He reasoned that Thus, in our own area of concern, the official history of Martinique (totally fashioned according to Western ideology, naturally) has been conceived in terms of the list of discoverers and governors of this country, without taking into account the sovereign beauties - since there were no male sovereigns - that it has produced. (Those are indeed the key chapters of our official history. The Martinican elite can see "power" only in the shape of the female thigh. Empress, queen, courtesan: History is for them nothing but a submission to pleasure, where the male is dominant; the male is the Other. This notion of history as pleasure is about making oneself available.) 8 A. JAMES ARNOLD This argument is, for all intents and purposes, identical to Edward Said's in his book on Orientalism, which is contemporaneous with the date of Glis- sant's original lecture. Said had pointed out that Western imperial discourse had feminized those cultures it had subjugated, in order to justify that sub- jugation. In other words, we may set out as our working hypothesis that we are dealing here with an erotics of colonialism based on a model of aggres- sive heterosexual desire. Glissant sees this situation clearly, and he finds it intolerable to the West Indian male. The alpha male, in terms of primate behavior, is the European (or, eventually, white American) Other. The col- onized is invariably conceptualized as the Feminine, which can only be sub- missive, pleasure-giving, accommodating, and, ultimately, screwed. The archetype in the New World is the Aztec princess known to history as la malinche, who was both Cortez's translator and his mistress, submitting to and translating his power in both these roles.

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