32 - The Caribbean Novel in French, 1958–2016

Summary

Between 1958 and 2016, the French Caribbean novel is resoundingly about the French Caribbean, less invested in dislocation and displacement—a number of novels of the 1960s and 1970s do focus on the alienation of exiled female protagonists in Africa and France—than in grounding, naming, reclaiming, bringing home. This foregrounding of the local acquired particular political urgency in the wake of departmentalisation (1946), which sparked a process of decreolisation that was accelerated through the French education system and media in subsequent decades. The urge to explore and validate home ground, and to preserve and celebrate Creole memory, becomes more explicit from the late 1980s, and reaches its fullest articulation in the Eloge de la créolité (1989). Despite accusations of nostalgia, even very contemporary novels look to the past, often celebrating a waning Creole culture. That such novels are usually set after Abolition (1848), and that so few novels place slavery front and centre of the narrative, does not, however, mean that the story of slavery is ignored, marginalised or irrelevant. The discontinuity between the overwhelming extra-literary presence of slavery (in interviews with novelists, and in their cultural/media work), and its relative diegetic absence, is more apparent than real: almost all Antillean fiction is haunted by this absent-presence, and can only be fully understood through it.