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Before beginning my discussion about the representation of sexuality in
several francophone West Indian novels, I think it is essential to identify
my critical stance as that of a white male homosexual American whose mother
tongue is English. [2]
I thus present an outside view of the world described by francophone and
creolophone heterosexual West Indian writers.
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To speak of a carnivalesque atmosphere permits me to choose the most diverse
and "crude" sexual scenes from the novels I am surveying in this essay.
It is known that the "enlightened" world permits itself to "get down and
dirty" once a year during carnival. Raphaël Confiant reminds us that
at the beginning of this century, in the Martinican city of Saint-Pierre,
"the white Creole elite cultivated a facade of Puritanism, except during
carnival" ("Preface" viii). During carnival, all the elements of the Creole
universe (all the races, ages, social classes and sexualities) intermingle
in a masquerade of differences; before the onslaught of the
Lenten season when they cease to eat red meat, Catholics and consorts give
themselves over to these other carnal pleasures. In a section from
his Discours antillais regarding "Pleasure and Joy" in Martinique
(293-302), Edouard Glissant speaks of these "burlesque marriages of carnival"
(299) where the roles are reversed (the men, for example, play the role
of pregnant women). René Depestre describes such a group of cross-dressers
in Hadriana dans tous mes rêves: "They had stuffed pillows
and cushions under their green satin dresses to simulate the final stages
of pregnancy. They had the breasts and buttocks of a Reubenesque Venus"
(59). Donned in burlesque mockery by Depestre, this so-called "transvestite
masquerade" (Glissant 299) encourages us, in turn, to take on the mask
of various authors to see how they present West Indian carnivalesque sexual
freedom. [3]
Whether the carnival allows for what Glissant sees as a great collective
and popular questioning of Caribbean society or whether the sexual roles
presented reinforce existing hierarchical and phallocratic sexual structures,
may depend, of course, on the side of the masquerade on which one sits,
if one laughs "at" or "with" the travesty, or if it generates a Bakhtinian,
carnivalesque laughter that reinforces while simultaneously ridiculing
the status quo. [4]
In "The Carnival Complex," Richard D.E. Burton argues the latter, noting
that what happens during carnival "is not fundamentally at variance
with what happens during the remaining 360-plus days of the year" (157).
As we will see with Chamoiseau's market women, Burton confirms that the
"stereotyping of homosexual and higgler" (market woman)--two members of
West Indian society who, like cross-dressers, do not fit into the cultural
and sexual division of male/outside and female/inside--always serves to
defend this "ideal" division of space (164, Burton's quotation marks).
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My objectivity on this issue was challenged by Terry Goldie who reminds
us of Frantz Fanon's footnoted comment in Peau noire, masques blancs
(146) that he had never seen an overt example of homosexuality in Martinique.
While he had seen men dressed as women, Fanon was convinced these cross-dressers
had a "normal" sexual life.
Only in France had Fanon found Martinican men who had "become" homosexual
(did his specification that they were sexually passive imply that the "top"
man was not homosexual?), and not for neurotic reasons but
for financial expediency. After citing this example, Goldie looks
at several of Fanon's other texts, underlining what he sees as the "importance
of masculinity in Fanon," who "made many statements which are aggressively
homosexual, some with a barely hidden homoeroticism." Suggesting
an important bonding experience between Fanon and an Algerian revolutionary
("In bed with the FLN") Goldie emphasizes, beyond sexual acts, that "In
the ideal homosocial world, the impersonation [of the Other] must be beyond
heterosexual or homosexual desire." For Fanon, as well as other writers
in the sexually-divided West Indian society described by Burton, misogyny
and homophobia are related to a very homosocial network.
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Searching for a West Indian (or Creole) specificity in the following fictional
scenes, one may be reproached for a certain doudouist exoticism
similar to that of so many tourists debarking in the Antilles, attracted
by texts written far from their northern climates in a landscape replete
with palms and coconut trees (the two are often confused; see Antoine,
341). What is an authentically Creole text? How can writers--and
readers--strike a balance between a realistic landscape and an evocation
I would qualify as doudouist, in the sense in which Maryse Condé
uses the word doudou:
The Antillean immigrant community has always, to a certain
degree, had a sense of its "difference." This is how, in the 1950s
and 1960s, West Indian singers acquired a certain reputation playing their
biguines while also achieving a certain folklore status. However,
what they are reproached for nowadays is that they belong to what one pejoratively
calls "doudou culture." That is, they represent certain traits
of the West Indian personality that are the very ones that had been privileged
by the colonizer. The colonizer desired to see in the Antilles purveyors
of smiles and sun, at a bargain price. ("Propos" 79)
Antillean people, therefore, cannot easily liberate themselves from the
doudouist mimicry of the image imposed on the community by others.
Glissant recalls for us "the phallic image of the Antillean people or of
the Negro" in Western mentality, just after mentioning that Air Canada
is jokingly called Air Coucoune because of the real or imagined
pleasures the Canadians discover in the Antilles (and/or the Antilleans
discover with the Canadians, 301n). One of the characters in the
novel L'Autre qui danse by Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie defines herself
as West Indian, but she (like Véronique in Maryse Condé's
Hérémakhonon) has difficulty giving up the "sexy"
West Indian stereotype: she refuses to be anything but a "beautiful,
languid doudou always in love . . . swaying her hips to the lilting
dance of the biguine" (325). Many of the authors I examine
in the following paragraphs would rather like us to believe that, in these
"pays chauds," the hips and palms of the tropical geography are
forever in motion. As Depestre writes, "The charm of Haiti before
God resides in the fact that the hips, loins, buttocks, and intimate organs
intervene in the elevated movements of the soul as much as the driving
forces of redemption" (Hadriana 66). The part of the real
and that of the imaginary become confused not only among non-West Indians,
but also among many of the West Indian writers who conform, consciously
or not, to the stereotypical image of an overflowing sexuality. Rare
is the author or character who questions it. And by repeating the
stereotypes, calling them to our attention, I enter the dangerous terrain
of which Mireille Rosello speaks so intelligently in her study, Declining
the Stereotype: am I challenging or perpetuating the stereotype?
And yet, rather than have a silence interpreted as complicity or assent,
I can perhaps "decline" the stereotype as "a way of depriving it of its
harmful potential by highlighting its very nature" (11).
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A so-called "authenticity" may be helpful to analyze exaggerations.
Yet where does "realism" stop, and doudouist folklorization begin?
The question is not necessarily useful; literature, a work of the imagination,
does not care about any reality. In Depestre's Alléluia
pour une femme jardin, a peasant offers his hand to a beautiful woman
in exchange for a blown kiss; the kiss proffered, he cuts off his
hand and throws it to the woman (13). Condé recounts the story
of a "negress whose loins were composed of veritable springs and who regularly
sent her partners flying to the ceiling" (Hérémakhonon
144). Does this quiver with exaggeration? With "magical realism"
à la Carpentier? Experts in oral literature might simply suggest
that the hyperbolic tradition of the Creole storyteller is carried over
into the written form of storytelling.
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Sometimes, exaggeration is a product of the phallic tradition in which
the man boasts about the great number of his conquests and the size of
his penis. In West Indian novels (written by both men and women), one often
finds the character of the kokeur (or coqueur, i.e. "fucker")
known for his victorious virility, such as Depestre"s géolibertin
(global-libertine), ferocious in the quantity and variety of his female
conquests, "master" of the female "ass" (derrière-caye) (Hadriana
197). Patrick Chamoiseau describes a woman character who has submitted
to the excessive vigor of a "master" kokeur and is then treated
like a "bitch" while the man parades about like a peacock: "After
having fucked (koké) Chinotte for several hours without any
mechanical breakdown, the sorcerer (quimboiseur) appeared at the
bar during a rum fest, with the ease of the master of the house" (Chronique
84). The majority of these male characters, especially among the
examples provided by male authors, remain, like roosters in the barnyard,
supreme in their dominating sexual power. These "Majors" are invincible
and impressive, masters in body and word: they never appear "submissive."
An example of the classically submissive female can be found in Jacques
Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée; the heroine, Annaïse,
declares her love to the male protagonist, Manuel, in the following manner:
I'll serve your meals and remain standing while you eat. And
you'll say, "Thanks, sweetheart." And I'll reply, "At your service, my
master," for I'll be the servant of your household. At night I'll lie at
your side. You'll say nothing, but I'll respond to your silences, to the
pressure of your hand, "Oui, my man," for I'll be the servant of
your desires. (116)
Esternome, of Chamoiseau's Texaco--one of these masterful, "marvelous
fuckers"--attributes his longevity to having taken such "great care of
his balls" (159). Can this "fictional" representation of a real phallocracy--which
never doubts the supremacy of the man with two balls (dé grenn)--be
qualified as "exaggeration"? In Chronique des sept misères,
Chamoiseau explains the differentiation of sexual roles at the public market.
The women knowingly submit to this hierarchization when they prefer to
begin their day by selling to a man over selling to a woman--this, despite
the fact that men consider all manner of market sales as beneath their
dignity. Ginette, for example, does not hesitate, "if by chance some
gossip comes by to inquire about her prices, to refuse to sell, so is it
true, as Fanotte affirms, that only a man dé grenn could
inaugurate an honorable day's work" (21-22). The central character
of the novel, Pipi, has "learned that the Caribbean market basket was a
woman's affair: men dé grenn don't sell" (50).
As is often the case with masculine writers, the sexual part--or parts--defines
the West Indian men and women as well as the roles they occupy. With men,
it is not solely the fact of possessing "two balls" that determines their
power and superiority; they must take special care of them in order to
maintain this weapon against women.
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References to the sexual power of men abound. It is necessary to
recall the rapes evoked in Moi, Tituba, Sorcière . . . Noire
de Salem by Maryse Condé in order to demonstrate how certain
female authors underscore the violent aspect of that power. In the
context of human exploitation in the cane fields, Simone Schwarz-Bart evokes
a series of real or possible rapes endured by a West Indian woman (Pluie
et vent sur Télumée Miracle 46; 110-111). There
does not exist "a single Martinican who does not count at least one violated
woman among his or her ancestors," writes Glissant (297). Sexual
violence--"one of the fundamental elements of the Creole psyche," according
to Confiant ("Preface" x)--could be seen as a tradition inherited from
the slave system, which reduced the woman to a breeder (génitrice)
and the man to a stud horse (Glissant 98). True joy had to be "stolen"
from the master (beyond the master's observation); the Martinican, says
Glissant, not only "doesn't have the time," he "doesn't take his time"
(295-296). Or, according to Confiant, "to make love in a Creole country
was (and still largely is) like rapping on a door quick and hard" ("Preface"
xiii). For Glissant, a tradition has thus been established in the
Antilles where pleasure and joy "mutually ignore or exclude each other"
(295), and where one finds "a machismo without sublimation . . . [and]
an unheard of brutality of manners" (298). This is how the West Indian
man affirms his virility, according to these authors.
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In authors such as Depestre or Confiant, the physical "superiority" of
man is glorified. Depestre keeps his reputation as a humorist for
those who do not take seriously his stories of géolibertinage.
In a scene from Eau de Café by Confiant, a striking representation
of overflowing phallocracy, one finds the exaggeration of the masculine
member and the imagined joy which women get from it.
[Thémistocle] had an impressively long cock, perhaps
two meters, maybe more, which he wrapped around his waist with infinite
care. . . . [Doris] experienced a vile nausea when the beast penetrated
her coucoune, her asshole, her ears, her mouth, her nose, each time
discharging in her a volley of jouissance the color of sugarcane,
so much so that she was completely covered with this pleasure, and fell
asleep right there under the sun until noon the next day. (177).
The size of the West Indian man's sex, previously reputed to be gargantuan,
according to racist tradition, is here exaggerated to a laughable degree. [5]
The use of Creole vocabulary and symbolism (coucoune/cunt, bonda/ass,
couleur de flèche de canne/cane-colored) could, nevertheless,
encourage amateurs of folklorization to attribute a legendary sexuality
to West Indian men and women.
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One must ask whether the Creole vocabulary used in the sexual scenes of
these French-language novels does not smack of racist stereotypes.
The debate over the use of the Creole language continues to pose problems
to West Indian authors. [6]
Confiant would say, ironically, that certain Creole words are "untranslatable
into civilized language" (Eau de Café 61-62) and should therefore
remain in Creole in the French text. [7]
Sexuality thus described in Creole becomes not only "untranslatable" into
French, but also not even "civilized." In the preface to a republication
of Une Nuit d'orgie à Saint-Pierre Martinique by Effe Géache
(written in French at the beginning of the century), Confiant asserts that
"Creole is the only language to name the sexual organs and practices that
are related to them" ("Preface" xi). In Lettres créoles,
Chamoiseau and Confiant affirm that the "utilization of Creole terms to
designate sexual organs and describe orgies gives a torrid coloration to
a text rather plainly written" (94). Like many West Indian writers,
they do not ignore the possibilities of that presumed "torrid coloration"
of Creole. Like the pseudonymous author of Une Nuit d'orgie
(Effe Géache = FGH), the authors of Eloge de la créolité--Chamoiseau
and Confiant--know how "to arouse the European reader" ("Preface" xi) by
their own use of Creole. According to Confiant, their linguist friend,
Jean Bernabé, has demonstrated "how the core of the Creole language
is structured on the basis of a vocabulary of sexuality" ("Preface" xi).
According to Confiant's character, Antilia, Creole has been "eviscerated"
and "strangled" by French, leaving nothing to the Creole language but the
"tetralogy of foutre (cum) and merde (shit)," namely:
"Kal (dick), Koukoun (pussy), Bonda (ass), Koké
(fuck)" (Eau de Café 251). When the opposition between
these two languages implies a link between Creole and this "tetralogy of
the uncivilized," the use of Creole vocabulary in the middle of sexual
scenes will serve to underscore the difference between West Indian and
continental sexuality. A stranger to French and other "civilized"
tongues, the Creole vocabulary salts the descriptions of sexuality with
exoticism.
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Implicit in the exaggeration of masculine sexuality and the glorification
of men dé grenn, one finds a flourishing and often extremely
homophobic heterosexuality. Homosexuality is not evoked save in an
exceptional manner among the West Indian novelists in order to make a joke,
for example, when a character is treated as a "faggot" (macoumé)
(Chamoiseau, Chronique 169). The rare representations of homosexuality
seem to have as their function the explanation of an "aberration" due either
to economic or survival factors, rather than representing it as a natural
tendency. One finds many examples in Condé of these men who
"are not men" (Les Derniers Rois Mages 164): in Hérémakhanon,
for example, a Peul domestic lends himself to the caprices of his European
employer (who is homosexual) solely because of the money (194). Additionally,
in Ségou, homosexuality is explained as a European "vice"
inflicted on Africans; José, the ganhador (queer) "was
no longer a human. He was nothing but a wreck (loque), a homo (pédale)"
(203-204). [8]
It is different in Moi, Tituba, where Condé develops a friendship
between Hester and the black witch, Tituba; here, female homosexuality
is seen, on the whole, under a rather positive light. [9]
With her parodies of characters and her mocking words, Condé appears,
nevertheless, as a rare example of a West Indian writer who attempts to
liberate herself from all "sexual nationalism" (Hérémakhanon
158). Désinor, a Haitian homosexual in Condé's Traversée
de la mangrove, remains silent, but we read that he "would have loved"
to insult, scandalize, and defy the bourgeois morality of the small community
with his flaunted difference (208).
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One is not surprised at the remark made by two men, Chamoiseau and Confiant,
citing Depestre's compilation, Alléluia pour une femme-jardin,
as a "hymn to the Haitian woman and to the sweet doucine treasures
she can provide" (Lettres créoles 95). All folklorization
of women--or rather, of their bodies--is not only permitted, it is sweet
(douce). Depestre, who deftly unites fantastic imagery of Haitian
food and fucking--we could add flora, fauna, females--enjoys the admiration
of his colleagues, also lovers of women's flesh. The novelist and
critic Milan Kundera has dedicated an article to West Indian writing in
which he speaks of Chamoiseau, Césaire and Depestre, and in passing
of André Breton, V.S. Naipaul, and Wifredo Lam. He does not
mention women writers or artists. According to Kundera, Depestre
demonstrates a "happy and naive eroticism . . . , [a] sexuality as unbridled
as it is blissful (paradisiaque)" (53). Obviously, we see
that there are many ways of conceiving paradise. His investigation
of the unbelievable, or fantastic, aspects of this literature seems to
incarnate the doudouist tourism (like that of Breton) of a Czech
writer discovering Martinique. In tracing the surrealist narratives
of West Indian authors, Kundera is quite right to speak of the limitless
possibilities of this "marvelous" or surreal imagination. It is sad,
however, that this creation never seems to abandon the limited field of
the heterosexual male imagination.
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Depestre's short story "Blues pour une tasse de thé vert" ("Green
Tea Blues," published in the collection Eros dans un train chinois)
is without doubt one of the most homophobic texts I have read. I
use the word "homophobe" in the conventional sense of "fear" of the homosexual
and of homosexuality; in addition, the homophobia in Depestre's text encourages
a perception of the homosexual as a danger. I found the copy
of the collection I bought in a Montreal bookstore in 1990 classified with
the books of "eroticism" rather than under "literature"; this fact
seemed more revealing of the judgments of the Quebecois readership than
of the author's intentions, although it is the French publishers who included
the first edition of the text in their "Erotiques" collection. On
the cover of the paperback edition, we find Miles Hyman's illustration
of a faceless, naked woman (with the "exotic" foreignness of a Chinese
sign behind her), which confirms, one could say, the desire of the Haitian
author (and/or of his editors) to entice the gaze of the male heterosexual
reader and objectify the foreign female. Written in the first person,
"Green Tea Blues" recounts the history of its narrator, a Haitian student,
who meets an American student (residing in the "Greek Dormitory" [79]):
"a big Black built like an officer of the [Military Police]" (77).
In fact, the camaraderie due to the "black color" of the narrator's skin--a
"'racial' solidarity" underscored throughout the story (93)--provokes "a
seducing smile" of friendship in Bill, the American, who, we discover,
is homosexual. The narrator receives an "ardent . . . declaration
of love" (84) from the American, written in an "effeminate prose" (85)
and signed, "Passionately [follement] yours" (84): a steamy
letter with a declaration more powerful than that of any woman.
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Thus we realize that Bill is a "macici, a maricón,
a golden fag from Alabama . . . a lawless, faithless queen . . . a dangerous
dandy" (85). [10]
Troubled, the narrator valiantly calls to mind his feminine conquests,
praising his cock and his "sensibility for the fairer sex" (88).
Thrice in the short story, the narrator recalls how his umbilical chord
had been cut, at birth, by the teeth of a young woman; this Haitian rite
is supposed to have "immunized" him for life against the path of homosexuality.
When the effeminate homosexual seizes the narrator's "huge magic dick meant
for the deflowering of white adolescent girls" (93), the narrator smacks
him with his fist, but unexpectedly finds himself overpowered. The
narrator then appears "prostrated by the horror and disgust of contact
with male flesh" (93). When he is seized by fear and repulsion, his
zipper (which is difficult to undo) saves the day. At the end of
the story, he runs "breathless" (95) into the arms and refuge of his female
friend, a "Czech tennis player" (joueuse/gaming partner);
he says it is "a feast to go fishing in her blond river" (81). The
exaggeration of his fear of the homosexual would be amusing if the story
did not evoke so clearly a scene of rape (the insistence of the solidarity
of "race" between the two men is significant). The homosexual is
described as a danger simply by being a homosexual, even though it is rather
the fixed role of this heterosexual man that should cause fear; he
believes himself defined by his sex--inviolable--as the hunter and never
the prey.
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In descriptions of West Indian sexuality, one finds another singular phenomenon,
the dorlis. Chamoiseau gives an example in Chronique des
sept misères of these men transformed into dorlis who
penetrate doors and locks to reach their sleeping victims:
That night, Héloïse lay down for her final slumber
as a virgin, because, in the meantime, black Phosphore, having divulged
to his disheartened son the Method learned from a tomb, had made him into
a dorlis. The modus operandi of Anatole-Anatole still remains
a mystery. . . . However so, it is certain that on the night in question,
he finds himself in Héloïse's room, in spite of all the barricades.
Applying his newfound knowledge of the dorlis, he spends eight delicious
hours with the sleeping figure. His grunts, tears, spasms, his orgasms
from the pleasure mingle with the gentle snores of his partner. (34)
As a consequence, Héloïse, the victim, learns to put her "black
panties [on] backwards" to protect herself from this nocturnal intrusion.
This scene undoubtedly will foster the phantasms of the avid reader of
forbidden bodies; the lack of consent by the completely objectified woman
ostensibly augments the pleasure. [11]
According to Glissant (300n), the dorlis "satisfies the desires
of women without their being allowed to remember anything." This
"phantasm of impunity and castration" is obviously a heterosexual male
fantasy.
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Curiously, again according to Glissant, "there is no known case of a homosexual
dorlis." Here is an interesting affirmation (if true) of the
collective imagination. Sexuality in the French-speaking Antilles,
or at least its fictive representation, seems closed to the idea of a passive
sexuality among men. It would be interesting to study other beliefs
than the dorlis, other "Afro-Atlantic" religions or occult practices
in the Antilles (in Cuba, for example), and other social configurations
in regard to homosexuality and sexual "possession." [12]
And yet, when reading, for example, Jamaica Kincaid's descriptions of a
bisexual West Indian man whose active homosexual life remained hidden (to
his family) behind its heterosexual counterpart, we might consider the
extent to which each author's personal view of sexuality, at times including
generalizations about the community--"the famous prudery that exists among
a certain kind of Antiguan woman"--colors their written observations.
As Kincaid writes, "I grew up alienated from my own sexuality and, as far
as I can tell, am still, to this day, not at all comfortable with the idea
of myself and sex" (69).
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An exception to "impenetrable" masculinity can be found in Confiant's Eau
de Café, where we learn how the character Thémistocle
obtained his reputed powers of kokeur: after he and some other
men had killed many bêtes-longues (snakes), Thémistocle
was led away by Bothrops, whom Confiant calls "La Femelle Originelle (reputedly
a hermaphrodite)" (192). [13]
In "an indescribable joy," Thémistocle was taken into Bothrops'
den where, he says, "his forked sex penetrated me from behind, mine slipped
through the iridescent scales of his orifice and we made love for forty-seven
and a half days" (195). In choosing such an example of active and
passive masculinity, one could infer that I am penetrated by doudouist
phantasms of homosexual géolibertinage. In fact, most
"outside" criticism--such as that of Kundera--speaks in laudatory terms
of the liberties taken by West Indian writers' sexual imaginations; one
might also conceive of configurations not necessarily within the limited
realm of the heterosexual voyeur.
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That is why I address myself in particular to women readers of the texts
in question. Joan Dayan speaks of "the reductionist idealization"
of women in Depestre's works (590n) and declares that Depestre operates
in a mode of "recuperative male fantasy" (590). In an interview with
her, Depestre has recognized his own ties to West Indian machismo.[14]
Depestre sings "alleluia" to the female sex: "In his flutterings
around the islands he had never seen between the thighs of a young girl
a conch shell blooming so royally. Putting his ear against it, he could
hear the Caribbean!" (Hadriana 24). And again: "I plunged
straight for her sex: . . . that is, the source of strength which sets
the blood coursing, the prodigy of the beginning of life, before fire and
rain, before darkness and wind, and above all, before the mythologies which
have denatured the female sex to the effigy of the greatest terrors of
our species" (Alléluia 64-65). In Hadriana dans
tous mes rêves, a mambo priestess prepares a ceremony in memory
of Hadriana, drawing a vévé of the young woman's sex:
"As we watched, Madame Brévica's talented hand drew a sphinx lusting
after a vulva-sun with a well-shaped head and lips and clitoris magnificently
spread" (76). The spectators then strip off their clothes, throwing
bras, garter-belts, and silk stockings into Madame Brévica's bonfire
as a revival ritual for the dead young virgin and to protect her spirit
from the rapacious Balthazar:
Men showered socks, ties, and handkerchiefs. One cripple
relinquished a crutch, another a false mahogany arm. We saw a bolivar-hat,
an effigy mask of Pope Alexander Borgia, an umbrella, a small bench, a
rattan chair, a huge Gothic dildo, and an Immaculate nun's wimple land
on the revived fire too. Watching the joyous erection of the fire,
Madame Losange's face contorted with pleasure. She took one of the
ten-kilo candles burning beside the catafalque, and planted it into the
outlined shape of the dead woman's genital organs with the intention of
stopping the butterfly's threats of rape. (77)
(The butterfly was once Balthazar Granchiré who, by the lustful
age of fifteen, had bedded scores of women "of all ages" [26]; he has been
transformed into a butterfly as punishment for having gone too far, seducing
the "garden-woman" of his step-father. Even metamorphosed as a butterfly,
he continues his vast conquests of female territory.) Depestre's
description of the ceremony continues "within the limits of a pagan homage
to Hadriana Siloé," with the entire community achieving "first the
death rattles of agony and then the triumphant cries of orgasm";
they somehow have the "crazy hope of snatching Nana Siloé from the
jaws of death and re-igniting the star of her flesh in our lives" (78-79).
While this passage is not intended as a "phallic mystery," the first person
possessive plural adjective ("our") with which it concludes refers to those
for whom Hadriana's flesh recalls personal sexual memories of volcanic
vibrations--the entire eroticized community for whom "her" flesh has been
reawakened. This colonization of the feminine sex certainly dates
from before the arrival of the first Africans and Europeans on the shores
of the Antilles. In both male and female writers' works, one often
finds women--such as Depestre's "garden-women"--compared to a field to
be plowed, or sown with seed. [15]
It seems we will never leave behind this colonizing machismo. According
to Glissant, certain "deviancies or singularities (homosexuality,
spinsterhood, community attitudes)" help to "liberate" women from "the
machismo environment" (298, emphasis added): but, he says, "the sexual
indifference of the Martinican woman is substituted these days by rather
spectacularly acute forms of sexual pathology" (Ibid.). One has the
right to ask what Glissant means by "sexual pathology"! The woman
who dares to "deviate" from the sexual role attributed to her by men had
better beware.
-
What do women readers make of Confiant's description of coucounes?
Do they know how to recognize their racial affiliation as readily as the
(male) expert?
The guy, in effect, grazes the curved, fuzzy coucounes
of the blue-black negresses, the most sublime that one could imagine, also
the most enticing, . . . the aggressive coucounes of the mixed-race
women [chabines] with hair yellow like the mango [mangue-zéphyrine],
the golden-brown, chaste slit of mulattas who wouldn't let themselves loose
until the very moment of ecstasy, the shimmering fleece of câpresses
and . . . the coarse hair of Indian women. . . . (Eau de Café
85) [16]
The narrator's godmother, Eau de Café, advises her black female
audience to deliver their "bodies to the thirst of all men" in order to
be seen as beautiful. Confiant does not need to use much Creole vocabulary
to describe this "negress uglier than the seven deadly sins"; her
beauty, he tells us, proceeds from her sex, valued for its doucine
flavor:
Ladies of the audience, don't look elsewhere for the reasons
of our ugliness and our poverty! . . . Our revenge is in the black coucoune,
bumpy with pink lips like the shell of the lambi. Allow someone to
come near the mouth of your lap, and he is as if entrapped by its radiations
and plunges his tongue unrestrainedly into the curved slit of the doucine
until it vanishes. To say that the negress is sumptuous, to efface
from her spirit all the litanies of evils that have been proffered her
by the Whites, all that is lacking is to suck her coucoune. (Eau
de Café 293)
This
is not all that far removed from Depestre's style. The male gaze
upon the colored pussy has been inherited from the slave tradition, or
from an eternal "droit de cuissage" that makes a woman's sex her only potential
power and a measure of her worth for the master. According to Eau
de Café, the black woman makes up for an innate ugliness (!?) by
the beauty men find in her sex. In a word, let everyone find beauty
where they will! Sexual phantasms undoubtedly differ between men
and women; it is worth noting, however, that one does not find a
parallel adulation of the male kal in the works of women writers.
-
This literature is not lacking in variations upon the old theme of the
toothed vagina, "with saw's teeth" for Depestre (Hadriana 25):
phantasms of the frightening feminine sex. In Depestre, it is the
beautiful Isabelle's lover who, "while fucking her . . . saw his genitals
shrink like a peau de chagrin. [17]
When one morning, upon waking, he discovers that his sex has disappeared
and that all that remains is a bit of one testicle, he kills himself with
a bullet to the head" (Alléluia 13-14). Dracius-Pinalie
describes a very jealous man who procures "afroparadisiac" products, one
of which, brought back for his wife, is administered, or rather "badigeonné
all the way to the deep end, inside her cunt." His wife's kokeurs
could make all manner of advances toward his wife and even
enter her from behind, but, the moment they would penetrate her dark sex,
wacha! the device would wrench out the head of their cock, cut it
off swiftly, plim! and then let it fall, wabap! like a banana
peeled and then tossed to the ground; the man would start to run like a
man possessed, and she would never see him again! (144-45).
For Depestre, it is men's extreme fear when confronted with the female
sex that leads to this phantasm of the "shrinking" phallus; for Dracius-Pinalie,
the man rids himself of his enemies by way of the "booby-trapped" sex of
his wife. The power and danger of woman resides in her coucoune
(as it is conceptualized by men), and this is, above all, a power given
to it by men.
-
Several male Antillean writers place a female character in the forefront. [18]
A very well-known example [19]
is that of Sophie Laborieux, the central character of Texaco by
Chamoiseau. She is the victorious woman, the liberated woman, the
one who overcomes all obstacles. If, from time to time, and armed
with different weapons according to their sex, the men and women of the
Texaco community fight together (292), Sophie gives precedence to the women
who are the only ones who dare to confront the police (337). Does
Chamoiseau depart from the phallic tradition in recognizing this example
of a woman who differs from the others when he evokes the "miseries of
women behind closed shutters" (264) and the fact that "men are worth nothing;
the women's only stick to hold onto in life [is] that of courage (bâton-courage)"
(312)? Or, does this portrait of Sophie, reputed to be a "woman with
balls" (femme-à-graines) (412), not precisely reinforce the
stereotype of power associated "with balls"? Whatever the case may
be, Sophie's beautiful coucoune does all it can to please her man:
it "becomes apple and pear and little golden cage, it makes itself chicken-and-rice,
it transforms itself into sugar-liqueur to be sucked . . . it metamorphoses
into danger, like the poisonous fleur-datura (thorn-apple flower)
that paralyzes one's legs" (392). [20]
-
If, before I began this essay, I had thought I would find among the female
authors a less crude sexuality, less likely to describe body parts in detail
than among the male writers--the sweet verbal jouissance of Simone Schwarz-Bart
being the strongest example among the women writers--I quickly reached
the conclusion that it is useless to make generalizations about West Indian
sexuality and its literary representations. One woman writer, Dracius-Pinalie,
has created an anti-heroine who plunges into a very violent masochistic
sexuality. [21]
Emile Ollivier, my last example (and from whom I cite only a short fragment),
demonstrates a lyricism quite rare for a male writer in his description
of a "night of feverish escapades" of his heroine, Amparo, in his novel,
Passages:
Her body is nothing but transparent water, an infinite space,
without reference, limitless, outside of time, with neither past nor future
. . . To enjoy every modulation, every ripple, every convulsion, every
thrust, in the crystallization of awakened senses. To enjoy up to the point
of losing consciousness, in short, to become herself again. . . . (147-148)
-
The passages I have cited present the Francophone Antilles as islands of
carnival open to many sexual possibilities, free of all religious and social
constraints. Nevertheless, one also and often finds a doudouist
and folklorist caricature of a sexuality similar to that which is offered
in advertisements for the "be-palmed" volcanic islands. Certain authors,
René Depestre at the forefront, seem to want to confirm these impressions. [22]
As in a burlesque party, the problem posed by a good number of representations
of West Indian sexuality is that the description of the "other" (and of
all difference)--of sex and of sexual orientation--is amusing, crazy, and
never serious. The jouissance of laughter (that of the storytellers,
listeners and readers), certainly contains a form of derision (self-mockery
for males) that ridicules machismo and exaggerated phallocracy. Nevertheless,
the reader of West Indian literature cannot avoid representations of a
sexuality that aptly signal the heritage of the ravaging colonial system.
When carnival becomes quotidian, in the Antilles as well as in the U.S.
or France, one may be able to speak of differences without a hierarchization
of power by race, sex, social class, sexual orientation, or religion.
So, it seems clear to me that doudouist stereotypes will disappear
only "when pigs fly."
Illustration © 1998 Béatrice Coron, Eclectic Iconoclast