3 - Gouverneurs de la … Mangrove: Architextual Authenticity in Maryse Condé's Traversée de la Mangrove

Summary

L'outrance dans cette soumission au modèle est déjà révélatrice. […] Un produit fabriqué par le colonisateur, une parole donnée par lui, sont reçus de confiance. Ses moeurs, ses vêtements, sa nourriture, son architecture, sont étroitement copiés, fussent-ils inadaptés.

Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé

Interiority is not authenticity.

J. Michael Dash, “Madman at the Crossroads”

L'intertextualité, condition de tout texte, quel qu'il soit, ne se réduit évidemment pas à un problème de sources …

Barthes, La Théorie du texte

A synopsis drafted by the Services Documentaires Multimedia explains Maryse Condé's 1997 novel Desirada as follows: “Une jeune métisse exilée en France tente de retrouver sa langue et son pays en passant par les États-Unis. Un beau livre sans exotisme facile d'où émane une profonde authenticité” (“Desiderada,” Troczone). Despite the terse nature of this text and the fact that it succeeds reasonably well in summarizing the novel, one word in particular—authenticity—remains strikingly vague. The blurb states that a profound authenticity emanates from this beautiful book. But what exactly does this mean? What or who precisely is purported to be authentic? Marie-Noëlle, the novel's protagonist? Maryse Condé as writer? The storyline itself? Or is the term referring to a certain situational authenticity that accurately encapsulates the struggles and emotions of an emigrant who, having grown up on the island of La Désirade off the coast of Guadeloupe, is shipped off to France against her will to live with a highly negligent mother and who later leaves for Boston with a jazz musician before returning one final time to her native land in search of answers concerning her roots?

Regardless of what the writer of the short summary may have intended, a second and more puzzling question arises: authentic how? Should a reader be led to understand that the authenticity at stake refers to a given description of specific events or experiences, or does it address the level of the narrative itself, namely Condé's authenticity of expression—stylistically, syntactically, lexically, idiomatically, or otherwise? If indeed we may assume that the synopsis is meant to identify a certain type of discursive authenticity, then we must ask yet another question: authentic where and according to whom?