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René Depestre, Maryse Condé and Santiago Gamboa

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René Depestre, Maryse Condé and Santiago Gamboa Copyright Adriana Umaña 2017 ABSTRACT Death as Poetics of Dislocation in the Global South: René Depestre, Maryse Condé and Santiago Gamboa By Adriana Umaña Fiction writing in the Global South—because of the region’s history and experience with colonialism—has been inextricably linked to questions of self-definition and collective representation. In a context of political and cultural domination, creative writers found themselves in the privileged but constrictive position of being the voice of a national community that was invested in articulating and affirming its cultural particularism. Death as Poetics of Dislocation surveys a gradual distancing from this position in the works of René Depestre, Maryse Condé and Santiago Gamboa and argues that representations of death function as the means to question notions of national exceptionalism and secure entry into a larger world literary space. Whereas the Global South translates both a postcolonial condition and an emancipatory project, it can only accomplish its decolonial purpose when writers cease to locate themselves at the periphery and in reaction to former colonial centers. René Depestre’s reconfiguration of the zombie—a historically charged symbol embodying many of the nation’s troubles—extracts Haiti and Haitians out of a position of isolated victimhood at the margins and proposes instead a view of Haitians as transnational, diasporic heroes whose agency re-enters the world in order to heal it. Similarly, Maryse Condé has recourse to mourning to deconstruct a series of myths that have shaped collective narratives in the French West Indies, ideas that have restricted individual freedom. Through the destabilizing power of grief, she accords a newfound lucidity to characters who had been relegated to silence for the sake of recovering the voice of an idealized community, but whose experience of bereavement propels them to pursue a life unbound by the place of their birth. Violent crime in Santiago Gamboa’s novels gives the writer the necessary means to abandon the exceptionalist and tragic depictions of his native Colombia, which have characterized several generations of writers. His transnational portrayal of human cruelty conveys how contemporary experience cannot be contained within any one set of national borders, but straddles several geographical locations at the same time. Depestre, Condé, and Gamboa’s poetics of death highlight the global dimension of Haitian, Guadeloupean, and Colombian writing and challenge the very idea of homogeneous national cultures and literary traditions. Acknowledgments In the midst of the solitude and silence that was necessary to write this dissertation, many voices supported my work. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Bernard Aresu whose generous mentorship has accompanied me from the first day I set foot within Rayzor Hall at Rice University. His faith in my intellectual questions gave me the confidence to continue when doubt assailed me; his thoughtful feedback allowed me to improve my arguments; and his graduate seminars provided the seeds for several of the issues I decided to explore in the dissertation. I encountered the richness of Francophone literature during his impassioned seminars and learned to recognize the echoes between distant places of the Tout- monde through his teaching. His encouragement and support to attend conferences, present my work, and challenge boundaries have shaped how I conceive a life in the academy. I also want to thank Dr. April DeConick and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the opportunity to be part of the “Mapping Death” seminar. It was within that collaborative, creative, and interdisciplinary space that I found a way to transform and to articulate intuitions into research questions. Dr. DeConick helped me to understand the need to write everyday—no matter what—and she represents for me a powerful role model of someone who lives according to that discipline. I would not understand the complex historical web of the Caribbean, in general, and Haiti, in particular—where race, religion and politics intersect—if it were not for Dr. Luis Duno-Gottberg. Nuestros cotejos en Duncan College me abrieron los ojos a aquella versión subversiva de la historia de Francia, Latinoamérica y el Caribe que no me habían enseñado en el Lycée Français Louis Pasteur de Bogotá. Gracias Luis. I must acknowledge that without Dr. Nina Tucci I would not be here today. My undergraduate professor of French at the University of Houston—a wise woman whom I now consider as part of my own family—encouraged me to apply to graduate school. My mother’s unremitting faith in my capacity to accomplish what I undertake, my father’s passion for defending one’s ideas—which I first witnessed in admiration as a child and continue to respect as an adult—and todos los Umañas y Hossmans who never doubted that I could be the first in my family to earn a PhD were the necessary fuel to keep me writing. Natalia’s reminder that the sister she knew and loved would never give up was exactly what I needed to hear to return to writing the one and only time I was ready to surrender. Tim, my 17th century mystic who continues to teach me how to hear the powerful voices of Pascal and Descartes at the heart of so many of my own academic questions, has seen me at my best and at my worst but has always stood firmly and lovingly by my side believing that I could do the work. He traveled with me to Haiti iv and Guadeloupe—so far away literally and figuratively from his monasteries and libraries—to trace the hauntings of France’s colonial past. He is, in addition to the best partner I could have asked for in life, an amazing intellectual interlocutor. Although Valentina is still too young to understand why mamá spent so many hours looking at a computer screen when all she wanted to do was to play and to read stories, I hope that she will be proud of me one day. May this completed dissertation serve as an example that she can accomplish whatever she sets her mind and heart to do in life. Finally, I want to dedicate this dissertation to my grandfather Camilo who passed away while I was writing the chapter on mourning. It was only as I faced my own grief over his passing that I finally understood what I was trying to explain in Condé’s use of mourning in her fiction. My grandfather’s voice—like the voices of all the dead in Condé’s works—survives death because I can hear his encouraging words beyond the grave. From the afterlife, he summons me to seek truth, to dismantle false beliefs, and thus to be free to lead a life worth living. v Contents Introduction 7 Chapter 1 Dislocation in the Global South 17 1.1 Global South 21 1.1.1 Global South as Condition 1.1.2 Global South as Project 1.2 Imaginative Strategies 30 1.2.1 Haitian Indigénisme 30 1.2.2 Négritude 34 1.2.3 Créolité 37 1.2.4 Realismo Mágico 40 1.3 Globalization 44 1.4 Dislocation 55 Chapter 2 The Third Space of Death: Depestrian Zombies and Creolization 59 2.1 Figures of Degradation 62 2.1.1 Historical Ambiguity 65 2.1.2 The Zombie in 20th Century Haitian Literature 69 2.2 From Victim to Heroic Model 78 2.2.1 Pharmakos 82 2.2.3 Loa Divinities 84 2.2.3 Hero of the Absurd 94 2.3 New Creole Identity 107 Chapter 3 Mourning and Betrayal: from Collective Myth to Individual Lucidity 124 3.1. To Mourn 134 vi 3.2 Shattering Myths 144 3.2.1 Mourning Betrayal: Racial Solidarity Comes Under Fire 145 3.2.2 The Open Wound 168 3.2.3 Breaking the Compact of Créolité 182 3.3. Uncharted Transformations 191 3.3.1 Rosélie’s Awakening 193 3.3.2 Accepting to Live 197 3.3.3 From Silence to Song 202 3.4. Characters Unbound 210 3.4.1 Tituba’s Freedom 215 3.4.2 The Power to Name 221 3.4.3 Longing for the Tout-Monde 228 Chapter Four Poetics of Failure in Gamboa’s Novela Negra 238 4.1 Neither Realismo Magico nor Narconovelas 242 4.2. The City as Space of Crisis 252 4.2.1 Death in the “Underbelly” of Paris 256 4.2.2 Jerusalem: A Martyrized Ville-monde 267 4.3 Novela Negra 278 4.3.1 Crime in the Tout-monde 281 4.3.2 A Meaningless World 285 4.4 The Possibility of an Island 294 Conclusion 301 Bibliography 306 Introduction Human beings can seldom wholly detach themselves in sentiment from present images of their past. If they become detached from their family or lineage, they become attached to their ethnic group or tribe or nationality or race or linguistic community and this entails regarding the past of these groups as their own. Edward Shills, Tradition Death is ever-present in the literature of Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Colombia. Zombies, mourners, ghosts, funeral processions, violent crimes, unsolved murders, and foretold deaths are replayed endlessly in fiction as if to exorcise a difficult past, contain a convoluted present and prepare for a better future. While it is true that death is a question that has haunted men and women across time and space from the beginning of recorded history and is a concern that breathes life into the various ways religion, philosophy, and art have attempted to explain a limited human experience, the literature of the French West Indies and Colombia is particularly obsessed with representing the end of life. This dissertation started as a set of questions that sought to explain the prevalence of themes of death in a limited segment of texts that range from 1967 to 2012 taking as a premise that it had to be more than a perverse re-enactment of a historical tragedy.
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