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The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 100, Number 1, Winter 2001,pp. 215-257 (Article)

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Chris Bongie

A Street Named Bissette: Nostalgia, Memory,

and the Cent-Cinquantenaire of the Abolition of

Slavery in Martinique (1848–1998)

In a confused way, he felt that the truth was locatedsomewhere between the rather unrealistic radicalismof those who pushed the ‘‘it’s a black thing’’ argumentand the ecumenicalism, itself rather impracticable, ofthose who made a case for the ‘‘little homeland of Mar-tinique’’ and the ‘‘big homeland of France.’’ But how tofind a name for this in-between condition? What termto assign it?—Raphaël Confiant, L’archet du colonel

Rather than being evidence of the breakdown of logic,or of low-grade hypocrisy, our ability to hold contraryopinions, to be of ‘‘two minds,’’ is really a practicalsolution to the difficulties of dealing with complex en-vironments. It is a mark of our flexibility and evidenceof our multiplicity that we accept new ideas withoutevicting our old ‘‘tenants.’’—Christopher Dewdney, Last Flesh

As the millennium comes to a close, ourpostmodern age turns back with an obsessivelynostalgic longing to a past that might anchorits endless semiotic and cultural drift in some-thing solid that does not melt into air. FredricJameson’s now canonical denunciation of thiscompulsive reinscription of the past, ‘‘the insen-sible colonization of the present by the nostalgia

The South Atlantic Quarterly :,Winter .Copyright © by Duke University Press.

216 Chris Bongie

mode,’’ 1 is shared by many. The Mexican cultural critic Néstor García Can-clini speaks, for instance, of how the desire for commemoration is a ‘‘com-pensatory practice’’ especially suited for an ‘‘epoch in which we doubt thebenefits of modernity, [and in which] temptations mount for a return tosome past that we imagine to be more tolerable.’’ 2 Positing the negative, ifdangerously seductive, powers of this nostalgic ‘‘colonization’’ and associat-ing it with such things as the bad faith of postmodernism or the puerile lureof cultural essentialism, these critics nonetheless also take for granted theneed to establish a relationship to the past that would be free of nostalgia.Wesee this need expressed in Jameson’s definition of nostalgia, for instance,whenhe characterizes it as ‘‘an elaborated symptomof thewaning of our his-toricity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’’(). Nostalgia thus diverts us from a positive and active experience of his-tory—from what I will here be callingmemory.We need (such critics argue)to retrieve and secure a real sense of the past precisely in order to combat itsnostalgic simulacra; thus, for instance, García Canclini hastens to add thatpointing out the ‘‘compensatory’’ dimension of commemorations is not todeny ‘‘the need for commemorative ceremonies of founding events, whichare indispensable for giving density and historical roots to the contempo-rary experience of any group’’ (). The critique of nostalgia thus groundsitself in an appeal to the apparently ‘‘indispensable’’ need for historicity, for‘‘historical roots.’’The opposition between nostalgia and memory is absolutely central to

recent theorists of Atlantic identity, who pitilessly critique false represen-tations of and affiliations with the past while at the same time holding outthe possibility—and the ‘‘need’’—for a truer remembering of that past. PaulGilroy, in his seminal The Black Atlantic, vociferates loudly against nostalgicrecuperations of the past, the ‘‘ornate conceptions of African antiquity,’’ the‘‘mystical and ruthlessly positive notion of Africa’’ put forward by Afrocen-trics; he berates ‘‘the active reinvention of the rituals and rites of lost Afri-can traditions,’’ 3 in the same way that Jameson accusingly points his fingerat various manifestations of the ‘‘nostalgia mode.’’ Against such illusions,Gilroy adopts a genealogical perspective that ‘‘striv[es] to comprehend thereproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission ofa fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions which sug-gest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert,response to the destabilising flux of the post-contemporary world’’ ().

A Street Named Bissette 217

And yet, despite its apparent insights into the constructedness of the pastand the traditions that supposedly belong to this past, Gilroy’s perspectivemaintains a confident grasp of the past; his critique of nostalgic fantasiesleads, ‘‘naturally’’ enough, to a counterinsistence that genealogical mem-ory does provide an authentic relation to and understanding of the past. The(false) traditions invoked by essentialists are, for Gilroy, altogether differentfrom the ‘‘cultural traditions’’ that reproduce themselves and, in their repro-duction, make possible what Gilroy refers to (and privileges) as ‘‘the livingmemory of the changing same’’ ().BecauseGilroy’s book so confidently accesses this ‘‘livingmemory,’’ it ulti-

mately demands to be read (as critics were not slow to see) against its overtlyantinostalgic grain. The initial euphoria produced by Gilroy’s critique ofessentialist identities has given way to a more nuanced assessment of hiswork, capable of discerning the extent to which his configurations of (black)Atlantic identity actually reinscribe a ‘‘major’’ nostalgia for blackness in a‘‘minor’’ diasporic key. His attempts at recuperating the ‘‘living memory’’of diasporic blacks, his refusal to abandon the changing same, and his bluntand decidedly nostalgic thesis that the ‘‘vital memories of the slave past’’() not only unified but still unify this diasporic identity 4 all confirm thatGilroy is dramatically implicated in the very pattern of thinking for whichhe rebukes the nostalgic essentialists and their ilk. But the point to be drawnfrom this fact is not (simply) that one can imagine a better and more nu-anced genealogical approach to Atlantic identity (black or otherwise) thatwould attenuate the nostalgic racial commitments of Gilroy’s book in favorof a more ecumenical position—although one certainly can imagine suchan approach.5 Rather, the point I want to insist on here is quite simply thatthe (‘‘good’’) genealogical memory of diaspora cannot be disengaged fromthe (‘‘bad’’) nostalgia of the essentialists, which means that neither is whatits enemies or proponents make it out to be. Indeed, I would argue, the twoare hopelessly—but also productively—entangled and cannot be conceivedapart from one another. Rather than see this entanglement as (simply) acontradiction, I will be insinuating here an argument in favor of this am-bivalent confusion of memory and nostalgia. The specific context in whichI will be reading, and promoting, the duplicitous consciousness that resultsfrom this confusion will be the recent discussions and debates generated inFrance and its overseas départementMartinique on the occasion of the thanniversary of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies (–).

218 Chris Bongie

As I will argue, the acts of commemoration and the historical polemics thatdominated the year in Martinique need to be understood both as aninevitable, if perhaps not necessary, act of cultural remembering and as apredictable, if perhaps not unfruitful, excuse for nostalgia, and thus as thatdifficult-to-name something else that lies in between these two convenient,but purely rhetorical, poles.

In his The Convict and the Colonel (), anthropologist Richard Price hasargued that in any discussion of contemporary Martinique Jameson’s ideasabout ‘‘ ‘nostalgia for the present,’ a desperate hanging on to a rapidly dis-appearing way of life,’’ are exceedingly relevant; ‘‘nostalgia for the ‘ances-tral’ way of life, for ‘the way we used to live,’ is omnipresent in s Mar-tinique,’’ he asserts.6 Price’s project in this book, which offers among themost evocative and layered accounts of twentieth-century Martiniquan cul-ture in any language, is to retrieve a series of interrelated stories from theisland’s past that have been buried by official history but that have none-theless remained present in what he calls the people’s ‘‘historical memory.’’These stories concern the guerre de Diamant, a political imbroglio centeredon municipal elections in the south of the island, and a ‘‘marginal his-torical figure’’ by the name of Medard Aribot, a vagrant folk artist who wasinvolved in that guerre. Medard’s story, in all its tenuous obscurity, serves asa perfect example of historical memory: ‘‘A set of traces, a series of remem-bered fragments about the past, that might be an ideal allegory for mymoregeneral contention that, pace some of the more pessimistic assessments [ofthe Caribbean, put forward by writers like V. S. Naipaul, Edouard Glissant,Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and Orlando Patterson], Martiniquan peas-ants and fishermen did preserve a heroic, anticolonial vision of the past andthat collective amnesia was more an invention of bourgeois intellectualsthan a rural reality.’’ 7 In Price’s account, the recovery of this historical mem-ory is itself interwoven (in postmodern fashion) with his own memories ofthe Martinique he first came to know as an undergraduate doing researchthere in the early s—a time very different from the present, and that henow sees as ‘‘the twilight of an era’’ (), a ‘‘watershed’’ separating two radi-cally distinct historical epochs ().To emphasize this perceived differencebetween then and now is not simply, he cautions, to indulge in a ‘‘ ‘tristestropiques’ narrative,’’ of the sort that he associates with certain pessimistic


analyses of contemporary Martinique (e.g., those offered by Richard D. E.Burton), but rather to accredit the lived experience of Martiniquans them-selves: the fishing families of Petite Anse with whom he lives themselves‘‘tend to envision an amorphous, atemporal period of ‘before’—stretching,however implausibly, from slavery days through colonial repression on intothe early s’’ (xi); discussions of ‘‘ ‘before’ bring waves of nostalgia’’ tothese islanders as they face up to, or turn away from, the realities of the‘‘ ‘modern’ present.’’What Price is forced to grapple with in his attempt at recovering the story

of Medard is the extent to which this nostalgia has superseded and thusobliterated historical memory. As he acknowledges, in a historical assess-ment that is itself inseparable from a certain nostalgia, the displacementof historical memory has been massive since the s: if, when first re-searching his subject in the late s, a story such as Medard’s seemed toform ‘‘a central chapter of their modern history, of their meaningful past,’’Price finds that two decades later he can no longer sustain those sorts ofclaims about Martiniquans. ‘‘It is,’’ he sighs, ‘‘as if the massive steamrollerof French (post)colonialism, with its destructive bending of consciousnessand identity, has finally made a sweep through even the most rural, leastmodern areas of the island’’ (–). Medard’s story has not simply beenforgotten: rather, it is now inseparable from ‘‘official folklore’’; it has becomepart of a larger process that Price dubs ‘‘ ‘the folklorization of colonialism,’or the ‘postcarding of the past.’ ’’ (As Price notes, the very recent inclusion ofMedard in the annals of official folklore has, ironically enough, been madepossible in great part through his own decades-long anthropological salvageefforts.) This story has been detached from the realm of historical mem-ory largely because of the increased immersion of Martiniquans in ‘‘Frenchmodels of how to think and act’’ (). Because of this displacement ofmem-ory and its replacement by nostalgia, the underpinnings and goals of Price’sown recuperative project are necessarily put into question: ‘‘such a returnto what people in Petite Anse call avant (‘before,’ ‘the way things used tobe’),’’ he admits, ‘‘involves risks—nostalgia runs deep in s Martinique.But,’’ he continues with muted optimism, ‘‘as Saramak hunters say, if youdon’t stir up a hole, you’ll never know what’s in it’’ (). The Convict and theColonel thus plays a double game, and this is the risk it takes: to acknowl-edge the ‘‘omnipresence’’ of nostalgia and yet attempt to retrieve historicalmemory; to grant ‘‘this master narrative of loss’’ and yet to ‘‘texture [it] . . .

220 Chris Bongie

and add hints about current renegotiations of identity’’ ().The confusingpresent in whichMartiniquan identities are being renegotiated, for Price, isnot an apocalyptic site of loss and alienation, as in the tristes tropiques ‘‘nar-rative of loss’’; nor is it simply the ‘‘double culture’’ analyzed by sociologistAndré Lucrèce, who sees contemporary Martinique as a place where ‘‘ar-chaic society’’ coexists with a modernity that distances islanders from ‘‘thetime of memory,’’ but where the archaic and the modern can neverthelesswith confidence be analytically distinguished from one another.8 Rather, itis a culture in which such analytic distinctions can no longer be made withcertainty, and where as a result one can never stir up the hole of memorywithout encountering a nostalgia that effectively hollows out whatever thereis to be found in that hole.Price’s sense that Martinique has undergone a veritable paradigm shift

since the s is one, as Price himself notes, that he shares not only withthe fishermen of Petite Anse but also with ‘‘the island’smost visible intellec-tuals’’ (), writers associated with the Créolité movement such as PatrickChamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, who over the last decade have (alongwith their mentor, Edouard Glissant) so forcefully impressed themselves onthe European andNorthAmerican literarymarkets as the ‘‘authentic’’ repre-sentatives of Martinique. Price acknowledges the affinity of his own visionof the modernization process with theirs but accuses them of reacting to itsimply with nostalgia, a ‘‘revisioning of the past’’ that bears little or no traceof historical memory: ‘‘I believe,’’ he asserts, ‘‘that the literary works of thecréolistes are, on the whole, complicitous with the celebration of a museumi-fied Martinique, a diorama’d Martinique, a picturesque and ‘pastified’ Mar-tinique that promotes a ‘feel-good’ nostalgia for people who are otherwisebusy adjusting to the complexities of a rapidly modernizing lifestyle’’ ().Chamoiseau and Confiant have fallen down the wrong hole—not the con-fusing and ambivalent hole of memory but the unquestionably (at least forPrice) empty hole of amythologizing nostalgia.This nostalgia privileges thesame ‘‘watershed’’ period of the late s and early s that Price himselfidentifies with 9 but also extends further back to the early decades of the cen-tury preceding (the date when the erstwhile colony voted to becomea département of France). For the Créolité authors, departmentalization wasthe final step in a centuries-long process of assimilation with themère-patrieandmarked the beginning of a definitive end to the island’s cultural and eco-nomic autonomy. For this reason, these authors show a decided proclivity


in their writings for the decades immediately preceding departmentaliza-tion: in novels such as Commandeur du sucre () and Régisseur du rhum(),Confiant turns to the interwar years,much asPrice turns back to thatsame period for the guerre de Diamant and the story of Medard. Given thesimilarity of their positions, one might well argue that Price and the Créo-lité authors are, in fact, exploring one and the same hole, and that Price’sargument does not actually do justice to the metafictive dynamics of thecréolistes’ best work. Novels like Chamoiseau’s Texaco () and Confiant’sL’archet du colonel (), in which it is notmerely stories about the past thatare being told but stories about how the storytellers are constructing storiesabout that past (just as Price not only tells the story of Medard but also pro-vides a metahistorical account of his own efforts at telling Medard’s story),surely put into question the authority of their own relation to the past thatthey are attempting to recuperate and thus cannot simply be accused of nos-talgic ‘‘pastification.’’ Be that as itmay, after reading Price’s scathing analysisof the historical distortions in the Chamoiseau-penned film L’exil deBéhanzin (–), to say nothing of his critique of the sexual stereotypesin that film or its disturbingly limited understanding of diasporic Atlan-tic identity,10 one is certainly hard-pressed to deny that the lesser work ofthe Créolité writers features ‘‘a nostalgia-based, vaseline-filtered view of thepast’’ and that it is vassal ‘‘to a broadly participatory, rather than contesta-tional, political practice in the present’’ ().Notwithstanding their often strong rhetoric about living and writing in a

‘‘dominated country,’’ as far as Price is concerned the Créolité writers haveresigned themselves to a collusive ‘‘acceptance, however grudging, of theinevitability of the logic of political and economic integration into Europe’’()—an acceptance that, he acknowledges, is shared by a great manyMar-tiniquans, regardless of whether or not they are likely to have seen L’exilde Béhanzin or read Texaco. To be sure, narratives of resistance groundedin ‘‘contestational, political practice’’ nevertheless continue to make them-selves heard in Martinique. Price’s critique of the ‘‘broadly participatory’’nature of the Créolité writers’ work, for instance, superficially resemblesthat found in longtime nationalist Guy Cabort-Masson’s Martinique: Com-portements et mentalité, winner of the Prix Frantz Fanon (Martinique’smost prestigious book award). There, one finds a scathing critique of whatCabort-Masson has referred to as ‘‘the creolitarian coterie’’ 11 and an indict-ment of their obsession with the days of yesteryear, le temps de l’antan. In

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particular, Cabort-Masson zeroes in on a few passages about the island’s departmentalization that occur in a section of Chamoiseau’s intel-lectual autobiography, Ecrire en pays dominé (), entitled ‘‘Mirage poli-tique.’’ According to Chamoiseau, what happened to Martiniquans over thecourse of this century was that ‘‘we were hurled out of a rural society intoan urbanizing society, out of a creole/mosaic substratum, indistinct andnocturnal, into the solar framework of a French/Western design.’’ 12 Thekey moment for Chamoiseau in this passage from a ‘‘créole-mosaïque’’ to a‘‘franco-occidental’’ society was : ‘‘Departmentalization sterilized us’’(); it ‘‘separated us from ourselves’’ (). Cabort-Masson rejects suchclaims, but not because—like Price—he sees them as simply evidence ofa nostalgic pastification that covers over historical memory. For Cabort-Masson, Chamoiseau’s comments are misleading because anyone readingthemmight imagine that ‘‘before there was in Martinique, as in Cuba,a hotbed of culture, a proliferation of works. Departmentalization is not thecause of our sterilization; on the contrary, it’s our sterilization that led to de-partmentalization.’’ 13Rather thanmarking themore or less definitive loss ofcultural and economic autonomy, departmentalization was merely the logi-cal product of a centuries-long process that is indissociable fromcolonialismand the ‘‘creolization’’ championed by Chamoiseau but that Cabort-Massonviews as an overwhelmingly negative process made possible only throughdomination and assimilation. Rather than producing a ‘‘mosaic’’ society, thevarious forms of métissage generated by creole societies were, and continueto be, Cabort-Masson argues, not part of a polyethnic multicultural processbut strictly manifestations of a (hegemonic) relation exclusively involvingsubaltern blacks and dominant whites. In short, ‘‘with Chamoiseau what wehave is the astonishing avowal of nostalgia for canefield slavery, for a seedygolden age’’ ()—an avowal that can only appear unrealistic to the Mar-tiniquan reading Ecrire en pays dominé but that will appeal to Chamoiseau’ssupposed Western target audience (‘‘what he counts on is the ignorance ofhis non-Martiniquan readers,’’ Cabort-Masson asserts []).Cabort-Masson thus empties out the Martiniquan past, following in the

time-honored footsteps of authors like Naipaul, whose pessimistic viewsPrice’s insistence on historical memory is meant to contest. The sheer re-ductionism of Cabort-Masson’s ‘‘contestational’’ text when it comes to as-sessing the island’s ‘‘sterile’’ past is only one reason among many that itwill assuredly not ‘‘travel’’ beyond the confines of Martinique: it is, to boot,


rather ineptly written and badly organized; it is immersed in local polemicsthat, apart from the comments about Chamoiseau, are unlikely to resonatewith non-Martiniquan readers; and finally, in retrograde ‘‘black national-ist’’ fashion, it contains some very peculiar arguments about gender rolesin Martinique, including the supposed privileging of black women in post-Emancipation society and the consequent ‘‘de-responsibilization’’ of theirmale counterparts, which women readers have been quick to jump on.14

Such objections, however, did not prevent this work from appealing to a cer-tain audience inMartinique and being awarded the Prix Frantz Fanon.The granting of this prize seems, on the one hand, to be a glaring instance ofnostalgia for the discredited but eternally seductive revolutionary rhetoricof the decolonizing s—a longing for the straightforward contestationalpolitics thatwould ‘‘unblock’’ the future, pointing theway forward toFanon’s‘‘national culture’’ and recovering ‘‘the epic through which the people worktheir way toward history.’’ 15 On the other hand, it seems a very timely inter-vention that dovetails with the election of the first Martiniquan indepen-dentist, Alfred Marie-Jeanne (founder of the Mouvement IndépendantisteMartiniquais), to the French National Assembly in and as president ofthe Conseil Régional in —an election that itself may be not so much(only) a new development pointing toward the future but an emphatic col-lective gesture of nostalgia on the part of Martiniquans. Be that as itmay, thejury awarding the prize to Cabort-Masson’s book ‘‘appreciated the renewedboldness of its critical questioning of Martinique’s colonial society,’’ 16 givingthis polemical outburst pride of place over the more nuanced concerns ofthe other two texts that it selected for special mention (Roger Toumson’sMythologie du métissage, a rather obscure deconstruction of the current criti-cal obsession withmétissage, andGeneviève Léti’s magisterial archival work,Santé et société esclavagiste à la Martinique [–] ).Despite Cabort-Masson’s Naipaul-like insistence on the ‘‘sterility’’ of vir-

tually all of Martiniquanhistory, there are a fewhistorical signposts towhichhe does want to draw his reader’s attention, most notably Aimé Césaire’sreview Tropiques (–), which he calls ‘‘the foundational book’’ (),a manifestation of pure Martiniquanness (and for this reason more impor-tant to his country than the Negritude of Césaire’s famous Cahier d’un re-tour au pays natal []). Cabort-Masson associates Tropiques, which he (notaltogether fairly) criticizes Créolité authors for ignoring,17 less with AiméCésaire than with his wife of the time, Suzanne Césaire, ‘‘who certainly

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wrote the most important articles for Tropiques (in terms of both quantityand quality)’’ (). Indeed, Suzanne Césaire née Roussi, ‘‘the most pro-found and most unrecognized of Martiniquan intellectuals,’’ is the secondperson to whom Cabort-Masson renders homage in his book’s dedications.Tropiques is not, however, the only moment of cultural achievement thatCabort-Masson retrieves from the wasteland of Martinique’s creolized past:musing upon the crucial significance of the literary work produced aroundthe time of Tropiques, Cabort-Masson asks himself: ‘‘Before Gilbert Gratiantand Joseph Zobel what idea had been generated by the slaves and the mu-lattoes?’’ In answer to this question, we are immediately informed that onlyone idea had preceded those of the key writers of the s and s:‘‘Only one—Bissette, who before everyone else hurled out the [call for] ‘im-mediate and unconditional abolition!’ ’’ ().Given the strength of this claim,it is not surprising that the first of the book’s two dedications reads ‘‘toCyrille Auguste Bissette, father of the abolition of slavery in Martinique.’’For those familiar with the conventional outlines of Martiniquan history,this dedication and the memory it evokes are doubtless the most unusual,and polemical, aspect of Cabort-Masson’s entire book because they so em-phatically strip the paternity of the abolition of slavery away from itstwo long-consecrated ‘‘fathers,’’ on whomdiscussions of Emancipation havealways centered in both France andMartinique: namely, the AlsatianVictorSchœlcher, primary author of the decree of April inwhich the provisionalgovernment abolished slavery, and the enslaved people themselves, who ledan insurrection on May that precipitated abolition on May , almosttwo weeks before the arrival of the official abolition decree from France onJune . It is these two familiar narratives concerning the date of Emancipa-tion that we will be examining in the second half of this article, but at thispoint wemust stop and briefly address the question of just who is this third,unremembered ‘‘father’’ and what is the significance of Cabort-Masson’seagerness to acknowledge him.The question of Cyrille Bissette’s identity is one that, until very re-

cently, few people, most Martiniquans included, could have been expectedto answer or even understand, for a variety of reasons—foremost amongwhich must be the fact that the mulatto abolitionist Bissette was a bitterrival of Schœlcher’s throughout the s and was actively excluded by thelatter from the commission set up by the February government in toregulate the question of what to do about slavery. In my book Islands and


Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature () I chronicle atsome length the hostile relations between these two men (which, I argue,ultimately need to be understood—as do all racial relations—in terms ofRené Girard’s ideas concerning mimetic rivalry);18 here, it will suffice verybriefly to recall themain facts about Bissette’s career in order tomake senseof his new visibility in Martinique (a visibility so recent, indeed, that I wasnot able to take it into account in Islands and Exiles).Bissette first came to prominence in December when he was ar-

rested for distributing a book that argued for an amelioration of the condi-tion of the class to which he belonged, the free men of color in the FrenchAntilles. The following month he was found guilty of sedition, branded,and condemned to a lifetime of hard labor. Freed through an effective legalcampaign that dragged on over several years, Bissette established himselfin France as spokesperson for the free men of color and in becamethe editor of the Revue des Colonies, the first French journal organized andrun by people of color. On and off until , the Revue carried out an acer-bic critique of colonial abuses and argued for the immediate abolition ofslavery. In the early s, Bissette launched his critique of fellow abolition-ist Schœlcher in a series of books in which he refuted aspects of the latter’saccounts of the Caribbean. This rivalry would carry over to the end of thedecade: as stated, Bissette was actively excluded from the deliberations onabolition,19 and this exclusionwas in part responsible for the surprising turnhis politics then took. From being the most vocal foe of the native whitepopulation on Martinique (the békés), Bissette entered into an electoral alli-ance against Schœlcher with a prominent béké for the elections andbecame the advocate of class reconciliation, a forgetting of the past (‘‘oublidu passé’’), fusion of the races, the maintenance of order, and the reestab-lishment of productive working conditions on the plantations. Embracedby the békés and the black masses, but seen by many of his own class as atraitor, Bissette and his running mate, Pécoul, trounced Schœlcher in the Martinique elections (and were themselves trounced in Guadeloupe).This electoral victory would be the high point of what turned into a relativelyundistinguished political career that came to an end with the coup d’étatof December , , and was followed by his death in relative obscurity in. By contrast, the radical republican Schœlcher would, with a certaindegree of self-satisfaction,20 go into exile after Louis-Napoléon’s coup andlive to fight another day, serving as a prominent voice of conscience in mat-

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ters colonial during the first several decades of the Third Republic and con-solidating his huge cult of personality in the French Caribbean. This cult,and the ‘‘mythe Schœlcher’’ that attached to it, were eminently useful inpromoting the Third Republic’s project of assimilation, which would culmi-nate in the departmentalization. As Cabort-Masson argues, the ‘‘realones steering the people toward assimilation’’ during the Third Republicand its aftermath were the ‘‘assimilationists of the left, socialists, radicals,and then communists who were in control of the cities,’’ and as he pointsout, ‘‘these are the ones who would manufacture the Schœlcher myth, sym-bol of French generosity, and who would obliterate the memory of Bissettefrom the [cultural] imaginary’’ (). The virtually total effacement of Bis-sette from Martiniquan history and the ideological prominence given toSchœlcher function for Cabort-Masson as an allegory for the cultural am-nesia that French colonialism has induced; one only has to read the namesof streets and buildings to register ‘‘the obliteration of the historical Mar-tiniquan from his own landscape,’’ Cabort-Masson notes, adding that theone exception to this rule, Rivière-Pilote (home territory ofMarie-Jeanne), isnonetheless a place ‘‘where greatest of all—Cyrille Auguste Bissette—has been forgotten’’ ().Cabort-Masson’s polemical retrieval of Bissette is in marked contrast to

the conventional portrait of Bissette as an antirevolutionary offered by thelikes of Aimé Césaire, who in , in the context of one of his many paeansto Schœlcher, noted that among the innumerablemerits of this ‘‘great man’’was his willingness to ‘‘take on the traitors, to take Bissette by the throat,to settle his score with Bissettisme—Bissette, head of the line of infamy,just as Delgrès heads that of honor, Bissette miserable sycophant of thecolonists’ feudal system, Bissette whose soiled posterity continues to doharm.’’ 21 Ignoring this officially sanctioned (and grotesquely stereotypical)opinion but still locked into the either/or logic that generated it, Cabort-Masson puts Bissette forward as an alternative, indigenous rather than im-ported, source for the ‘‘idea’’ of abolition. In a recent interview, reflectingon the cent-cinquantenaire, he elaborates further on the significance of Bis-sette and the effacement to which this pioneering abolitionist has been sub-jected: he starts off by contesting one of the most prominent ‘‘memories’’that was evoked during the commemoration, namely, that of the ma-roon, the neg mawon (of whom a good many statues were made during thecommemorative year, notwithstanding the glaring fact that ‘‘there’s nothing


to indicate the slightest participation on the part of maroons . . . in the re-volt of May ’’).22 Pointing out that ‘‘many people still like celebratingthemaroon because it comes across asmore revolutionary,more authentic,’’Cabort-Masson asserts that this is a ‘‘historical error’’: ‘‘These people hungup on mythical maroons are afraid to face up to facts, to acknowledge whatthey owe to the mulatto class, because it’s been dumped on by the followersof Schœlcher, on both the right and the left, including Aimé Césaire dur-ing the centenary.’’ Nostalgia for the absolute rebellion of the maroon(a nostalgia that the créolistes have themselves repeatedly attacked) has got-ten in the way of an understanding of ‘‘Bissettisme,’’ which Cabort-Massondefines positively as ‘‘the attempts of mulattoes trying to establish allianceswith the békés during the s—at the time, a normal, indeed necessary,action for the independence movements in colonial Latin America.’’ Thisnostalgia signals a reluctance to remember the crucial role of the mulattoclass in the events surrounding the Emancipation of : ‘‘Themulattowason the offensive, he won in and he succeeded in stirring up capitalistsociety.We are the sons of the mulatto class. No one wants to acknowledgethis, and for that reason no one acknowledges Bissette.’’ 23

One problem with Cabort-Masson’s identification of Bissette with themulatto class tout court is, to be sure, that in the nineteenth century Bis-sette was generally seen as an antidote to (or a betrayer of ) that class. Itwas, for instance, precisely the fear of a mulatto hegemony that generatedthe most extensive work ever written in praise of Bissette, Le préjugé derace aux Antilles françaises (), authored by the ‘‘enlightened’’ békéGastonSouquet-Basiège, who praised that ‘‘martyr, philanthropist, and dissemi-nator of reconciliation,’’ supported his ‘‘doctrines of appeasement and ofconcord,’’ and lashed out at the ‘‘fanatical henchmen of hatred’’ who re-jected Bissette—namely, the mulatto class, whom he saw as being intent on‘‘substituting the mixed-blood race for the white race.’’ 24 Whether Cabort-Masson has thought through the genealogical connections that link his ownargument, and his own nationalism, to the reactionary antiassimilationistdiscourse of the post-Emancipation planter class is impossible to say basedon the evidence of his book (although, as we will see later on, this issue hasbeen addressed by at least one prominent critic of Martiniquan nationalism,Edouard de Lépine).What is certain, however, is that Cabort-Masson’s res-urrection of Bissette is decidedly in tune with the times and not simply anisolated phenomenon, as can be seen from the frequency with which Bis-

228 Chris Bongie

sette’s name surfaces in recent works from and about Martinique: Bissette,and the profound ambiguities of his position, are once again becoming avisible part of the Martiniquan historical landscape at the turn of the mil-lennium.As random evidence of both the renewed visibility of Bissette and the still

very grudgingnature of this inclusion, it is illuminating to read closely a pas-sage from the introduction to a reedition of Schœlcher’s Des coloniesfrançaises (put out by theMinistère de l’Education nationale, de la Rechercheet de la Technologie). The author of this introduction, while arguing for theextreme novelty of Schœlcher’s ideas in favor of the abolition of slavery, rhe-torically raises the possibility that perhaps other people had similar ideas atthe time but immediately treats this suggestion dismissively by saying, ‘‘it isby no means certain that this is the case.’’ After providing a list of moderateabolitionists from the July Monarchy, he then feels compelled to admit that‘‘one would have to deal as a case apart with Bissette and his Revue des Colo-nies, the ideas of which are perhaps closer to those of Schœlcher.’’ Havinggiven with one hand, however, he quickly takes away with the other, add-ing deceptively that ‘‘it needs to be recalled that the former was only wonover rather belatedly to abolitionism and that he appears on the scene as anadversary of the author of Des colonies françaises, a book that he would re-ceive coolly in his Revue.’’ Apparently ignorant that Bissette was arguing forimmediate abolition well before Schœlcher (and, indeed, was thoroughlyirritated by Schœlcher’s refusal to acknowledge this), the author of the intro-duction again switches directions and makes a nervous conciliatory state-ment: ‘‘in any case, whatever the difference of opinion was that separatedthem, the two men are close in their ideas and at present that is what con-cerns us.’’ 25 But, in one last twist, he makes it clear that proximity of ideasis not all that should concern us, for even if Schœlcher was not the firstto argue for the idea of immediate abolition, he concludes, ‘‘No one did itwith as much consistency and as much courage’’ and it is ‘‘the vigorousnessof his action’’ that makes it especially valuable and memorable. Aside fromreinscribing a masculinist rhetoric of courage and vigor that was basic toSchœlcher’s own self-presentation and to the evirating portraits of his mu-latto rival (and that would repeatedly find its way into the revolutionary pro-nouncements of Césaire),26what such concessions and reinscriptions proveabove all is that it has become difficult, even for themost ardent proponentsof the mythe Schœlcher, to avoid the name and works of Bissette.


The time has become right for Bissette’s return to the consciousness ofMartiniquans: over the last few years, his writings have been appearing inanthologies,27 he has been given serious attention by historians,28 and he haseven featured as a character in a novel.29Doubtless the most obvious sign ofthis new relevance has been the publication in January of Stella Pâme’sinformative biography of Bissette, which has been selling very well inMarti-nique (to judge from an informal poll of Fort-de-France’s bookstores madein June ).30 The book, which is actually a Sorbonne dissertation,is a straightforward chronicle of Bissette’s career; based on substantial ar-chival research, it is especially strong on the events surrounding the affaireBissette of – but maintains a very neutral tone regarding its subject.However, in interviews and debates accompanying publication of the book,Pâme has given a much more subjective account of Bissette, going so faras to characterize him as a ‘‘victim of obscurantism,’’ and Schœlcher as asimple ‘‘opportunist.’’ 31 In line with Cabort-Masson’s comments aboutMar-tiniquans’ inability to face up to the past and acknowledge their ‘‘filial’’ re-lation to the achievements of the mulatto class, she claims that Bissette’seffacement from Martiniquan history can be explained by the fact that ‘‘wehaven’t yet settled our scores with the past,’’ adding pessimistically that inher opinion, ‘‘they’ll never be settled. It’s too inscribed in our genes.’’ Toobusy settling scores with the past, people are unable to grasp the modernityof Bissette, his relevance to the present: responding to the interviewer’s in-triguing comment that Bissette’s ‘‘discourse seems more modern than thatof Schœlcher, or in any case still very current,’’ she agrees that ‘‘he does in-deed have themoremodern discourse.’’ This emphasis on Bissette’s moder-nity vis à vis Schœlcher runs in the face of the standard,Césaire-sanctionedview that maintains the continued relevance of Schœlcher’s radical repub-lican agenda to the twentieth century (in the famous words of Césaire, ‘‘hisfrock coat may have become outdated but not his ideas’’).32

It is never clarified in the interview exactly what is meant by the wordmodern as it applies to Bissette, although one might guess that Pâme andher interviewer are simply referring to his preference for a rhetoric of racialconciliation and fusion, which has obvious affinities with the increasinglydiffused emphasis on the virtues of métissage in both France and the over-seas departments). But from the perspective of my own salvage work onBissette, it is not just the ‘‘broadly participatory’’ nature of this preferencethat accounts for his modernity; more profoundly, he is ‘‘modern’’ because

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he and his story resist being appropriated by any of the ‘‘master narratives’’through which one might hope to ‘‘redeem’’ him as an unproblematic heroin the manner, say, of Césaire’s Schœlcher. The obvious flaws and equivo-cations in Cabort-Masson’s neonationalist presentation of Bissette testifyto this resistance. One can imagine other such master narratives throughwhich eager revisionists might wish to retrieve Bissette. For instance, com-plementing the narrative of nation could be one of race, which would re-cuperate a ‘‘black’’ ancestor who has been subjected to (white) colonial era-sure; this narrative would be part and parcel of the ‘‘recovery of a collectivememory, the bid to give dignity back to black people, the building of an alter-native historical consciousness’’ that Stuart Hall has identified as the Pan-Africanist impulse.33 Or, in the spirit of Gilroy’s supposedly antiessential-ist revisionism, one could enlist a narrative of diaspora, which would chartthe movements of a migrant ‘‘black’’ subject as he negotiates the circum-Atlantic space between the mère-patrie and the island of his birth. Althoughthe ‘‘Afro-diasporic pioneer’’ narrative may sound rather more likely (andmore attractive) to contemporary readers than the protonationalist or Pan-Africanist narratives, the main point to be drawn from the story of Bissetteis that neither this nor any other such unequivocally positive model canadequately account for the uncomfortable mixture of resistance, compro-mise, and capitulation toward which this story directs us. That is what con-stitutes Bissette’s modernity. Indeed, one might say his postmodernity, in-asmuch as his entirely problematic heroism serves to distance us from andput into question, without simply undoing, what Cora Kaplan has called the‘‘heroic identifications, together with their inevitable discontents and dis-appointments, [that] were . . . a narrative process of idealization and dis-enchantment, central to the making of modern subjectivity.’’ 34 The heroicidentifications of aCésaire or aCabort-Masson, alongwith the self-righteousdisidentifications that inevitably mirror them (whether these be shunted offonto the hero’s monstrous doubles or onto the monsters that once-greatheroes are themselves thought to have degenerated into), form the all-too-clear boundaries between (and not beyond) which alone the ambivalentlymodern story of a Bissette can be properly remembered and told. And forthis very reason, it is hardly surprising that—notwithstanding his new visi-bility in Martinique—Bissette was, as Pâme puts it in her interview, ‘‘themost notable absentee of the cent-cinquantenaire’’ (). What place, if any,could there be for a problematic story such as his amid the clear and heroic


imperatives of this official commemoration? That is the question to whichwe must now turn.

The first half of this article has put forward ‘‘postmodern’’ arguments re-garding the inextricable relationship betweennostalgia andmemory and theinadequacy of those ‘‘heroic identifications’’ that have been so central to ourunderstanding of history and to the perceived necessity of commemoratingthat history. Having fleshed outmy theoretical assumptions and introducedthe figure of Bissette in support of them, in the second half of the article Iwill for the most part limit myself to a descriptive account of some of themore salient debates generated by the sesquicentenary celebrations inMar-tinique.To inject Bissette into the story of is to trouble the two master nar-

ratives about the abolition of slavery that have over the past several decadesuneasily shared the historical stage: the first of these narratives, the story ofApril , is associated with Schœlcher and the revolutionary beneficence ofFrance, and the second, the story of May –, is linked to the revolution-ary potency of the oppressed slaves. Both of these myths (in Barthes’s senseof the word) speak powerfully to different aspects of the notoriously dividedMartiniquan mentalité. The official terrain of is marked out by thesetwo dates: the first refers to the signing of a decree in France that abolishedslavery two months after its proclamation in each of the ‘‘old’’ French colo-nies (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cayenne, Réunion, Senegal); the second, toa spontaneous riot in Martinique that provoked the formal declaration ofabolition a week and a half before the arrival of the official delegate fromFrance who was to have proclaimed the April decree.35Nothing better ex-emplifies what wemight call the Atlantic aporia—or (in Bhabha’s words) the‘‘time-lag ofmodernity’’ 36—than the overlapping events that led to the possi-bility of a double commemoration of the abolition of slavery: what opens upbetween these two dates, between a time in which ‘‘freedom’’ is granted bythe benevolent mère-patrie and a time in which it is seized by the colonized,between a state of passivity and one of agency, is a third space and time inwhich the importance of both these commemorative datesmust be acknowl-edged, while the possibility that the truth lies in between them is equallyrecognized, transforming a potential either/or situation into a both/and thatis also inseparable from a neither/nor. This is a neither/nor, the unname-

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able ‘‘entre-deux’’ of which Confiant speaks in my first epigraph, that cantake into account, for instance, the role of a Bissette, whose place is clearlyneither in Schœlcher’s world nor in that of the insurgent slaves (despiteCabort-Masson’s best, if historically fallacious, attempts at locating Bissettewithin the latter world, as when he claims that ‘‘on – May the mulat-toes organized by Bissette, along with the enslaved masses, obtained aboli-tion’’ []).37

For over a century, the double time and place of April /May – wassubject to predictable processes of single-minded colonial erasure: the onlyofficial date for commemorating the abolition of slavery was April . It wason this date in that Aimé Césaire delivered his centenary speech, inwhich he covered Schœlcher with effusive praise and suggested that with-out the decisive intervention of that Frenchman abolition would have beenset back thirty or forty years.38 Fifty years later, April was still an impor-tant date for the sesquicentenary commemoration, albeit predominantly inmetropolitan France. In a typically grand gesture, for instance, the revolu-tionary heroes Toussaint Louverture and Louis Delgrès were given plaquesthat day in France’s lieu de mémoire par excellence, the Pantheon. Alongwith this memorial tribute, the main political authorities in France all con-tributed speeches marking this solemn occasion. President Chirac, for in-stance, in an April speech that avoided any reference to the hot issueof whether slavery was a ‘‘crime against humanity’’ (an issue to which wewill return near the end of this article), emphasized the central role of theFrench provisional government and more specifically Schœlcher in abol-ishing slavery (‘‘The anniversary that we are celebrating today is in the firstplace a homage to this honored citizen of the Republic’’) 39 and drew high-sounding lessons from the experience of about the importance ofmemory, humanism, and universals (e.g., we must ‘‘fully assume our dutyto remember [notre devoir de mémoire]’’ in order to realize the eternal rele-vance of ‘‘the struggle for the rights of the human individual’’). Meanwhile,Prime Minister Lionel Jospin went to Champagney (Haute-Saône), whenceemanated on March , a cahier de doléance that marked the first callin France for the complete abolition of slavery; Jospin used the event tourge his people ‘‘to mobilize every possible effort to build a France . . . tran-scending differences and cultures in order the better to harmonize [marier]them.’’ 40 As with Chirac, Jospin’s appeal to this intercultural ‘‘marriage’’ didnot broach the ‘‘crime against humanity’’ issue, although a speech given that


same day by the president of the National Assembly, Laurent Fabius, did.Capping off these speeches and tributes, on April the French Senate ren-dered ‘‘solemn homage’’ to Schœlcher.A little less than a month later in Paris, on May some , Domiens

(people from the overseas departments)marched in silence fromPlace de laRépublique to Place de la Nation. This was a complement on the Europeanside of the Atlantic to the celebrations in Martinique on May , the dateon which the abolition of slavery is now officially celebrated on the island(May , it should be noted, was the day of the insurgency; abolitionwas offi-cially proclaimed on May ). The commemoration of May is a relativelyrecent tradition inMartinique, traceable to the years immediately followingthe departmentalization of the island. For over a hundred years thisdate played no role in officialMartiniquanhistory, but around the time of thecentenary Martiniquans affiliated with the Parti communiste martiniquais(PCM)—notably,Gabriel Henry—began to zero in on this date—a tendencythat was reinforced in the early s by the historian and secretary-generalof the PCM, Armand Nicolas. But the date really only entered the popularconsciousness when it was ‘‘discovered’’ by Aimé Césaire and his party, theParti progressistemartiniquais (PPM), who decided to turn it into a nationalholiday in the early s. As Césaire put it in a speech inauguratingthe place du Mai near the PPMheadquarters in Fort-de-France, the previ-ous focus on April had been misguided, leading to a wrong understand-ing of Martinquan history: there had to be a May in the history of Marti-nique, he asserted, because ‘‘in colonial history, there is no place for idylls,for bucolics, for the nights of August [, when the National Assemblyvoted the abolition of all feudal rights and privileges, and the equality of allFrenchmen], nor for empty passing fancies, and Schœlcher is right to sayand to think that, even in the best of cases, it is still and always violence thatis the midwife of History.’’ 41 In this speech, indeed, Césaire goes so far as tovoice his (extremely problematic) belief that the decree of April wouldhave been ‘‘regarded as a dead letter, if not purely and simply repealed,’’ hadthe insurrection of May never happened. In , the French govern-ment under Mitterand, interested in promoting a decentralizing policy ofregionalization, decreed that an official holiday would be devoted to Eman-cipation in all the overseas departments (as well as the territory of Mayotte),with a date to be fixed by each of them. This made possible the officializa-tion of the May date in Martinique,42 while the legislation also preserved

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the centrality of April by making it the day on which, in all the schools ofthe Republic, an hour of ‘‘reflection on slavery and its abolition’’ had to bedevoted.The highly ‘‘constructed’’ and ‘‘symbolic’’ nature of this lieu de mémoire,43

or what we might term this neotraditionalist contribution to the Martini-quan patrimony,44 certainly confirms the general point that, ‘‘arbitrary intheir selection, commemorations do not always do justice to complexitiesand uncertainties.’’ 45 Without a doubt, the Martiniquan who has given themost attention to the complexities and uncertainties generated by the un-easy coexistence of April and May is Edouard de Lépine, a formerTrotskyist whose political trajectory has seen him wind up in the bosomof Césaire’s PPM. Ever since the PPM’s ‘‘discovery’’ of May in the earlys, de Lépine has been at pains to question the ‘‘authorship’’ of this lieude mémoire and to remind readers of its essentially mythological nature. Inhis Questions sur l’histoire antillaise, he painstakingly demonstrated thatit was not the PPMwho ‘‘discovered’’ this date—pace the claims of Césaire’sright-hand man (and, since , one of Martinique’s four representativesin the French National Assembly), Camille Darsières, in his Des originesde la nation martiniquaise ()—but rather that the emphasis on its sig-nificance had to be traced back to Armand Nicolas’s interventions in theearly s and, even further back, to comments made in the late sby Gabriel Henry; he also tellingly emphasized the lack of any references tothis date in Césaire’s speech (‘‘no trace to be found there of ‘that de-cisive day, May,’ only the occasional dithyrambic eulogy of April andVictor Schœlcher’’).46 Twenty years later, during the sesquicentenary com-memoration, the paternity of May was still being argued over by repre-sentatives of the PPMand thePCM,withDarsières continuing to emphasizethe originary role of his party in establishing this ‘‘national’’ holiday—bothin editorials for the PPM organ, Le progressiste, and in his sesquicentenaryspeech onMay 47—and with the other side continuing to complain about‘‘how unacceptable it is that the history and the merits that belong to it arebeing stolen in this way from Martinique’s Communist Party.’’ 48

Clarifying the muddied genealogy of May is, however, only a smallpart of de Lépine’s project. His main contribution to the debates concern-ing when the abolition of slavery ought to be commemorated lies in hisinsistence that the matter is by no means a simple either/or affair. In aninfluential collection of essays and lectures written over the course of the


last decade and published together a year after the May celebrationsas Dix semaines qui ébranlèrent la Martinique, mars– juin (), deLépine elaborates on the position he initially took in his book, arguingthat to confine oneself to the bipolar terms of the April /May debateis ‘‘to end up accepting the frameworks that are imposed upon us by colo-nial historiography’’ (). Rather, one needs to situate oneself ‘‘between theinfantilism of the nationalist critique and the ingenuousness of the assimi-lationist apologetics,’’ in an intellectual space where ‘‘there is room for a newcritique of abolition and of Schœlcherism, but only on condition of keepingaway from the dead end into which the quarrel of April versus Mayleads’’ (). This is the same argument de Lépine was pushing twenty yearsago, but—not surprisingly, given his own drift away from radical politicsinto the bosom of Darsières’s party—his specific target has shifted from thePPMto the ‘‘infantile’’ nationalists: thosewhomhe ironically refers to as ‘‘thenew champions of the duty to remember,’’ who are committed to the ‘‘newpopulist history’’ (), which wants to ‘‘disconnect Emancipation from anyand all references to the February Revolution’’ (). (The phrase ‘‘duty to re-member,’’ it must be recalled, was everywhere bandied about in Martiniqueand France in and was especially associated with the vocal Comité De-voir de Mémoire, formed that year under the aegis of Médecins duMonde.)The sesquicentenary commemoration was, de Lépine points out, a goldenopportunity for intellectuals and politicians of the nationalist ilk to insiston the supreme importance of the events of May , , in an argumentfueled by nostalgia and a long-standing ressentiment at the ineffectiveness oftheir calls for independence or at least sovereignty (‘‘What gets in their crawis not that the people might be thought to have lost the memory of slavery,but that they haven’t been able to convince the popular consciousness of theonly solution to the colonial problem that seems suitable to them, that ofnational independence’’ []).What these ‘‘duty-to-remember’’ nationalistsseem to have forgotten, he argues, is above all that ‘‘ May was only pos-sible because the principles from which the decrees of April drew theirinspiration were widely known in Martinique and that their immediate en-forcement was the main objective of the May insurgents’’ (). There wouldhave been no May insurgency, he asserts, had the slaves not been verywell aware that the newRepublic was already in the final stages of legislatingthe abolition of slavery.The nationalists’ obsession with May typifies what for de Lépine are

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the ‘‘puerile’’ limitations of their position in general, its ‘‘microinsularity.’’Taking the Martiniquan exception as the rule, they perforce ignore the dy-namics of the abolition process as it unfolded in the other French colo-nies affected by the April decree, where the ‘‘midwife of History’’ wasnot a violent insurrection. ‘‘We are shut away in the self-glorification of our May’’ (), he affirms, whereas Martiniquans should be at least equallyconcerned, when celebrating the sesquicentenary, with what took place in in every one of France’s ‘‘old’’ colonies: not simply the abolition ofslavery but the immediate granting of citizenship to all of the former slaves(). For de Lépine, ‘‘abolition remains, whatever we think of it, an eventin the history of France’’ (), and this event itself needs to be understoodin the context of ‘‘the vast antislavery movement of which the manifesta-tions in the French colonies constitute only a minuscule part’’ (). Indeed,notwithstanding all the commotion in Martinique itself during this com-memorative year, the extent of the sesquicentenary celebrations and the im-portance accorded themmust in great part be traced back across theAtlanticto France: ‘‘Without the initiative of the French government to give a solemncharacter to the commemoration of the th anniversary of the abolitionof slavery in its colonies, it is probable that this sesquicentenary would havegone by here as the th did, and as the st will doubtless go by, if no trulynew element in our approach to the question emerges’’ (). Because theinsular advocates of May have not grasped the transatlantic complexity ofwhat they are commemorating, the sesquicentenary has not, when all is saidand done, increased people’s knowledge about abolition but marked a re-gression in it. ‘‘Nothing more from this point on, when it comes to the fightagainst slavery, than maroons and May’’ (): that was the reductionistpopulist lesson being foisted on eager Martiniquans during May bythe duty-to-remember advocates, nationalist or otherwise. In turn, their de-luded, self-flattering obsession with rebellious maroons and the events ofMay ultimately helps promote what de Lépine sees as the long-standing‘‘collective irresponsibility’’ of Martinquans in general, ever eager to stresstheir heroic agency while at the same time all too willing to lay blame fortheir misfortunes on the ‘‘three devils of populism’’: ‘‘It’s always the otherwho is responsible for our situation. In this respect, we have three devils forevery occasion: the French colonialists, the mulattoes, and the békés’’ ().Given this supposed tendency of Martiniquans to scapegoat these ‘‘three

devils,’’ onemight expect a sympathetic treatment of Bissette in de Lépine’s


Dix semaines; as it turns out, though, the mulatto abolitionist is the one‘‘devil’’ that this confirmed schœlchériste has no intention of undemoniz-ing.49Césaire’s ‘‘miserable sycophant’’ is notmerely guilty of supporting the‘‘colonists’ feudal system’’ and its contestation of the abolitionist and demo-cratic reforms of the Second Republic; in taking sides against Schœlcher, deLépine points out, Bissette might in retrospect appear to have been pursu-ing an antiassimilationist agenda compatible not only with the reactionaryaims of his béké allies but with the insular arguments of current-day nation-alists. Given the search of ‘‘revisionist criticism’’ for home-grown heroes,he suggests (in one of the articles from Dix semaines written shortly beforeCabort-Masson’s book came out and verified his prediction), ‘‘it is not evenimpossible that the false antiassimilationist Bissette will one day be foundamong those who inspire the [revisionist] counterhistory, if not among thefathers of the Martiniquan nation’’ (). Having adopted during the elections the role of native-born Martiniquan fighting against the alien doc-trines of an overly radical Frenchman, Bissette could be seen as someoneuniquely concerned with ‘‘the specificity of Martiniquan problems,’’ whoseviews might be qualified as ‘‘subtly or cynically prenationalist’’; for this rea-son, de Lépine notes, ‘‘one finds it astonishing, be it said in passing, that hehas not been adopted by the populist bandwagon against the assimilation-ist Schœlcher and his heirs’’ (). By the end of , as the publication ofCabort-Masson’s book testifies, this populist adoption of Bissette was a faitaccompli, and de Lépine—in his discussion of the ‘‘three devils’’—could af-firm that Bissette is the only mulatto ‘‘in the good graces’’ of the populists(). As his characterization of Bissette as a false antiassimilationist sug-gests, de Lépine leaves it open to question whether these populists are rightin believing that Bissette belongs to their camp; given his consistent appealsto the benevolence of the mère-patrie, Bissette could just as well serve as themetonym for a dangerously complicitous, assimilationist politics, and deLépine’s account of him wavers somewhat ambiguously between these twoequally dismissive ways of portraying his favorite ‘‘devil.’’Bissette functions for de Lépine not merely as the (false) prototype of

contemporary nationalists in Martinique but also—in the articles of Dixsemaines written after May —as a foil to his criticisms of the nostalgicexcesses of the duty-to-remember proponents. In this particular respect, itwould be hard to lump Bissette in with the nationalists, given his infamousemphasis after on the need for a forgetting of the past, which would

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make possible a reconciliation between Martiniquans of all classes. For deLépine, Bissette’s emphasis on forgetting does nothing more than servethe interests of the ruling classes: ‘‘the Bissettist forgetting . . . was purelyand simply a falling into line with the position of the former masters.’’ Bis-sette’s pleas for an oubli du passé, and the insistence on a devoir de mémoirethat was so omnipresent during the commemorations, are equallybad from de Lépine’s perspective: the one a denial of historical memory,the other an exercise in nostalgia. In contrast to both of these well-definedpositions, what de Lépine argues for is ‘‘a shared forgetting,’’ ‘‘the puttinginto parentheses of what one knows and what one cannot erase, in orderto take on in the open a new behavior regarding the matter of slavery andrelated issues, by trying to do all we can to ensure the construction of a com-mon future’’ (); he wants Martiniquans to know their history but then,‘‘knowing that none of that is now any longer possible,’’ to forget ‘‘every-thing that has cropped up around it,’’ such as the contempt of the mastersfor the slaves, the slaves’ hatred of the masters, ‘‘their fear of substitutionand our fear of assimilation.’’ Whether one agrees with de Lépine’s argu-ment or not is less important in the context ofmy own argument than regis-tering the extent to which his attempt to distinguish himself from Bissettehere actually reveals the genealogical precedent of his own argument aboutthe virtues of forgetting—a genealogy about which de Lépine is clearly anx-ious. For de Lépine, Bissette has to be either a protonationalist—false orotherwise—or an assimilationist intent on erasing the injustices of the colo-nial past in the name of a benignly cross-cultural future. To read Bissetteas someone who entertained a confusing variety of positions between thesetwo extremes is clearly beyond de Lépine. Indeed, one could make the ar-gument that Bissette simply serves as a convenient figure onto whom hecan, as did Césaire in the past, displace anxieties about the compromisednature of his own political position: what neither Césaire nor de Lépine canbear to admit is that Bissette vacillated, depending upon circumstances, be-tween indigenist (Caribbean) and ‘‘universalist’’ (French) positions—just asCésaire has always fluctuated between ‘‘revolutionary’’ appeals to maroonidentity and ‘‘sycophantic’’ appeals to the goodness of former Vichy bureau-crats such as Mitterand, or as de Lépine has wavered (some might say re-gressed, others might say progressed) from the ‘‘revolutionary socialism’’of his early days to the comfortably neither-too-hot-nor-too-cold politics ofthe PPM.


If de Lépine’s argument thus succumbs, irresponsibly, to the need fornationalist and assimilationist devils economically combined into the onefigure of Bissette, themost recent articles inDix semaines nonetheless serveas a good summing up and putting into question—‘‘a disintoxication’’ ()—of some of the commonplaces about and the ‘‘duty to remember’’ thatwere voiced during the sesquicentenary, a year in which, as he points out,‘‘more books will have been published on this subject, more colloquia, moreseminars, more symposia, more forums, more exhibitions will have beenheld, than over the course of the century and a half that separates us fromslavery’’ (). His emphasis on the transatlantic nature of the abolitionis, given the nativist emphasis on May , a necessary gesture in terms of‘‘dispersing the fog that shrouds themonths ofMay and June ’’ (to quotefrom the postface of Vincent Placoly’s Frères volcans [], doubtless themost importantMartiniquan novel to focus on the events of ).50 Equallynecessary, moreover, is his related insistence, as we saw earlier, that the commemoration was itself a product of these same transatlantic con-ditions, inseparable from the ‘‘initiative of the French government,’’ ratherthan simply a local affair disconnected from, and in opposition to, the ‘‘colo-nial’’ center. Few people in Martinique, indeed, could have avoided thisconclusion, given the substantial financial and ideological encouragementcoming fromFrance to commemorate abolition in its overseas departments,especially since , when the well-known Guadeloupean novelist DanielMaximin was put in charge of coordinating and animating all the locallygenerated ceremonies.51 If in the year preceding the commemoration somecultural commentators still voiced the fear that the sesquicentenary wouldbe more or less ignored in and by France, as had the bicentenary ofthe first abolition of slavery, during the French Revolution,52 and if the occa-sional individual could still utter the predictable warning that ‘‘if we don’tkeep bringing these things up for ourselves, we leave the way open for thoseof theWest, and above all the French, who absolutely don’t want these thingsto be talked about,’’ 53 the events of would prove such fears unfoundedand put pat certitudes about what the French do or do not want to talk aboutinto doubt, at least superficially. As Césaire himself acknowledged, applaud-ing the newly commemorative spirit in France: ‘‘It has to be recognized thatthere is a new feeling afoot. Everything that had been denied, obliterated,erased: today, France recognizes that we’re talking about a major politicalmisdeed, even if it was that of another epoch.’’ 54Whether this new emphasis

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on remembering the past serves the purposes of Price’s historical memoryor is merely a way of co-opting that memory in the services of an emptystate-sponsored nostalgia or is—most likely—a disturbing mixture of thetwo, what becomes clear from the transatlantic nature of the sesquicente-nary celebrations is thatwhat theMartiniquannationalist or the postcolonialcritic might wish to treat as a uniquely ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ event isinseparable from a rather more complicitous state of affairs.Nowhere was this complicity more evident than in the several speeches

given in Martinique for the May commemoration by Secrétaire d’Etatà l’Outre-Mer Jean-Jack Queyranne, who showed himself as familiar withthe ideas of Fanon and Glissant as any North American academic toutingthe resistant ‘‘authenticity’’ of Francophone culture, and as much an advo-cate of the duty to remember as those nationalists pilloried by de Lépine.For instance, articulating the fraught dynamic of remembering and forget-ting in a colonial milieu, he solemnly cited Fanon, pointing out that to be‘‘a slave of the slavery that dehumanized our forefathers’’ is to live ‘‘in therepression of the traumatism that our ancestors lived through,’’ and onlythe devoir de mémoire can remedy this situation: it is ‘‘the obligatory routefor exorcizing the effects of the traumatism once and for all.’’ 55 When theMartiniquan’s ‘‘duty of memory’’ is thus stringently upheld by the Frenchminister of state, or when the idea of métissage has migrated from the theo-retical texts of an Edouard Glissant and become part of the official politicalrhetoric,56 one is certainly entitled to some skepticism regarding the ‘‘appro-priation’’ of these ostensibly antihegemonic postcolonial ideas (or the ideasthemselves, inasmuch as they lend themselves to such appropriation), al-though one might equally look upon such confluences as a heartening ex-ample of cultural cross-fertilization, which justifies the belief that there is,in Césaire’s words, ‘‘a new feeling afoot.’’Among those Caribbean writers cited approvingly in Queyranne’s

speeches was Chamoiseau, and it is worth noting here the author of Texaco’sreaction to the French role in sponsoring the commemoration, both becauseit gives a good sense of the delicate balancing act that Martiniquan writers(at least those who do not adopt the uncompromisingly nationalist perspec-tive of a Cabort-Masson) consistently maintain between ‘‘the big homelandof France’’ and ‘‘the little homeland of Martinique,’’ and because it leadsstraight into the final issue I will address in this article—namely, the debatesthat arose during the sesquicentenary surrounding whether slavery was a


‘‘crime against humanity,’’ as well as the crucial role of the békés in those de-bates. Like de Lépine, Chamoiseau was supportive of France’s initiative: ashe put it in an interview, ‘‘It’s certainly not because the decision comes downfromParis that one should refuse to participate in [the commemoration].Onthe contrary, I think that wemust profit from the occasion in order to set onits way a positive and meaningful process.’’ 57 A well-orchestrated event likethe sesquicentenary offered, according to Chamoiseau, an excellent oppor-tunity to draw slavery out of the hole of forgetting into which Martiniquanshad relegated it (‘‘We wanted to forget who we were in order to get rid of thetraumatism. There was a process of turning in on ourselves generated byshame’’) and also contrasted favorably with previous, locally generated at-tempts at celebratingMay (‘‘As far as what was done for May in the pastis concerned, it was a desert’’). Chamoiseau’s dismissive comments aboutpast commemorations predictably drew Cabort-Masson’s wrath, and theycertainly situate him closer to Paris than to Fort-de-France on the trans-atlantic tightrope that problematically links France and its overseas départe-ment. As if wary of going too far in that direction, however, Chamoiseauis careful to distinguish his position from that of an even more compro-mised writer, the novelist–cum–state functionary Maximin, whose desireto ‘‘place the events [of the sesquicentenary] under the sign of cultural mé-tissage’’ Chamoiseau certainly shares but whose ‘‘hostility to the notion ofcrime against humanity’’ he forthrightly rejects: ‘‘I am in a position of mar-ronage’’ with regard toMaximin’s anti-crime position, he states, significantlyrecuperating the heroic rhetoric of the maroon for himself.58 For Chamoi-seau, in learning how to deal with a traumatic past that they have forgotten,Martiniquans need to remember notmerely slavery and its abolition but thecriminality of what was abolished: ‘‘This commemoration must be the toolthrough which the notion of crime against humanity is institutionalized,’’he asserts. For this reason, he informs his interviewer, he has, along withGlissant and Wole Soyinka, signed a text to be sent to the secretary-generalof the United Nations demanding that slavery be acknowledged as a crimeagainst humanity. (The text of this petition was itself quickly turned into amass-circulated postcard and poster.) 59

While for some this gesture came across as cynically self-promotional,60

Chamoiseau and company’s desire to ‘‘officialize’’ the notion of crimeagainst humanity was certainly shared bymany during the sesquicentenary,as if the simple memory of slavery would be nothing more than idle nos-

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talgia were it not given a more substantial form in the present; in line withthis impulse, and as further proof of the ‘‘new spirit’’ afoot, a parliamentarydeputy from French Guiana, Christiane Taubira-Delannon, succeeded inhaving legislation passed in the French National Assembly on February ,, criminalizing the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slavery in Frenchcolonies that ended in . (The legislation was passed unanimously, al-though only of representatives voted in the debates.) 61 Self-evidentas this retroactive criminalization of slavery may have seemed to Chamoi-seau and Taubira-Delannon, not everybody shared their views, and here wecan return to de Lépine’s Dix semaines, which ends with an acerbic postfacecriticizing the Taubira-Delannon law in particular and the antihistorical nos-talgia generating this need for a ‘‘crime’’ in general (–). Acknowledg-ing that ‘‘whoever shows the slightest reservations regarding this simplisticvision of the history of abolition is suspected of being a henchman of as-similationism, a shameful accomplice of the slavers, a suck-up to the békés,a negator of the crimes of slavery, an enemy of the Martiniquan nation’’ (),de Lépine nonetheless energetically points out many of the obvious prob-lems raised by the law. For one thing, by refusing to distinguish between‘‘the government of February that abolished slavery and Louis XIV’s,which codified it’’ (), the law is guilty of homogenizing the past. Equally,it is guilty of anachronistically judging the past on the basis of present values(‘‘How can one legally condemn the perpetrator of a crime on the basisof a law that didn’t exist at the moment when he committed the crime?’’[]). Moreover, the law ahistorically attempts to draw equations betweenthe slave trade and the Shoah, between anAmerican plantation and Buchen-wald ().The law passes over without comment African complicity in theslave trade (‘‘Are we ready,’’ he asks, ‘‘to put the [Maurice] Papons of Africaon trial?’’ [], referring to the Vichy bureaucrat found guilty of wartimecrimes against humanity in theweeks immediately preceding theApril/May commemoration). Most of all, the law is emptily nostalgic because itaddresses only one particularly glaring aspect of a millennia-long problemand thus shies away fromany condemnation of present-day slavery inAfrica,Asia, and Latin America (, ): ‘‘To condemn transatlantic slavery asa crime against humanity in the context of the UN Charter, while refus-ing to commit oneself as actively and as energetically as the abolitionists ofthe nineteenth century to the struggle against modern slavery, adds strictlynothing to the result obtained by those who abolished slavery in the name


of the rights of Man’’ (). Facile commemorative laws like this are simplyalibis for ‘‘forgetting the present’’ and, indeed, are real affronts to those whoare currently fighting ‘‘against a slavery that is in no way less odious or lesscriminal than that which held sway in our part of the world.’’ Is it really, heasks, ‘‘more urgent to denounce yesterday’s crime than to mobilize opin-ion against today’s crime?’’ (). As de Lépine looks back on the commemoration, Taubira-Delannon’s law seems emblematic of an insularself-preoccupation, an ‘‘indecent . . . displaying of our past miseries’’ thatprivileges these over present injustices elsewhere in the world: ‘‘Seen fromMartinique, this is the painful impression that one can come awaywith fromthe commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of aboli-tion,’’ he concludes ().62

As can be seen from de Lépine’s comment that anyone who divergesfrom the (for him) naive happy talk of the Taubira-Delannon law risks beinglooked upon as a souceur de békés, among the biggest issues raised by thecrime against humanity debate—and by the sesquicentenary as a whole—was the role of the descendants of the former slave owners in contemporaryMartinique, whose population numbers around , but who control ap-proximately percent of the commercial, industrial, and agricultural lifeon the island. As one editorial put it, the last two years have been ‘‘themoment when people can’t stop talking about the place of the békés in theMartiniquan homeland.’’ 63 Notably, discussions about retroactively crimi-nalizing transatlantic slavery necessarily also involved the issue of atoningfor the crime through some form of reparations. Indeed, the commissionin charge of formulating the Taubira-Delannon law initially included vaguesuggestions regarding the need for reparations, symbolic or otherwise, butthesewere excised from the law before it cameup for debate on the assemblyfloor. During that debate, Darsières put the case against reparations strongly(‘‘It would be distasteful to me if anyone had the impression that I voted forsomething in order to make money out of other people’s suffering’’),64 andthis view was shared by his former sparring partner but now PPM colleaguede Lépine, who derided the idea of reparations in Dix semaines (‘‘In suchclaims there is an aspect of romanticism that is in no way shocking but thatshows a disconcerting lack of realism’’ []).On the larger issue of the actual place of the békés in Martiniquan society

and their role in the sesquicentenary, we can usefully return one last time toCabort-Masson and his criticisms of the nostalgic Chamoiseau. The winner

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of the Prix Frantz Fanon has been a harsh critic of the békés for decadesnow, accusing them of living ‘‘as an exclusive, racist caste, in a state of apart-heid,’’ 65 of exploiting the land for their own commercial benefit and that offoreignmarkets rather than for the good of the Martiniquan consumer, andof being supremely lacking in intelligence and culture (theirs is, he asserts,‘‘a caste that has not added an atom of cultural creation to the world’s vastreservoir’’; ‘‘I’d like you to citeme even onework of art produced by the békésof Martinique since ,’’ he recently challenged an interviewer).66 Notingin his prize-winning book that ‘‘the drastic and extraverted domination ofthe béké caste was the principal brake upon all positive change in Marti-nique’’ (), he even goes so far as to reject their entitlement to the labelof Martiniquan.67 It is Chamoiseau’s (supposed) willingness to compromisewith the békés that provides Cabort-Masson with yet more fuel for his at-tacks on the ‘‘creolitarian coterie.’’ In Chamoiseau’s novel about slaverytimes, L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse, for instance, Cabort-Masson findsevidence of his opponent’s indulging in the ridiculous fantasy that the bé-kés will someday change, ‘‘abandoning racism and apartheid’’ (), when asChamoiseau very well knows, or ought to know, ‘‘the békés haven’t changedan iota since ’’ ().Cabort-Masson goes so far as to argue that Chamoi-seau is one of several of ‘‘our intellectuals’’ who has been co-opted by thebékés, through an insidious process of ‘‘mercenary sponsoring,’’ ‘‘as a formofprotection . . . for the sesquicentenary of abolition’’ (). If one moves fromCabort-Masson’s polemic to what Chamoiseau has himself said about thebékés, of course, a rather different story emerges, one in which the author ofTexaco has plenty of very critical things to say about the békés but is none-theless intent on maintaining that they are an integral part of the island’screole community. On the one hand, the békés are certainly living off thespoils of slavery days: noting that ‘‘% of the big concerns belong to them’’and that ‘‘all the laws developed in Martinique benefit them,’’ Chamoiseauis firm in his belief that ‘‘one can’t deny that the current wealth of the békés,their opulence, their economic control, stem from colonization and slavery.’’On the other hand, though, having acknowledged the direct connection be-tween békéwealth and slavery, he is nomorewilling than de Lépine to call formaterial reparations. Discussing his belief that slavery should be decreed acrime against humanity, Chamoiseau suggests that at most ‘‘the béké com-munity might want to carry out a number of actions without, for all that,declaring itself guilty.’’ These actions need not achieve anything immedi-


ately practical, he notes, going on to argue for the necessity andusefulness ofpurely symbolic gestures: ‘‘They are the sort [of gestures] that create psycho-logical flexibility, allow for a certain number amongus to talk to one another,to re-create community ties . . . that we need in order to enter on the path ofdevelopment.’’ 68 Firm in his belief in the efficacy of such gestures at helpingpromote a ‘‘collective catharis,’’ Chamoiseau revealed to an interviewer inApril that what he most wanted to accomplish in this context duringthe commemorative year was to gather together ‘‘all the communities of theMartiniquan people in order to inaugurate a stela reminding us to remem-ber. I will,’’ he continues, ‘‘attach a special importance to the presence of thebékés. It seems to me that such a reunion would be of a sort to untangle thepsychological knots that are holding us back.’’ 69

And it was, at least ostensibly, in the spirit of promoting this collective ca-tharsis and untangling those psychological knots that a substantial segmentof the békés, a notoriously closed caste, did make certain symbolic gesturesto mark the sesquicentenary. Although virtually invisible during the actualMay ceremonies, very soon after there issued forth a collective statementinwhich they acknowledged slavery to be a crime against humanity. ‘‘Amongthe descendants of the white colonists,’’ the statement affirms, ‘‘today’s Bé-kés remember and are eager to contribute their part to the ceremonies incelebration of the cent-cinquantenaire of the abolition of slavery’’; they do this‘‘with sincerity and emotion’’ and believe that ‘‘the evocation of this com-mon history, out of which was founded today’s creole identity, must form anew stage toward a better mutual recognition of the communities that livein Martinique and that are, together, the actors of its future.’’ ‘‘It is impera-tive,’’ they conclude, that slavery be declared a crime against humanity, espe-cially in order to combat it in the present.70 The béké who spearheaded themanifesto, Roger de Jaham, argued in an interview that ‘‘there is awholemy-thology around the béké, false ideas that need to be corrected and fought,’’ 71

and that the purpose of the manifesto was to break the silence of his owncaste and to establish better links with the rest of the Martiniquan commu-nity, although, he cautioned, the question of reparations was a nonstarter(‘‘Restore what and to whom?’’ he asks—a question that, as we saw with deLépine and Chamoiseau, one does not have to be a béké to ask).72 Minimalas this symbolic intervention may seem to readers outside Martinique, itwas nonetheless greeted in certain quarters on the island as a very signifi-cant gesture indeed. Thus, for instance, the prominent Martiniquan jour-

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nal Antilla—copying Time’s decision to give its Man of the Year awardto Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr—chose de Jaham as one of its two menof the year precisely on account of this gesture, pairing him off with thenationalist AlfredMarie-Jeanne,whose election as president ofMartinique’sConseil Régional that year was seen as raising independence to the levelof the other classic options regarding Martinique’s political status, depart-mentalization and autonomy. For Antilla, de Jaham is someone ‘‘who withcourage dares to participate publicly in the great gut-spilling of Martinique’spast, on the occasion of the sesquicentenary of the abolition of slavery,’’ andthe béké manifesto is ‘‘a contribution that will mark a milestone through itssharing in the duty to remember and through its marking a will to break thesilence.’’ 73

If I am citing Antilla’s seemingly overdramatic reaction to ‘‘the irrup-tion of a béké into the monologue of blacks and mulattoes,’’ it is not nec-essarily because its editorial view is somehow representative of large seg-ments of the Martiniquan population, the ‘‘real people,’’ but rather becauseit allowsme to introduce one final, exemplary actor in the ambivalent trans-atlantic drama that I have been staging in this article.Antilla, while certainlythe slickest of magazines put out in Martinique, has a decided ideologicalperspective, which it loosely shares with the créolistes. Its current editor-in-chief, Tony Delsham, to whom is largely attributable Antilla’s emphasis onthe importance of de Jaham’s intervention, is not merely an engaged jour-nalist but also among the most, perhaps even the most, popular novelist inMartinique.74 Lacking the international audience of Glissant and Chamoi-seau, he is someone who appeals, as Price points out, to a predominantlyfemale audience and whose work is for themost part, unlike that of the nos-talgic Créolité writers, ‘‘squarely situated in the present.’’ 75 Throughout thesesquicentenary year, Delshamwas an outspoken advocate for the ‘‘normal-ization’’ of race relations on the island (a word he specifically opposes to the‘‘reconciliation’’ preached by Bissette,76whose role in the abolition of slaveryhe nonetheless appreciates).77 Looking back on the events of May , heargued that what was important about the commemoration was that, ratherthan serving as the excuse for a nostalgic revival of the racial hatreds of old,it managed to facilitate a ‘‘dialogue’’ leading to something new. ‘‘I don’t wantto see in a béké a slave owner to whom I have a bill to present in the nameof my slave ancestor,’’ he asserted; ‘‘that’s just an extremely convenient wayof profiting from the situation, which in reality only allows for one thing—


the furthering of someone’s political career.’’ Rather than such demagogicappeals to the idea of crimes against humanity and reparations, ‘‘it is morerealistic and more effective to see in a béké what he really is in the here andnow, that’s to say a voracious capitalist whom it is right to fight against inthe name of human dignity, while at the same time persuading him of theurgency of fully developing our common patrimony, the land.’’ 78 The lessoneveryone should have learned from the sesquicentenary is that ‘‘themoderndebate must eradicate those who prosecute out of hatred, those who exploitthis tragic business [of slavery] for the purposes of political or social advance-ment’’; those who perpetuate past hatreds must give way to ‘‘the advocatesof love,’’ who (and here Delsham comes very close to de Lépine’s concept of‘‘shared forgetting’’) ‘‘while having forgotten nothing, forgotten absolutelynothing of the past, will know how to show us the normal path of a classstruggle and no longer a race war, in which the offending parties, whoevertheymight be, will be led to the appropriate legal court and no longer beforethe tribunal of history, which is the refuge of the castrated.’’ 79

This thesis about ‘‘normalization,’’ and this ambivalent movement awayfrom the past and toward the future, find ample expression in his novel Dé-rives (April ), which is doubtless the first work of literature to weavethe events of the sesquicentenary commemoration into a fictional narrativeand is for this reason a suitable text with which to end this article. In thisfinal installment of his five-volume Le siècle, Delsham depicts his country asbeing increasingly in the grip of such things as delinquency and drugs, withFort-de-France still under the control of a once charismatic leader (Césaire)who is ‘‘giving the painful impression of insisting on a payment for servicesrendered by clinging to the administration of a capital that he was no longerin control of.’’ 80 The Martinique of Dérives is one in which the hollownessof the revolutionary and nationalist dreams of the decolonization era hasbecome clear to one and all; it is a contradictory place in which Martini-quans can ‘‘send an independentist deputy to the FrenchNational Assemblywhile specifying that his separatist ideas were only of secondary interest tothem, and that for now they were asking of him only one thing: to defendthe interests of Martinique from within Europe and France’’ ().At the novel’s outset, we are introduced to the old béké Benoît-Eugène de

Floricoures, who has finally understood ‘‘the message of the future’’ (), amessage that had already been understood by his grandson, Jean-Bernard,whowasmurdered alongwith his blackwife, Isa, for having braved the inter-

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diction against interracial marriages (and, even more to the point, the even-tual transfers of property to non-békés that suchmarriages involve): namely,the need for the békés to break down the apartheid-likewalls separating themfrom the rest of the island and for the others—blacks and mulattoes—todo likewise. Benoît-Eugène has decided that his great-grandson, Rodolphe,saved from the womb of his assassinated mother, will be the official inheri-tor not merely of the béké name de Floricoures but of both his father’s andhis grandfather’s fortunes, whichwouldmake him the largest landowner onthe island. Rodolphewill be guarded over by the enlightened representativesof a troika of families, the Boffardin (blacks), the Le Roy-Dufourneau (mu-lattoes), and the de Floricoures—all ‘‘committed to a philosophy of bring-ing closer, and normalizing the relations between, the groups composingMartiniquan society’’ (). The very existence of Rodolphe is symbolic tes-timony, in the words of Camille Le Roy-Dufourneau (who functions as anauthorial spokesperson in this roman à thèse), of the need to ‘‘accept whatwe have become, that’s to say, of taking on ourmétissage, for we are all, afterfour centuries, métissés, whatever the color of our skin’’ (; also , ).Because Rodolphe, this oxymoronic symbol le béké noir, represents a threatto the established order, the troika makes sure that he spends his heavilyguarded childhood and adolescence in the safe haven of Europe.When hereturns to Martinique at the age of eighteen, and as the details of his inheri-tance are gradually revealed, Rodolphe becomes the object of great hatred:the békés resent this béké-noir and the blacks are equally resentful of this noir-béké. (Frustrated with the ressentiment of the latter class, Rodolphe notes that‘‘to deny positive signs in the present in order just to brandish exactions ofthe past is as harmful as the pigheadedness of a racist béké’’ [].) Attemptson his life follow, and on those close to him, notably the young woman withwhom he has fallen in love, the békée Chantale Luzieux de Fardenay. Thescenario of interracial love enacted by his parents has repeated itself, andthe two lovers are met with exactly the same hostility: ‘‘Twenty years hadpassed by, but nothing had changed, hatred seemed to be the inheritancepassed on from generation to generation’’ ().As the novel draws to its climax, the reader anticipates a successful resolu-

tion of Rodolphe and Chantale’s affair—a ‘‘national romance,’’ the symbolicmarriage that was the ‘‘common project’’ (as Doris Sommer has argued) ofmany nineteenth-century Latin American and Caribbean novels as they at-tempted to build a nation ‘‘through reconciliations and amalgamations ofnational constituencies cast as lovers destined to desire each other.’’ 81 And


it is indeed a version of this romance that the novel offers at the end, albeitin the tragic form of death rather than the comic form of marriage. The cul-minating episode of the novel takes place on Thursday, May , , a dayon which, as the narrator puts it, men and women ‘‘had leapt out of theirbeds determined to relive in their memory the courage of their ancestors,which for so long had been denied in the history books written by whites—a courage that was henceforth recognized andmade official by the presenceat the festivities of the minister of the overseas departments [the Glissant-spouting Queyranne]’’ (). Delsham’s comments about the May com-memoration in this novel, through his spokesperson Camille, were aggres-sively out of line with the populist consensus about that date’s significance.As Camille states, in a provocative passage that was frequently picked up onin the Martiniquan press upon the novel’s release: ‘‘Our primary difficultyis to figure out how to convince our country that the May is the victoryof Martiniquans, of all Martiniquans, that it is the point of departure for anormalization of the relations between blacks, békés, mulattoes.The Maybelongs to everyone, it’s not a black victory, it’s not a mulatto victory, it’s nota béké victory, it’s the victory of human dignity, it’s the victory of Martinique.That’s all’’ (). It is precisely in order to draw his reader’s attention to thevictory of human dignity rather than that of a particular ethnic caste whomight be supposed to have ‘‘triumphed’’ in that Delshamhas his younglovers stage-manage the production of a May , , memory that use-fully supplements that of May , . Rather than themarriage ceremonyexpected by the reader, and by the huge crowd Rodolphe and Chantale havegathered at the graveside of the former’s parents, what we bear witness to isthe enactment of a suicide pact: the two lovers pour gasoline on one anotherand set themselves alight. This (melo)dramatic action with which the novelconcludes, we are told, traumatized the entire population of the island, re-gardless of color, and was heard around the globe; it inspired films, and then‘‘a tremendous groundswell shook the country. Young people declared themessage of Rodolphe and Chantale a national patrimony, and in their songs,in their poems, in their films, in their plays, in their novels, they beseechpardon and sing of love’’ (). After centuries of hate, the novel’s final para-graphs inform us, Martiniquans are finally speaking to one another: the siteof Rodolphe andChantal’s death has become ‘‘a place of pilgrimage for loversthe world over,’’ ushering in the third millennium ().With this novel, Delsham certainly runs the risk of being branded

both a utopian and a reactionary. The vision of Martinique that he is

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trying to promote—in a ‘‘serene literature, a literature that finally singsof taking root,’’ 82 but that remains paradoxically implicated in apocalyp-tic, nineteenth-century narrative conventions—may well strike readers asoverly schematic, and his refusal ‘‘to be a castrated messenger carrying billsfrom beyond the grave’’ as naively ahistorical.83 No less than any of the Mar-tiniquan discourses that we have looked at in this article, Delsham’s novellends itself to an ambivalent reading, one that is hesitantly poised between‘‘forgetting and the duty of memory.’’ 84 Nowhere is the ambivalently trans-atlantic positioning of these various discourses clearer than in anApril poll, of rather dubious provenance, reported in Antilla regarding the up-coming sesquicentenary: the results of this poll showed that percent ofMartiniquans thought one should forget the past and turn to the future, yet percent agreed that slavery was a part of the island’s history and that onemust transmit this history; percent said that slavery served as an excusefor the problems of today, yet percent believed it was time that the descen-dants of slaves became proud of their past; percent were in agreementthat slavery be declared a crime against humanity, and yet percent con-sidered that ‘‘themoney given over to the commemorations could have beenprofitably put to other uses.’’ 85Are the equivocal results of this poll, as a com-mentator in Antilla suggested, nothing more than further evidence of thelamentable ‘‘incoherence and flagrant illogicality’’ of the average Martini-quan? Is such indecision proof positive of whatmight once upon a time havebeen readily identified as cultural alienation and false consciousness stem-ming from the loss of historical memory? Or might one not, rather, lookupon such contradictions and shifting allegiances not (simply) as the nega-tive products of a colonial education and history but (also) as the positivesigns of a mentality that is ‘‘modern’’ precisely because it cannot be reducedto one coherent position. It is in the spirit of this latter suggestion that Cana-dian media theorist Christopher Dewdney has put forward his optimisticvision of what our entry into a new ‘‘transhuman’’ age entails: to be of ‘‘twominds’’ is ‘‘a mark of our flexibility and evidence of our multiplicity’’;86 it isa survival skill as necessary now in our global village as it has always beenin the fraught conditions of the colonial locale. If Delsham is correct in be-lieving that ‘‘now at the end of the century, the Martiniquan knows who heis and where he wants to go,’’ and that ‘‘it’s no longer accurate to say that hedoesn’t know it well or is unaware of it,’’ 87 then this is perhaps the case pre-cisely because the lack of a definitive self-knowledge, for so long lamented


by cultural critics like Fanon and Glissant, can now be reconfigured as itselfa potentially productive form of knowledge, and that the lack of one pathinto the future (or back into the past) may itself open up the possibility thatthere are many such paths. This is the postmodern (or in Dewdney’s term,‘‘transhuman’’) lesson—itself doubtless as utopian as, if rather less bloodythan, the ending of Dérives—of the in-between, complicitous, and confusedstate of affairs that I have been attempting to account for in this discussion ofPrice’s historicalmemory,Cabort-Masson’s amnesiac nationalism,Chamoi-seau’s nostalgic regionalism, and de Lépine’s shared forgetting, all of whichcan be traced back, genealogically, to the compromises and complicities ofa figure like Bissette, whose muted but symptomatic reemergence onto thescene of Martiniquan history signals a new awareness of and willingness toremember a problematic and duplicitous subject-position that up until nowcould only be repressed or demonized as that of a ‘‘low-grade hypocrite.’’This, if anything, is the devoir de mémoire that faces our resolutely nostal-

gic age: not (just) to seek in the past for figures that might root our ‘‘need’’for heroes and heroines in the sacred ground of memory, that might ‘‘fix’’the past (in all the many senses of that word), but (also) to see in it the im-possibility of this search, and the figures through whom that impossibilitybecomes visible. Pâme ends her book by noting that there is no street inMartinique named after Bissette (), something that is as true now as itwas when she wrote those words twenty years ago. Although a nationalistlike Cabort-Masson might well wish to fix this situation, his urge to com-memorate Bissette as the hero of can be nothing more than the erro-neous mirror image of Césaire’s desire to forget him. Perhaps the absenceof this street named Bissette, combined with his renewed presence in theminds and writings of his fellowMartiniquans, is the best compliment thatcan be paid him, the best way to fulfill the ambivalent duty with which heleaves us: to keep looking in the hole ofmemory, knowingwhat onewill findthere but knowing also that there is more than one way of coming upon itsnostalgic content, more than one way of telling the story of its emptiness.

Notes

All translations from the French are my own. I would like to offer my thanks here to Richardand Sally Price for reading and commenting on this article. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC,

), .

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Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity,trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis, MN, []), .

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA,), , .

As Laura Chrisman puts it, Gilroy’s ‘‘outer-national, hybrid blackness’’ rests on manyof the same assumptions as the ‘‘reductively absolutist, vanguardist, exclusivist andessentialised-purist currents of ethnic nationalism and economistic socialism’’: ‘‘Hisown project subscribes to a decidedly mystical, idealist ideology and constructs a tran-scendental category of blackness, which retains the ‘ethnicism’ for which he castigatesAfrocentric nationalism.’’ Chrisman also draws attention to some bizarrely totalizingclaims in Gilroy’s book, where the ‘‘memory of slavery’’ becomes an improbably all-encompassing explanatory tool for understanding contemporary, postslavery existence(e.g., Gilroy states that ‘‘in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social self-creationthrough labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants ofslaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination’’ [Black Atlantic, ]).See Laura Chrisman, ‘‘Journeying to Death: Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,’’ Race and Class .(): , –.

Joseph Roach’s subtle emphasis, in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (NewYork, ), on the ‘‘construction of collective memory out of genealogies of perfor-mance’’ () in a circum-Atlantic world that, through repeated processes of cultural‘‘surrogation,’’ is everywhere subject to a ‘‘memory [that] operates as both quotation andinvention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well asthe past’’ (), exemplifies such an approach—albeit perhaps at the cost of abandoning a‘‘definitive political project’’ (see Peter Hitchcock, Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spiritof Millennial Materialism [Minneapolis, MN, ], n. ).

Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel (Boston, ), . On this issue, see alsoRichardD. E. Burton,Le roman marron: Etudes sur la littérature martiniquaise contemporaine(Paris, ), esp. –.

Price, The Convict and the Colonel, . André Lucrèce, Société et modernité: Essai d’interprétation de la société martiniquaise (Case-

Pilote, ), , . See, for instance, their autobiographical evocations of childhood: Patrick Chamoiseau’s

Une enfance créole (Paris, –) and Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du devant-jour (Paris,).

See also Richard Price and Sally Price, ‘‘Shadowboxing in the Mangrove: The Politics ofIdentity in PostcolonialMartinique,’’ inCaribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Repre-sentation, ed. Belinda J. Edmondson (Charlottesville, VA, ), –. For an excellentEnglish-language interview in which the Créolité writers defend themselves against suchcharges, see Lucien Taylor’s ‘‘Créolité Bites,’’ Transition (): –.

Guy Cabort-Masson, interview in Antilla (October , ): . Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé (Paris, ), . Guy Cabort-Masson, Martinique: Comportements et mentalité (Fort-de-France, ), . See, for instance, Cyliane Larcher’s commentary in Le Naïf (May–June ): ; and


Gratienne Laurence’s letter to the editor in the Union des Femmes de la Martinique’snewsletter Lumina (April–June ): .

Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, []), . Reported in Antilla (January , ): . Cabort-Masson, interview in Antilla (October , ): . For Chamoiseau and

Confiant’s (admittedly superficial) discussion of Tropiques, see their Lettres créoles: Tracéesantillaises et continentales de la littérature (Paris, ), –.

See my discussion in Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature(Stanford, ), –, esp. –.

See Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande, ‘‘L’abolition de l’esclavage: Les évènements enmétropole(fin février–mi-avril ),’’ in L’historial antillais, ed. Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande (Fort-de-France, ), :–; and Oruno D. Lara, De l’oubli à l’Histoire: Espace et identitécaraïbes—Guadeloupe, Guyane, Haïti, Martinique (Paris, ), .

As the Guadeloupean historian Lara puts it in hisDe l’oubli à l’Histoire, which provides aninvigorating, if unflattering, portrait of Schœlcher (see esp. –), ‘‘this exile gave himan unhoped-for opportunity tomake himself known to the general public, to play the roleof the unflinching defender of the Republic’’ ().

Quoted in Edouard de Lépine, Dix semaines qui ébranlèrent la Martinique, mars– juin (Paris, ), .

Burton, Le roman marron, , and see – for a general critique of the myth of marron-nisme in twentieth-century Martinique.

Guy Cabort-Masson, interview in Antilla (June , ): . Gaston Souquet-Basiège, Le préjugé de race aux Antilles françaises (Fort-de-France,

[]), , , . Intriguingly, the name of Souquet-Basiège has resurfaced in the An-tilles recently with Pierre Souquet-Basiège’s Le malaise créole: Un dérivé du mal français,d ed. (Petit-Bourg, ), which features a surprisingly favorable preface by the Créolitéwriters Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant (itself commented on ironically by Cabort-Masson in his Martinique []). The appealing federalist argument of Le malaise créole,for all its liberal humanism and its respect for the cultural and political autonomy of theFrench Antilles, is disturbingly complicitous with the hysterical representations of in his ancestor’s Le préjugé de race: was, the present-day Souquet-Basiège argues, ‘‘amissed opportunity,’’ a social transformation contaminated by the ‘‘Jacobin virus’’; ‘‘abo-lition happened with an unseemly haste,’’ which had the effect ‘‘of rekindling racial an-tagonisms for which there were no longer any grounds’’ ().

Lucien Abénon, introduction to Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l’esclavage,by Victor Schœlcher (Paris, []), xii–xiii. For a recent example of how Bissetteis still being effaced from book-length accounts of Schœlcher and the Second Republic,see Fabienne Federini’s desultory L’abolition de l’esclavage de : Une lecture de VictorSchœlcher (Paris, ).

This emphasis on Schœlcher’s ‘‘vigor’’ echoes Césaire’s suggestion, in his centenaryspeech on Schœlcher and the abolition, that we ‘‘ponder a few of the most forceful[vigoureuses] of the comments of this admirable man, whose memory it would be point-less to commemorate were one not determined to imitate his politics.’’ See Aimé Césaire,

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Oeuvres complètes, vol. , Oeuvre historique et politique: Discours et communications (Fort-de-France, ), . For a specific commentary on this line, see my Islands and Exiles,, and see – for a general account of the masculinist bias of Césaire’s modern-ist/revolutionary poetics.

See, for example, Jean Breteau and Marcel Lancelin, eds., Des chaînes à la liberté: Choixde textes français sur les traites négrières et l’esclavage de à (Rennes, ), –;and Myriam Cottias, ed., D’une abolition, l’autre: Anthologie raisonnée de textes consacrés àla seconde abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises (Marseilles, ), –.

See, for example,GeorgeMauvois,Un complot d’esclaves: Martinique (Grenoble, ),–, which recounts the affaire Bissette; and Gilbert Pago, Les femmes et la liquidationdu système esclavagiste à la Martinique, – (Petit-Bourg, ), –, which paysspecial attention to the role of women inMartinique during the SecondRepublic and theirrelation to bissettisme.

See chapter (‘‘Les marchands de liberté, ’’) of the béké novelist Marie-Reine deJaham’s Le sang du volcan (Paris, ), –. Deeply entrenched in the ‘‘creolist dis-course’’ of her nineteenth-century ancestors, which I have analyzed at length in Islandsand Exiles (–), de Jaham traces the events of May to a mulatto conspiracy goneawry and astoundingly suggests that the planters—led by the enlightened béké Arthur deSolis—were themselves on the point of declaringEmancipationwhen the revolt broke out.

Stella Pâme, Cyrille Bissette: Un martyr de la liberté (Fort-de-France, ). Stella Pâme, interview in Antilla (April , ): . Quoted in de Lépine, Dix semaines, . Interview with Stuart Hall, ‘‘Breaking Bread with History: C. L. R. James and The Black

Jacobins,’’ History Workshop Journal (): . This Pan-Africanist impulse, it shouldbe noted, was what generated in the s Mercer Cook’s solitary effort at rehabilitat-ing Bissette: see his Five French Negro Authors (Washington, DC, ), –.Writing inthe aftermath of James’s Black Jacobins, with its heroic portrait of Toussaint Louverture,Cook clearly had his hands full trying to valorize a problematic individual who ‘‘missedhis excellent opportunity to become France’s Great Emancipator,’’ a ‘‘Negro who allowedhis enmity with one man to overshadow an entire life of service to his race’’ ().

CoraKaplan, ‘‘BlackHeroes/WhiteWriters: Toussaint L’Ouverture and theLiterary Imagi-nation,’’ History Workshop Journal (): .

For a good introduction to the events of , see the articles collected in Adélaïde-Merlande, L’historial antillais, :–.

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, ), . As Cabort-Masson puts it, the Martiniquan people owe abolition to the mulattoes,

‘‘through the words of Porry Papy [adjunct to the mayor of Saint-Pierre who played a cen-tral role in the events of May –] and through the actions of C. A. Bissette’’ ().

Césaire, Oeuvres complètes, :. Quoted in Antilla (May , ): . Quoted in France-Antilles, April , , . Quoted in Le progressiste (May , ): ; and in de Lépine, Dix semaines, . It should be noted that inMartinique’s sister-island ofGuadeloupe, abolitionwas declared

on May , not as a response to an armed insurgency, but simply as a logical response to


the events inMartinique. This fact necessarily affects the way in which the events of are discussed by Guadeloupeans: see, for instance, Henri Bangou, A propos du cent cin-quantenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Petit-Bourg, ).The same holds true of France’sother overseas departments and territories: in FrenchGuiana, Emancipation is celebratedon June ; in Réunion, on December ; and in Mayotte, on April .

See especially the section on ‘‘Le symbolisme des dates’’ in the excellent and hugely popu-lar hors série May commemorative issue of France-Antilles entitled Cent cinquante-naire de l’abolition de l’esclavage, – (–). As Elisabeth Landi puts it in one ofthe articles in this section (‘‘ avril, mai, mai: La construction d’un événementhistorique’’), the oscillation between these several dates ‘‘shows that history is an ongoingconstruction, a function of issues in the present.’’

As García Canclini reminds us: ‘‘The ‘philosophical’ foundation of traditionalism is sum-marized in the certainty that there is an ontological correspondence between reality andrepresentation, between society and the collections of symbols that represent it. Whatis defined as patrimony and identity claims to be the faithful reflection of the nationalessence. Hence its principal dramatic performance is the mass commemoration: civicand religious celebrations, patriotic anniversaries, and, in dictatorial societies, especiallyrestorations’’ (Hybrid Cultures, ).

Geneviève Fabre, ‘‘African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the NineteenthCentury,’’ in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. G. Fabre and RobertO’Meally (Oxford, ), .

Edouard de Lépine,Questions sur l’histoire antillaise: Trois essais sur l’abolition, l’assimilation,l’autonomie (Fort-de-France, ), .

See Le progressiste (May , ): –; and for the speech itself, Le progressiste (May , ): –.

See Justice . (June , ): ; and also Justice . (June , ): . For de Lépine’s antipathy toward Bissette, see also Gérard Dowling-Carter’s account of

Dix semaines in Antilla (May , ): . Vincent Placoly, Frères volcans: Chronique de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Montreuil, ), .

In his astute reading of this novel (Dix semaines, –), de Lépine emphasizes Placoly’sunexpected decision to tell the story from the perspective of an enlightened béké, a narra-torial choice that has the effect of renouncing ‘‘easy solutions associated with the genre,in a society that more than any other craves, and at the beginning of the smore thanat any other point in its history, heroes and ancestors that console it for the mediocrity ofthe present day’’ ().

France’s willingness to sponsor and coordinate the various commemoration cere-monies would certainly have confirmed Maximin in his belief that ‘‘decolonization canhappen within the Republic, without necessarily passing through the formation of anindependent state.’’ Quoted in Inez Fisher-Blanchet, ‘‘Abolition de l’esclavage et commé-moration,’’ Le naïf (May–June ): .

See David Rigoulet-Roze, ‘‘A propos d’une commémoration: L’abolition de l’esclavage en,’’ L’homme (January–March ): –.

Fernand Tiburce Fortuné, ‘‘Esclavage: Le point de vue des ‘victimes,’ ’’ Antilla (Feb-ruary , ): . Fortuné is the author of a self-published novella on the events of

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entitledMémoires d’un rendez-vous manqué, ou La journée du mai de l’esclave X(Ducos, ).

Quoted in France-Antilles, May –, , . Quoted in Justice . (June , ): . For instance, in one of his speeches, Queyranne quotes Glissant’s claims about how

slavery gave birth to a creolized society inwhich there can be no genocide or ethnic cleans-ing ‘‘because our taking root no longer depends upon just one root; the one root leads toexclusivism.’’ Queyranne then goes on in Glissantian fashion to point out that the iden-tity of France was constructed, and continues to be constructed, ‘‘in a dialogue with thecultures of the world, in a dynamic process of métissage in multiple forms: ethnic, social,cultural’’ (quoted in France-Antilles, May –, , ).

PatrickChamoiseau, interview inMay commemorative issue ofFrance-Antilles (Centcinquantenaire de l’abolition de l’esclavage, –), .

Patrick Chamoiseau, interview in Antilla (April , ): . The text of this petition is as follows: ‘‘No place in theworld can any longer put upwith the

slightest forgetting of a crime, the slightest shade over thematter. /We ask that the parts ofour history that have not been spoken [les non-dits de nos histoires] be conjured up, so that—together, and liberated—we can enter into the Tout-Monde. / And together, let us namethe slave trade and the slavery perpetrated in the Americas and the Indian Ocean:

.’’ In the context of an article like mine, which is in part attempting toprivilege Martiniquan voices that have not achieved the imprimatur of an internationalaudience, it is worth juxtaposing this rather portentous appeal to the ‘‘Tout-Monde’’ withCabort-Masson’s dismissive view of that particular Glissantian idea: ‘‘It’s wool over theeyes, because he just wants to mask over the process of globalization. His Tout-Monde isnothing more than a place where the shark-managers of the world, gathered around BillGates, hold court; Glissant just wants to serve as their expert in cultural communication’’(interview in Antilla [October , ]: ).

The Communist weekly Justice, for example, after noting with irony that Chamoiseau has‘‘finally gotten around to discoveringMay ’’ in , points out that the target audiencefor his ‘‘doctored folklore’’ is assuredly not Martiniquan’’ (. [June , ]: ).

For the parliamentary debates concerning this bill, seewww.assemblee-nat.fr//cri/leg//.asp. Along with retroactively criminalizing transatlantic and IndianOcean slavery, the law contains suggestions regarding how and when slavery should betaught in schools, a request that the law be sent on to institutions such as the UnitedNations, and a call for the establishment of a committee to propose ‘‘places and acts ofmemory’’ in which the remembrance of slavery could be ensured.

For Taubira-Delannon’s response to de Lépine, see Antilla (May , ): –. See Le naïf (May–June ): . See www.assemblee-nat.fr/cri/leg//.asp. It should be mentioned here

that the only time Bissette’s name came up in the parliamentary debates was when hewas cited by a Martiniquan representative, Anicet Turinay, as being an advocate of repa-rations—a position he held in but no longer maintained in .

Cabort-Masson, interview in Antilla (October , ): . Cabort-Masson, Martinique, ; interview in Antilla (October , ): .


As Cabort-Masson reminds readers of his Martinique, in his Les puissances d’argenten Martinique he was forced to conclude that ‘‘békés were not Martiniquans, not becausethey are white and slavers but simply because of their historical behavior’’ ().

Chamoiseau, interview in May commemorative issue of France-Antilles, . Patrick Chamoiseau, interview inAntilla (April , ): . For de Lépine, this pro-

posal—worked up with the béké JoséHayot—seemed the best of ‘‘all the propositions thathave been put forward to mark the sesquicentenary of the abolition’’ (Dix semaines, ).

Quoted in Antilla (June , ): –. Quoted in France-Antilles, May , , . Glissant, for one, speaking of those ‘‘who bring up repentance, who speak of compen-

sation, of an invoicing of the offense,’’ asserts that he is ‘‘absolutely not [in agreement]with them on this,’’ and that what he wants is not repentance but a conviction in people’sminds that the facts of slavery must no longer be hidden or camouflaged. See ‘‘Penserl’abolition,’’ Le monde [Livres], April , , .

See Antilla (January , ): , . As Tony Delsham himself puts it: ‘‘I’m the first and the only writer who hasn’t needed

the stamp of approval from the white Papa in order to gain recognition in Fort-de-France,Pointe-à-Pitre, and Cayenne. That’s a fact that someone would do well to point out andstudy’’ (interview in Antilla [June , ]: ). It is precisely this sort of more local-ized, less internationalized reading of Martiniquan literary and political culture that Ihave been trying to lay the foundations for in this article.

Richard Price and Sally Price, ‘‘Shadowboxing,’’ n. . Tony Delsham, ‘‘Lettre ouverte à Gilbert Pago et à Philippe Pierre Charles du G. R. S.,’’

Antilla (May , ): –. Overlapping in this one respect with the nationalist position of Cabort-Masson, Delsham

affirms that in coming to grips with the events of , and with Bissette’s important rolein them, one needs to keep in mind that ‘‘the idea of the revolt came from the mulatto’’(personal communication, June , ).

Delsham, interview in Antilla (June , ): . See Antilla (January , ): . Tony Delsham, Dérives (Schœlcher, ), . Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley,

CA, ), . Tony Delsham, interview in Antilla (May , ): . Delsham, ‘‘Lettre ouverte,’’ . See Antilla (May , ): . See Antilla (April , ): . Christopher Dewdney, Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era (Toronto, ), . Delsham, interview in Antilla (May , ): .

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