The Rise of the récit d'enfance in the Francophone Caribbean

Summary

Prior to 1990, autobiographical forms of Francophone Caribbean literature had received scant critical attention. Although the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented period of literary fecundity in the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti, this was largely expressed through poetry in the first half of the century, with a later shift towards prose and the novel discernible from the 1960s. A number of magazines, journals, essays and manifestos, many of which launched trenchant debates on literary movements, had also appeared with varying degrees of success and longevity. Such publications, however, tended to privilege the collective over the individual, articulating national rather than personal identity. They were also problematic in terms of accessibility, readership and dissemination, most often finding an audience in metropolitan France or indeed in Western universities, calling their connection with audiences in the Antilles into question. This relative lack of engagement with autobiography in Francophone Caribbean literature contrasts sharply with contemporary literature of the same period from the former British Caribbean colonies and North America: Anglophone African-Caribbean and African-American literatures have their origins in slave autobiographies, and from the 1930s canonical autobiographical texts in English appeared by authors including Jamaican Claude McKay (A Long Way from Home (1937)); Barbadian George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and The Pleasures of Exile (1960)); Trinidadian Derek Walcott (Another Life (1973)) and Americans Langston Hughes (The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956)), Richard Wright (Black Boy (1945)) and Maya Angelou (who has written six volumes of autobiography, commencing with the acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)).