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A Companion to African Literatures. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн.Название A Companion to African Literatures
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isbn 9781119058212
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
Réunion eschewed nationhood in 1946 and is part of France, while Mauritius became independent from the British in 1968. But despite such political resolutions, if we can consider them thus, tensions and contradictions in the French “status” of France’s overseas departments and their people are very much part of twenty‐first‐century notions of Frenchness. When a French beauty queen was discovered, soon after her crowning as Miss France in 2007, to have posed in what the pageant deemed a compromising position (a playfully sexual picture of her licking yoghurt, and another of her in a swimming pool lying on a floating crucifix), the pageant’s authorities immediately pointed to her Réunionese belonging, to her not being French, and, therefore, to her being morally inferior. Old and enduring ideas about hierarchies linked to race and of European culture’s superiority to the contaminated version of it in the colonies – particularly because of racial mixing, read contamination – exploded out into the open. Wanting to shame the islander into subservience, the pageant’s president, Geneviève de Fontenay, said in an interview that the young woman, Valérie Bègue, could have proven her moral worthiness by saying, “I’m resigning because I am not worthy to carry on as Miss France!” But she did not. Wanting to revoke her award, de Fontenay alluded to her distance from the French ideal, saying she should “stay there,” in Réunion, and remarking also that she would not want to be touring around with a girl “like that” (see Prabhu and Murdoch 2008, 403). Bègue’s supposedly depraved morals were thus linked “to the ambiguity of her already denigrated Creole origins and, by inference and extension, their basis and location in distant Réunion” (Prabhu and Murdoch 2008, 411). Along with the strong support for Bègue, the Communist Party of Réunion reminded the Réunionese people in the debates in the press and in the streets that the underlying reasons for which autonomy from France was sought by more radical Réunionese are still up for consideration.
In literature and beyond it, those who are attached to Réunionese autonomy have most often anchored that identity alongside the importance of Creole language as a vector. Literature in French creatively incorporates Creole language through allusions to certain conversations taking place in Creole, the use of Creole vocabulary, and other ways of creolizing the French language text.6 Beyond that, in the move to acknowledge poorer sections of society, many of whom would be considered illiterate by measuring literacy in French, inventing a written form for Creole was central to that project in Réunion as it was in Mauritius but also in the Caribbean islands. Axel Gauvin’s Du créole opprimé au créole libéré (From oppressed Creole to liberated Creole) is a manifesto that shares much with its counterpart from the Caribbean, Chamoiseau, Bernabé, and Confiant’s Eloge de la créolité (translated as In Praise of Creoleness), which grew out of the authors’ work with Creole education for school‐age students.
In Mauritius, no African language makes its way into the educational system in the way Indian languages have been promoted. This move to infuse the educational system with the ancestral languages of the majority population “was one that acknowledged a particular history and provided a vehicle for the development of an ‘ethnic’ identity, which, by virtue of appearing in the idiom of the ‘cultural,’ escaped being a racial nomination derived so directly through colonial purpose” (Prabhu 2005, 186). Thus, while Indians engaged in a process of ethnification (as Tamils, Bhojpuris, or Telugus) and reinforced it through language learning in the schools and language identification in the census, “Africans” (and métis who could not pass for white) were identified, rather, through the notion of race. Creole language never performed the function of comparable ethnification for descendants of African slaves. And, while no group claims Creole as their “mascot,” it remains the lingua franca. Thus, ethnicity allows Mauritian Indians to transcend the brutal colonial either/or divisions by race through the nuances accorded by ethnicity (and religion). What they gain is also a diasporic identity beyond their history of indenture and alongside their economic movement and cultural aspirations. On the other hand, lack of ethnification has left nonwhites of African descent less room for evolution in the imaginary even as they overcame and transcended their colonial function as slaves. Amongst others, Paul Gilroy reflects on the way the idea of diaspora, which builds on the desire to transcend “the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity,” has had to, historically, “sit uneasily alongside the uneasy choices forced on black movements and individuals embedded in national political cultures and national states” (1993, 19). Mauritians of African descent have less often expressed belonging to such a black diaspora.
Edouard Glissant’s refusal to allow his version of hybridity to lapse into an idea of a utopian mixture where all kinds of different cultures mingle and create a melting pot is discussed in detail elsewhere (Prabhu and Quayson 2004, 226–228). For Glissant, the violence between the self and the other and the persistence of difference beyond the initial encounter ensure that a level of tension continues through the evolution of hybrid locations. This is done theoretically by refusing to focus on the “two” entities in a relationship that causes hybridity (such as black and white, colonizer and colonized) and, rather, to insist on the absoluteness of “Relation.” The tension is not suggestive of violence, but rather of a productive uneasiness that constantly generates movement in thought and in action.
Indian coolie labor is well documented by the author Marcel Cabon in his Namasté (1965), an early thorough engagement with Indians in Mauritius. Cabon’s inheritor, Deepchand Beeharry, one of the few Mauritians to write in English, probes this Indian history with That Others Might Live (1976) which is set in Mauritius but begins in India and covers the capture and journey to Mauritius of three Indians, Manish, Thomas, and Dhiren, who come from different parts of India. Beeharry carefully represents different religious and ethnic Indian groups in Mauritius while the late Abhimanyu Unnuth, who was once a lone writer in Hindi, left behind a vibrant literary culture in Hindi with writers such as Mohanlall Brijmohun and Soomatee Boodhun contributing to it.
Mauritius was signaled early on, well before Baudelaire’s 1841 visit (or Darwin’s in 1836), by Bernardin de Saint‐Pierre’s 1788 novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 2005), a classic of eighteenth‐century Enlightenment literature, and which gives Mauritius a false start in the literary canon by diverting attention to the small group of privileged French people from the island’s other populations, as Lionnet argues (2012a, 32). As is well known, Virginie is sent away to France when the youngsters, who grew up together on this idyllic island, become sexual. The protagonists are not reunited because when Virginie is making her way back from France to Mauritius, her ship sinks before it can reach the coast. She dies before Paul’s eyes because she prefers to preserve her modesty and will not abandon her clothing! Saint‐Pierre published his impressions in a lesser‐known nonfictional account, entitled Voyage à l’Île de France (Travel to Mauritius), in 1773. This is the most elaborate published account of slavery on the island. Saint‐Pierre describes the terrible situation of the slaves and the punishments he witnessed. This sparked a debate with a local plantation owner whose fear of the abolition of slavery was made real by the Frenchman’s critique. The planter Thomi Pitot’s refutation is almost comical in that he contests the number of lashes cited by Saint‐Pierre or other details in the degree or extent rather than the actual fact of the type of punishments slaves received. A counter‐refutation appeared