1 - Past and Present Matter(s): Vernacular Architecture, the Caribbean House, and the Building Blocks of Literature

Summary

The relations of the two are typified by Jekyll's house, which is half Jekyll and half Hyde.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

La poésie comme élément antisismique mental. Pour empêcher l'effondrement des âmes.

Gary Klang, “La Dernière Utopie”

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, as a complement to the literary analyses that constitute the bulk of subsequent discussions of identity in this book, I turn to what might be understood as a literal—i.e. physical—manifestation of authentic French-Caribbean construction. Specifically, a bona fide architectural structure—the Haitian Gingerbread house—will serve to exemplify the inherent contradictions involved when attempting to ascertain how, precisely, identity is or might be understood in the region. The findings of Joel F. Audefroy's assessment of “vernacular architecture” following Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake will furthermore allow for the architectural authenticity of actual structures to be examined on a practical, longitudinal level. Indeed, Audefroy's assessment places particular emphasis on the Haitian Gingerbread houses’ resistance to the devastating seismic event and advocates for a dynamic, evolutionary understanding and integration of construction knowledge in the country's ongoing (re)building efforts. Drawing from both traditional techniques and present-day technologies and innovations, vernacular architecture is thereby described as a fundamentally localized, transformative building process which, for the purposes of this book, I will equate with the vernacular architexture of the French Caribbean.

Recognizing the long-standing currency of natural spaces in critical studies of French-Caribbean history and literature, the second part of this chapter outlines the “spatial turn” (Conley) of the past several decades and argues that human landscapes should also be considered integral characters in the telling and creating of the region's identifying narratives. To this end, three brief textual analyses of French-Caribbean works will illustrate how the construction of individual and collective identities is informed by the architectural (as well as architextual) structures found within literature. In conclusion, I provide an overview of relevant literary criticism, in particular as pertaining to the role of literary form in the evolving fields of spatial and postcolonial theory. In so doing, it will become clear, I hope, how the methodological tenets of this book with regard to architecture and architexture set it apart from other recent studies and offer an original, probing understanding of the ongoing construction of literature and literary identity in the French Caribbean.