Raphaël Confiant: Mamzelle Libellule (1987, as Marisosé); trans. 1994

Raphaël Confiant's Mamzelle Libellule is Confiant's own French translation of his Marisosé, which was later translated into English by Linda Coverdale as Mamzelle Dragonfly. The book concerns about sixteen years of the protagonist Adelise's life, and is narrated (usually alternately) both by Adelise and an unknown third omniscient person. In fifteen chapters, it in some respects reminded me of a film or television script in which omissions of events and times are made.

Mamzelle Libellule begins in a rural environment, where Adelise's mother slaves in a sugar cane plantation, where she is economically forced to send her fourteen-year-old daughter Adelise, who is raped by the boss and later younger workers take advantage of her, although she keeps things from her mother. Sex means nothing to her, its just an incomprehensible act from which she derives no pleasure but no particular displeasure. Her body doesn't belong to her, although her heart is different, and she gives that to a tree she doesn't know the name of, and nor does anyone else. It transpires that her mother buried Adelise's umbilical cord at the tree's roots, and at the end of the book it is named as a jastrame.

Adelise's mother believes her daughter will have a better life in the capital, so she is sent to live with her aunt Philomène in Fort-de-France. But the forty-year-old Philomène lives in a kind of shanty town with a corrugated roof and without electricity and is forced to eke out a living through prostitution: 'I didn't choose this profession, I was led to it by poverty and bad luck.' Philomène believes that the uneducated Adelise can find a better way to make a living, although this is not the case and Adelise is impelled by circumstances to join her aunt's trade, although not by selling her physical attributes on the infamous Pont Démosthène but by tapping into the more bourgeois market, even if it sometimes means satisfying a well-heeled old man and his idiot son.

In time Adelise starts more legitimate but far less lucrative employement by working in a café. Philomène hopes that one day she will marry, although Adelise says to herself: 'What was Auntie thinking? She didn't realise that in my eyes men were of no more value than stones in the gutter or rainwater running from the roof of the houses in our part of town.'

But then Homère comes along and she's in love for the first time, he seems different from the other guys who are only interested in sex and know nothing, and she intends to share her life with him, but he's really just a bum like the others, and he doesn't understand that to give her body is nothing, but to give her heart is something special. After the death of her aunt and with money to leave for France, she's ready to go, and the news that Homère has thrown himself under a car is surely just a post scriptum?

The personal seems important here, and Aimé Césaire's speech, the political unrest, the battles between the police and the workers, all the violence, seem like a mere backcloth to the main story, they almost get in the way of it. And the story is resolutely female.

Raphaël Confiant: Madame St-Clair, Reine de Harlem (2015)

Raphaël Confiant, from Martinique, explores his island's history. His Madame St-Clair: Reine de Harlem is a novelised biography of Queenie (1886–1969), or Stéphanie St-Clair (born Stéphanie Sainte-Claire in Martinique), who emigrated to the USA and became a notorious gangster who ran a numbers game, an illegal lottery within Harlem. She also becomes the friend, for instance, of the eminent W.E.B. Du Bois and the poet Countee Cullen, a homosexual who was very briefly Du Bois's daughter Yolande's husband.

Confiant's novel has many laugh-out-loud events, is full of apparent admiration for Stéphanie St-Clair for her spunk, her almost androgynous nature, her fierce feminism, but doesn't shrink from the violent streak that was certainly in her, the brutal determination not to allow anyone to stand in her way.

Before all that though, Stéphanie Sainte-Claire came from a very modest background in Martinique, where she first found work in the relatively wealthy Verneuil household and accepted being raped at night by the adolescent Eugene, the family's son: her only fears were getting pregnant and losing her job. She loses her job over a trifling matter anyway, and with the death of her mother leaves initially for France. But in Marseilles, after only about seven months in the mother country, she sets sail (third class) for New York, where she becomes 'St-Clair' on Ellis Island.

After starting life in New York with an Irish family poorer than her (she at first finds it hard to believe there are poor whites) Stéphanie associates with the infamous Forty Thieves, although she ends up completely severing O'Reilly's penis and testicles, and on blinding Duke in one eye has to escape from New York for a time before she is forced to join many others as mere statistics pulled out of East River by the cops. She gets the wrong bus out, which is held up by the Ku Klux Klan and she's repeatedly raped by the monsters. But, almost by miracle, she escapes relatively intact and is helped by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Several months later, when she returns to New York, Duke has been killed and with relief she sets up home in Harlem.

It's quite by chance that Stéphanie discovers that the 'medicine' Jamaica Ginger contains virtually all alcohol, which at a time of Prohibition is really good news: alcohol is in theory banned, but much good stuff is smuggled through Canada, the prairies of the Mid-West provide wholesome material, although the rot-gut chemically adulterated liquor produced in New York can send a person blind. So too it turns out can Jamaica Ginger, but it provides Stéphanie St-Clair and her companion Lewis with a decent living until she decides to opt out and go for the gambling, although Lewis fights with her and she accidentally breaks his neck and runs out on a manslaughter the cops put down to a burglar.

And so Stéphanie St-Clair thrives and makes pots of money out of illegal gambling, living the life of a black aristocrat on Edgecombe Avenue, Sugar Hill, where the cops generally leave her alone. OK, she pays some of them well to be left alone to her business, and continues to do so until – Prohibition ended – other shady characters such as Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano begin to muscle in on her territory and she is forced to compromise by taking a big cut in profits.

The other stories of Stéphanie St-Clair ratting on bent cops, telling her tales in a column in a highly reputed Harlem paper, etc, are gems. But the one about her falling in love with a religious guy and shooting him for screwing a younger girl (although certainly based on fact) somehow falls flat, as though added without consideration for the main story. Which is a shame, as this is a hell of a read.

Paris 2015: René Maran, Cimetière du Montparnasse #1

 

'RENÉ MARAN
HOMME DE LETTRES
PRIX GONCOURT 1921
1887 – 1960

MME CAMILLE MARAN
1894 – 1977'

 

I really didn't have any hope of finding René Maran's grave in Montparnasse: I knew the division number, but with no image of it online it seemed a wild shot. And then Joseph from the Cimetière du Montparnasse came along and showed us a number of graves we'd have had some difficulty in finding, casually mentioning Maran's as we passed by it. Maran's name is unfortunately in shadow, but who cares: this is an unexpected gem.

 

Maran was actually born on a boat taking his parents (of Guyanese origin) to Fort-de-France, Martinique, the place of his declared birth. He spent most of his life in France, was the first black writer to win the Goncourt (for the novel Batouala), and is seen as a precursor to négritude. It was viewed by some as controversial because of the attacks on colonialism in the Preface. Many thanks to Joseph for this find.

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011)

The writer Édouard Glissant, born in Martinique, died in France today. He won the Prix Renaudot for La lézarde (The Ripening) in 1958, and after a visit to Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's former home in Oxford, Mississippi, published Faulkner, Mississippi in 1996. It's a little early for obituaries, perhaps, but this link is to an article in English on Édouard Glissant.

Aimé Césaire and the Panthéon, Paris

Aimé Césaire - who is perhaps most noted for his key role in the négritude movement - was born in Martinique, where he died in April 2008 at the age of 94. Moving his remains to the Panthéon in Paris was discussed, but it was thought in France that that would be seen as a 'manifestation of neo-colonialist arrogance'. So a compromise has now been reached: he will be remembered by a plaque in the Panthéon this April.

Probably Césaire's best known work is his forty-page narrative poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, which is a surrealist rebel yell that stirred André Breton.

This is Césaire's obituary in The Times, and this a useful biography from The Poetry Foundation.