4 - Reflections on Interior Design: Daniel Maximin's L'Île et une nuit

Summary

[L]a libération du colonisé doit s'effectuer par la reconquête de soi et d'une dignité autonome.

Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisateur

Surtout ne pas délirer. Mais rêver de l'intérieur.

Daniel Maximin, L’Île et une nuit

Cela sera pour nous une attitude intérieure, mieux: une vigilance, ou mieux encore, une sorte d'enveloppe mentale au mitan de laquelle se bâtira notre monde en pleine conscience du monde.

Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité

It would be difficult not to make at least passing mention of the Maison des Flamboyants when referring to Daniel Maximin's L’Île et une nuit (1995). After all, it is there, a house that has been in her family for generations, that the novel's protagonist, Marie-Gabriel, takes shelter from a hurricane that devastates Guadeloupe over the span of one night in September 1989. Contrary to Glissant's La Lézarde and Condé's Traversée de la Mangrove, the entirety of Maximin's novel takes place in or within immediate proximity to the protagonist's home. The narrative structure of the novel also accentuates the privileged—and, indeed, confined—nature of this physical space, its seven chapters coinciding squarely with the seven hours of the storm's siege. Given the clear and immediate danger associated with leaving the house during this time, and the fact that all means of communication with the outside world have been literally severed (the telephone line leading to the house is discovered to have snapped in the storm), Les Flamboyants3 constitutes in many regards the story's sole setting—both in terms of its foreground, as Marie-Gabriel makes her way from room to room in an attempt to avoid and assess the cyclone's wrath, and as its background, the sights and sounds during the night apprising both Marie-Gabriel and the reader of the house's resistance and gradual surrender to the storm's gale-force winds and torrential rain.

As opposed to Traversée de la Mangrove and even La Lézarde, where the roles of particular houses are central to key elements of the plot but far from all-encompassing in terms of each story's immediate and imagined settings, narrative trajectories and overall chronology of events, one would be hard pressed in discussing L’Île et une nuit to not identify Marie-Gabriel's house as a fundamental component of the story.