SONG Xin-yi
Since the 1980s, profound changes in the global political landscape have led to numerous diaspora groups in the French-speaking world. Many writers born in former colonies in the French Caribbean chose to immigrate to metropolitan France or Quebec. They formulated the concept of a cosmopolitan cultural identity that differs from the racist view of Négritude put forward by previous generations. This research explores their writing of cosmopolitan cultural identity from a post-colonial perspective by referring to the concept of voyage in proposed by Edward Said and that of post-colonial intelligentsia by Arif Dirlik. By taking Dany Laferrière and some other Caribbean writers of the-1980s generation as examples, we will reveal how their cosmopolitan ideology and identity strategies colluded with the French cultural hegemony and ensured their legitimacy in the Francophone space.
Keywords: postcolonialism, cultural identity, Francophone literature, créolisation, Laferrière
I. Introduction
Since the 1980s, the internal political crises of the Third World1 have been frequent, and the once tightly bounded world structure during the Cold War has encountered profound changes. Due to social turmoil, political oppression, and personal will, people from former colonial countries decided to move to Western Europe and North America, forming many diasporas. This situation is particularly evident in the Francophone world. With the end of World War II, the colonies in the French Caribbean began to seek national independence, and one after another went into the process of decolonization. However, these countries have repeatedly encountered decades of dictatorship and social crises. During this period, millions of people migrated to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Québec. Although the decolonization has been complete, colonialism remains. The binary oppositions of black/ white and Western/ Third World are still deeply entrenched in their target immigration society. The Caribbean diasporas often play an ominous other in Western societies, and it is difficult for these Caribbean immigrants to integrate into the white community.
Historically, cultural identity2 has constituted an issue of all Francophone writers of the Caribbean diaspora. It gradually expressed the historical evolution of colonialization and decolonization. In the first half of the twentieth century, when the French colonial activities were most active, René Maran (1921) and Aimé Césaire(1939), the Martinique writers, issued a revolutionary voice of anticolonial oppression in works such as Batouala and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Such an independent voice echoing with the Harlem Black Renaissance Movement expressed Caribbean immigrants’ expectations to construct the cultural identity of the Négritude. After World War II, under the influence of the decolonization movement, some young Caribbean writers who had gone to France for education and then returned to their motherland began to conceive a new concept of cultural identity. Theorists such as Patrick Chamoiseau and édouard Glissant initiated the movement of créolisation. They advocated cultural integration within the Creole community by inventing a Creole French accessible to all the Caribbean people. Since the 1980s, another sign has appeared. The status of the Caribbean diaspora in the French intellectual arena has notably improved. The status of the Caribbean diaspora in the French intellectual circle has increased significantly. More and more Caribbean writers publish their works in French publishing houses, some of which have won literary awards and academic recognition.
During the Cold War, the trend of division from the global scope to the local area gradually impacted people’s historical and political consciousness. Since the late 1980s, ethnic conflicts have ranged, and social class division remains the same. The economic and political differences among the Third World have triggered large-scale immigration. As some researchers asserted, the universal commitment made by postcolonialism to transcend national, racial, and cultural boundaries is so inspiring on a global scale. According to the American historian Odd Arne Westad, “the interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union has shaped the social frameworks of Third World countries. Without the Cold War, Africa, Asia, and Latin America would be completely different from their situation today. The political solutions formed by the elites of the Third World are often a conscious response to the ideology of the Cold War” (Westad, 2012, p. 3). We have noticed that some intellectuals from the former colonies sought to introduce their voices that had been on the margins of political spheres into western cultures and consequently were playing the leading role of critical discourse. In addition, they demand to erase the profound differences between the center and the periphery and eliminate all the binary oppositions that followed the colonialist logic. On a global scale, they aspire to reveal the social heterogeneity and historical contingency and consequently achieve a universal cultural discourse.
As Arif Dirlik, an American post-colonial critic pointed out in The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, “the complicity of post-colonial in hegemony lies in postcolonialism’s diversion of attention from contemporary problems of social, political, and cultural domination, and in the obfuscation of its relationship to what is but a condition of its emergence, that is, to a global capitalism that, however, fragmented in appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations” (Dirlik, 1994, p. 331). Therefore, we may suppose that the new concept of the cultural identity of the-1980s Caribbean writers is inherent in such post-colonial logic. In addition, the tacit understanding between these immigrant writers and the intellectual circles of France is rather a cultural strategy deliberately adopted by them instead. From a perspective of post-colonial criticism, their cosmopolitan ideology colludes with the French cultural hegemony, ensuring their cultural legitimacy in the Francophone space.
In general, French researchers haven’t paid much attention to the writing of the cultural identity of these 1980s Caribbean writers. However, American post-colonial critics have achieved a lot in this field and can provide theoretical support for further analysis. This article will explore this questionable writing of cosmopolitan cultural identity from a post-colonial perspective and reveal three strategies or postures of these Caribbean Francophone writers: the strategy of nostalgia, the strategy of languages, and the posture of cosmopolitan writers. To do so, we will refer to the concept of voyage in proposed by Edward Said and that of post-colonial intelligentsia by Arif Dirlik.
II. The Strategy of Nostalgia and the Voyage In of the-1980s Caribbean Writers
In the third chapter of Culture and Imperialism, Said put forward the famous concept of voyage in to describe that some writers, intellectuals, and their works moved towards metropolitan France from the Third World and successfully integrated into it. In Said’s view, the voyage in of the Third World intelligentsia is a specific cultural journey and knowledge journey which involves several factors. First of all, “anti-imperialist intellectual and scholarly work done by writers from the peripheries who have immigrated to or are visiting the metropolis is usually an extension into the metropolis of large-scale mass movements” (Said, 1994, p. 244). Second, “theses incursions concern the same areas of experience, culture, history, and tradition hitherto commanded unilaterally by the metropolitan center” (Said, 1994, p. 244). “The voyage in, then, constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work. And that it exists at all is a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures” (Said, 1994, p. 244). Last but not least, “these voyages in represents, I believe, a still unresolved contradiction or discrepancy within metropolitan culture, which through co-optation, dilution, and avoidance partly acknowledge and partly refuses the effort” (Said, 1994, p. 244).
This concept of voyage in can help us clarify the issue of cultural identity writing in Caribbean French literature in the 1980s. Most of these writers were born in politically or culturally elite families and received a good education in their home country or France. They left their hometowns at an era of globalization when the Third World was involved in social crises and that the advanced European countries were facing unprecedented challenges. For them, how to define their cultural identity constitutes an inevitable issue. We have noticed that there are two alternative concepts of cultural identity among these writers: one is to embrace the trend of globalization and the arrival of the era of global political, economic, and cultural homogeneity, which will lead to alienation from their original cultural foundation; the second is to adopt a nationalism cultural viewpoint that opposes the trend of globalization. Pure cultural nationalism might be unrealistic, but abandoning the original culture will bring them the accusation of a betrayer to their national culture. Faced with this dilemma, some of these writers have devised a compromise plan that can easily circumvent the embarrassing impression of marginal origin and win the favor of Western intellectual discourse.
We noticed a strong nostalgia in Caribbean Francophone literature at the end of the twentieth century: early life in hometown became a typical theme in the works of Dany Laferrière, René Depestre, and Maryse Condé. In his speech pronounced at the reception ceremony at the Académie fran?aise, Laferrière, a Haitian-Canadian writer, proudly mentioned voodoo, the folk belief of the Creoles, and his poetic childhood spent in Petit-Goave in the company of grandmother (Laferrière, 2015). Similarly, the Guadeloupean writer Condé also makes childhood a frequent theme in her works. In her autography Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, tropical landscapes, and elements of Guadeloupean culture appear many times with a sentimental tone that recalls the old days (Condé, 2006). In an autobiographical novel, the Haitian-French writer Depestre presents the Haitian village of Jacmel as an image of agricultural civilization, even a utopia of pre-capitalist culture, by referring to the biblical story of Lost Paradise. In summary, these idyllic literary works depicted Caribbean islands as an ancient, mysterious, and leisurely legend (Depestre, 1988).
As the Chinese cultural critic Jinhua Dai pointed out, nostalgia appears as a specific cultural phenomenon.“In modern people’s historical imagination, nostalgia has become an effective strategy to ease the gap between the undeveloped colonial world and the developed western world” (Dai, 1999, p. 112). Nowadays, Europe and the United States have entered the post-industrial era, and environmental protection has become more current than ever. Under such circumstances, French readers began to look forward to a literary discourse that opposed Enlightenment progressivism and modernization. As is clarified above, these fictional Caribbean towns are almost irrelevant to factors of urban civilization. By describing their hometown with a pre-modern atmosphere, these Caribbean writers moderately express their negative attitude towards modern society. In this way, they represent themselves as a non-aggressive cultural other and cater to French readers’ aspiration for nostalgia.
III. The Strategy of Languages, the Movement of créolisation and Dany Laferrière
According to Herderism, literature, language and nation are often closely connected. Language is not only a literary tool but also an inescapably political instrument. It is through language that the literary world remains subject to political power. In countries that have undergone colonization, colonizers exert political domination by linguistic means (Casanova, 2004, p. 115). In the Caribbean colonies, the French colonial government issued a series of decrees requiring colonized people to learn French to ensure colonial domination. Edouard Glissant, a Martinique poet, once clearly described this colonial linguistic domination: “European conquerors first exported their languages, systematically and systematically imposed European languages on the colonized people, and then made them dominate the indigenous languages. In countries with an enduring history of colonization, bilingualism is a typical sign of political domination” (Glissant, 1997, p. 35). The difference between the colonial language and the native language can directly reflect the difference in the social status of the two groups. “The native language of the colonized is precisely the least valued. It has no dignity in the concert of nations and peoples. If he wants to find a job, build his place, exist in the city and the world, he must first comply with the language of others, that of the colonizers, his masters. In the linguistic conflict that obsesses the colonized, his native language is being humiliated, crushed. And this contempt, objectively founded, he ends up making it his own” (Memmi, 1985, p. 136). Glissant once emphasized the suffering of expression of the colonized, “Rejecting or accepting the language of the colonizer constitutes an unavoidable dilemma for all the colonized. Either close yourself to indigenous culture or be assimilated by colonial cultures” (Glissant, 1997, p. 117); only the ruled people will encounter such distress. When others cannot understand its deep meaning, this mental distress will become more and more serious. Those who live peacefully in their mother tongue will never understand this kind of language torture” (Glissant, 1997, p. 122). Almost all colonized people feel guilty while using French, the colonial language. The Algerian writer Jean Amrouche once wrote: “If you are a colonized, then you must use the language they lent you. You only have the right to use it, not the legal owner of the language. Just a simple user”(Amrouche, 2000, p. 332); “Taking the language of a civilized person as my own and writing, it makes me feel like an illegitimate child” (Amrouche, 2000, p. 329).
To achieve literary recognition, “dominated writers must therefore yield to the norms decreed to be universal by the very persons who have a monopoly on universality. More than this, they need to situate themselves at just the right distance from their judges: if they wish to be noticed by readers, they have to show some differences from other writers-but not so different that they are thereby rendered invisible. They must be neither too near nor too far. All writers from countries under the linguistic domination of France have had this experience” (Casanova, 2004, p. 156). Out of the above considerations, some 1980s Caribbean writers such as Confiant and Laferrière adopted an eclectic view of language, by which they can maintain a balance between the native language and French, as well as the national culture and French culture.
At the end of the 1980s, Rapha?l Confiant, Jean Bernabé, and Patrick Chamoiseau launched the movement of créolisation, a revolutionary movement of cultural independence in the French West Indies. In éloge de la créolité (1989), a manifesto of this movement, they urged all Caribbean people to resist the rule of the French language and build up a new language, Creole French. To do so, they advocated the systematization of Creole, which existed only at the level of oral expression. In addition, they also urged to endow Creole French with“special syntax, grammar, vocabulary and appropriate writing methods, intonation, rhythm, and soul” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau & Confiant, 1989, p. 45). Creole French is different from standard French in grammar and vocabulary but is generally comprehensible by French people. This proposition of Creole French has been realized in Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006), an autobiographical novel of the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé. This work was written in a creolized French, which combines Creole vocabulary and French grammar, presenting a special linguistic effect, different from standard French but intelligible to French readers” (Casanova, 2004, p. 297).
Chamoiseau believes that the Creole French can express the cultural uniqueness of the Caribbean people and promote the cultural and political liberation of the indigenous community. “Because the Antilles literature does not yet exist, it is still in the quasi-literary stage… it is necessary to establish native literature based on the Creole oral tradition to replace the French literature paradigm” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau & Confiant, 1989, p. 14).“Spoken language is the carrier of stories, proverbs, nursery rhymes, and songs. It is our collective wisdom and the way we interpret the world…, yes, we must re-master this language and rebuild cultural continuity. Expressing our collective identity is urgent. This language can perfectly express our wisdom… In short, we must invent a kind of literature that does not violate the requirements of modern language and our oral tradition”(Bernabé, Chamoiseau & Confiant, 1989, pp. 34-35). The movement of créolisation did not keep them away from the French literary orthodoxy but instead brought some rewards such as the Goncourt Prize. With this language strategy, they entered the cultural platform of France and published their works in major French publishers such as Gallimard and Seuil. French critics’ responses can also reflect the effectiveness of this language strategy: French critics simplified the language revolution into a pure stylistic innovation; they regarded Creole French literature as a success of French literature in the new era. In a sense, the critical benediction bestowed upon Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabé has demonstrated the power of consecration by the center to depoliticized politically dominated writers, preventing them from formulating political or national demands.“Such recognition is at once a necessary form of autonomy and a form of ethnocentric annexation that denies the historical existence of those who are consecrated” (Casanova, 2004, p. 156).
Unlike Chamoiseau and the other Caribbean writers of Creole French, Laferrière holds a very personal view of language, both conservative and radical. It is conservative because Laferrière is opposed to the innovation of the Creole language. His works, including novels, essays, poetry, and autobiographies, were written in French, with little Creole vocabulary. He once explained in L’Art presque perdu de ne rien faire, a long essay: “I can use French to express what any other language in the world can express” (Laferrière, 2014, p. 171). In addition, a dialogue in his autobiographical novel L’énigme du retour also reveals his indifference towards Creole. This conversation took place between Windsor, the protagonist, and his friend. The theme of this conversation is the relationship between Caribbean identity and Creole. This friend wanted to make Creole the mother tongue of her future children because she believed that “only children who grow up in a Creole environment are truly Creole people” (Laferrière, 2009, pp. 196-197). However, Windsor disagreed with her view about the importance of Creole by replying: “speaking Creole is not enough to make me a Haitian” (Laferrière, 2009, p. 193). However, we must admit that Laferrière’s view of language is radical. In his works, the relevance of national language and cultural identity is completely negated while the importance of Caribbean identity is ignored, replaced by his imagination of professional identity. Windsor, the protagonist of L’énigme du retour, moved to Quebec for political reasons. Twenty years later, when he returned to Haiti, he found that he had lost his sense of belonging to the indigenous culture. As a novelist, he decided to create an idealized Caribbean space through writing,“returning to his hometown through the window of the novel” (Laferrière, 2009, p. 161). In addition, Laferrière also expressed a similar logic in a newspaper interview: “Let language be my country, my hometown. Only through writing can I know who I am” (Saint-éloi, 2001, p. 4).
Now, let us make a summary of the above language strategies. The promoters of the Creole French tried to create an aesthetically unique language by changing the normative usage of French. Different from these revolutionary language creators, Laferrière chose to write in French. He directly inherited French literary resources and possessed a set of knowledge and techniques that may allow him to enter the history of French literature. With such language strategies, they have surpassed the limited readership in the Caribbean space and gained a wide readership.
IV. The Posture of Cosmopolitan Writers and World Literature in French
It is undeniable that French literature has a high reputation around the world. The French critic Pascale Casanova stated proudly that French literature constitutes “the literary Greenwich meridian” (Casanova, 2004, p. 87) or the capital of literature of all nations. In recent years, the superiority of French literature has become questionable along with the stronger cultural self-consciousness of the Third World. During the 2007 presidential campaign, candidate Nicholas Sarkozy put forward radical nationalist slogans, preaching “the superiority of French culture.” As a reply, the Leftist newspaper Le Monde published a literary manifesto titled Towards a World Literature in French (Pour une littérature-monde en fran?ais). Forty-four French writers signed this article, more than half of which are of African and Caribbean descent. In the name of pluralist literature, these writers advocate “a break with the French literary hegemony, which ignores the process of globalization and regards the self as the only reference and universal model of humanity” (Le Bris & Rouaud, 2007, p. 25). Furthermore, they also propose a cosmopolitan cultural identity transcending ethnic and national boundaries. This posture of cosmopolitan identity has become common practice in recent years. In a class on Black Literature given in 2016, Congolese-French writer Alain Mabanckou proudly announced that he was “a writer of three continents” (born in Africa, educated in Europe, beginning his writing and teaching career in America). In the same year, Laferrière used almost the same expression in a speech when he said that “I am a writer of the world”(Saint-éloi, 2001, p. 4).
We cannot help asking: Is this cosmopolitan identity realistic? How do we understand it? If we examine the cultural policies of France in recent years, it is not difficult to find that the above pluralist ideology seems to be an attack on French cultural chauvinism, but it secretly caters to the French government’s demand for expanding cultural influence. Since the 1990s, the North American cultural industry has developed rapidly, and the Third World countries have seen a relatively strong trend of cultural self-consciousness. In this context, the superior position of French culture gradually withdrew from the historical stage. “In the late 1980s, the government intervention in the cultural field was particularly significant” (Poirrier, 2009, p. 9). The French government launched a cultural strategy of North-South cooperation, strategically attracting scholars and writers from the former colonies and giving some cultural recognition. Since 1987, several Caribbean writers (including Chamoiseau, Laferrière) have won the Goncourt Prize, the Fémina Prize, and other influential awards. In 2013, Laferrière was elected academician of Académie fran?aise; in 2016, Collège de France, the top French academic institution, established an annual chair for Mabanckou.
From the perspective of postcolonial criticism, this cultural strategy adopted by the French government “is the same as its practice of supporting the indigenous elite in the early days of colonial activities. It belongs to an old picture, granting privileges to a group that may move upwards and making them the real residents of the marginal zone” (Dirlik, 1994, p. 356). “Eurocentrism, as the very condition for the emergence of these alternative voices, retains its cultural hegemony; but it is more evident than ever before that, for this hegemony to be sustained, its boundaries must be rendered more porous in order to absorb alternative cultural possibilities that might otherwise serve as sources of destructive oppositions” (Dirlik, 1994, p. 354). In this post-colonial era, French cultural hegemony has changed its appearance, adopting a softer and more subtle way to incorporate these Caribbean cultural heterogeneities. As for the Caribbean writers above, their posture of cosmopolitan cultural identity “may be complicit in the consolidation of hegemony in the very process of questioning it” (Dirlik, 1994, pp. 347-348), and consequently ensures their legitimacy in the Francophone space.
Therefore, no matter such proposition of a “world literature in French” or other cosmopolitan postures constitute a specific narrative of French culture in the era of globalization, a post-colonial literary narrative. While these Caribbean French-speaking writers are crying out for pluralism against nationalism and racism, they secretly cater to the needs of French culture for global expansion. In this sense, the “cosmopolitanism” they proclaimed is no different from the hidden synonym of French cultural hegemony.
V. Conclusion
Now, let us summarize the three identity strategies mentioned above. Since the 1980s, those Caribbean French diaspora writers have successfully gained recognition in the French cultural market by praising a nostalgia for pre-modern civilization and writing an exotic but intelligible French, Creole French. In addition, they turned the focus of cultural identity from national language issues to writers’ professional identity issues. Moreover, in the name of resisting the French cultural hegemony, they adopted an egalitarian and cosmopolitan posture, which allowed them to cater secretly to the global expansion of the French culture. Such highly praised cultural diversity did not go deep to explain the essence that exists between different ideological traditions while concealing their hidden indifference to the rights of minorities. Just as Dirlik stated, “postcoloniality… is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia…. Postcoloniality is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism” (Dirlik, 1994, p. 356). From the perspective of post-colonial criticism, such writing of the cultural identity “is an expression not so much of agony over identity, as it often appears, but of newfound power” (Dirlik, 1994, p. 339). To be more concrete, the new concept of a cosmopolitan cultural identity of the-1980s Caribbean writers is inherent in such post-colonial logic. The tacit understanding between these immigrant writers and the intellectual circles of France is rather a cultural strategy deliberately adopted by them instead. Their cosmopolitan ideology colludes with the French cultural hegemony, ensuring their cultural legitimacy in the Francophone space, even on a global scale. Even these Caribbean writers have engaged in a valid criticism of past forms of colonial ideological hegemony, they have had little to say about its contemporary figurations. In consequence, we highly doubt whether such literary writing “can generate a thoroughgoing criticism of their ideology and formulate effective practices of cultural resistance against the system of which it is a product” (Dirlik, 1994, p. 356).
Of course, we must admit that their writing of a cosmopolitan identity has produced some positive effects. On the one hand, the travel experience of traveling around the center and the periphery allowed these Caribbean writers to transcend the old barriers of national consciousness and gain a deeper understanding of their national culture and French culture than the previous generations. On the other hand, such strategic literary writing constitutes a criticism of Eurocentrism that imposed the Western views of history and process of civilization on the Third World. In the Caribbean space, literary expression is no longer the privilege of colonialist writers. Similarly, academic discourse in literature is no longer under the predominance of European researchers. In this sense, their “voyage in” is undoubtedly significant for building a cultural dialogue between Europe and the Third World. In another perspective, their pluralist identity concept forces people to rethink the social identity and cognitive forms created by postcoloniality. As is noticed by Dirlik, postcoloniality constitutes not only a specific condition of the Third-world but also a dilemma for all contemporary people. Therefore, such identity writing in post-colonial Caribbean literature should arouse more attention. “How to transcend postcoloniality?” is a question that all literary critics should seriously consider, whether in Europe, Asia, or America.
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Journal of Literature and Art Studies2021年12期