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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2019
This article offers a comparative reading of Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle. Acknowledging the distinct geographical and temporal contexts of the Francophone Caribbean and the Mediterranean, I argue that the authors’ employment of frame narratives and (ch)orality as a mode of collective remembrance and cultural transmission can be read as interventions in the debates on maritime perspectives and the figuration of the sea in contemporary literary studies. This argument is grounded in the mobility, fluidity, and dynamism of oral storytelling and the frame narrative’s pre-novelistic transnational path historically and in the present works, examining the authors’ stylistic and thematic practices as linked to the sea. By putting Agnant and Ghermandi in conversation, this article explores a maritime practice of reading and its potential application to other texts.
1 Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Agnant moved to Montréal in 1970 at the age of seventeen. She published her first collection of poetry, Balafres, in 1994. She was later named a finalist for the Prix Dejardins in 1995 with the publication of her first novel, Le Dot de Sara, and her collection of short stories, entitled Le Silence comme le sang, was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Prix du Gouverneur Général in 1997.
2 “At first, I did not really know what form to give to Emma. Should it lean toward fiction or essay-testimony? . . . We can talk about fiction but sometimes, even in Emma, I wonder which part is fiction and which part is the unconscious, my unconscious.” All translations from this interview are mine. See Agnant, Marie-Célie, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” interview by Florence Raymond Jurney, The French Review 79.2 (2005): 384–394 Google Scholar .
3 Born in Addis Ababa, Ghermandi moved to Italy in 1979 at the age of fourteen. She began writing at the end of the 1990s, receiving first prize for her short story “Il telefono del quartiere” in 1999 from the intercultural association Eks&Tra, an organization dedicated to the promotion of migrant authors writing in Italian. Ghermandi is also a founding editor of El Ghibli, the first online journal dedicated to migration literature in Italy.
4 Cohen, Margaret and Dever, Carolyn, The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 25 Google Scholar .
5 By canonical cultural memory, Michael Rothberg is referring to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s conceptualization of the term in their edited volume, Memory in a Global Age (London, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), elaborating on Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory. See Rothberg, Michael, “Remembering Back: Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2013), 368 Google Scholar .
6 Assmann, Jan, “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory,” in Memory in a Global Age, eds. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
7 Wolf, Werner, “Framing Borders in Frame Stories,” in Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, eds. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 189 Google Scholar .
8 Sansalvadore, Giovanna, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text: Gabriella Ghermandi’s Queen of Flowers and Pearls (2007),” English Academy Review 33.2 (2016): 21 Google Scholar .
9 Elleke Boehmer’s “Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel” presents the concept of postcolonial reading in response to Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique. Although not addressed in this essay, the postcoloniality of reading outlined here could be applied to novels utilizing frame narratives such as Le livre d’Emma and Regina di fiori e di perle. See Boehmer, Elleke, “Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4.1 (2017): 11–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
10 Cohen and Dever, The Literary Channel, 15.
11 Apter, Emily, “Afterword,” The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 251–252 Google Scholar .
12 Apter, “Afterword,” 251. See also Anderson, Perry, The Origins of Postmodernity (London, England: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar and Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (London, England: Verso, 2013)Google Scholar .
13 Cohen, Margaret, “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe,” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 657–662 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
14 Cohen, “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe,” 658.
15 Yaeger, Patricia, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 525 Google Scholar .
16 Quayson, Ato, “Periods versus Concepts: Space Making and the Question of Postcolonial Literary History,” PMLA 127.2 (2012): 342–348 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
17 Quayson, “Periods versus Concepts,” 342.
18 Papastergiadis, Nikos, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 4 Google Scholar .
19 Quayson, “Periods versus Concepts,” 344.
20 “our History (or more precisely our histories) is shipwrecked in colonial history” (my translation). See Bernabé, Jean, Chamoiseau, Patrick, Confiant, Raphaël, and Bouya Taleb-Khyar, Mohamed, Eloge de la créolité (Paris, France: Gallimard, 1993), 36 Google Scholar .
21 Tagore, Proma, Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and the Politics of Testimony (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 3 Google Scholar .
22 Allan, Michael and Benigni, Elisabetta, “Lingua Franca: Towards a Philology of the Sea,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017): 1–5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
23 Benigni, Elisabetta, “Dante and the Construction of a Mediterranean Literary Space: Revisiting a 20th Century Philological Debate in Southern Europe and in the Arab World,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017): 113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
24 Merriam Webster Dictionary. “Net.” Accessed July 1, 2018.
25 Mallette, Karla, “The Seven Sages at Sea: Framed Narrative Systems in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017): 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
26 Lionette, Francoise and Shi, Shu-mei, Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , cited in Quayson, Ato, “Comparative Postcolonialisms: Storytelling and Community in Sholem Aleichem and Chinua Achebe,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.1 (2016): 58 Google Scholar .
27 Munro, Martin, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 249 Google Scholar .
28 Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 254.
29 “What remains—memories or traces, we shall come back to that—what remains is the product of an erosion caused by oblivion. Memories are shaped by oblivion as the contours of the shoreline are shaped by the sea” (my translation). See Augé, Marc, Les formes de l’oubli (Paris, France: Rivages, 1998), 29 Google Scholar .
30 Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” (1882), in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8–22.
31 “Travel and eyewitness reporting and similar externally organizing features appear . . . in both Arabic and non-Arabic frame narratives.” See Slater Gittes, Katherine, “ The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition,” PMLA 98.2 (1983): 241 Google Scholar .
32 “Long-distance travel and exchange are abundantly attested to from early prehistory onward, and Neolithic expansion across the Mediterranean has even been characterized as an essentially maritime phenomenon.” See Broodbank, Cyprian, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2013), 215–217 Google Scholar .
33 Homi Bhabha, “On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture,” Forum on the Humanities and the Public World, Berkeley, 2008.
34 “When this book appeared, some people were astonished, as if, to a certain extent, they were wondering: what is the relationship between Haiti and slavery?” See Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
35 Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
36 “a way of measuring the damage of alienation.” See Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
37 Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz’s article on trauma and testimony in Le livre d’Emma opens with a discussion of the institutional forgetting and colonial nostalgia that characterizes metropolitan France, citing, as an example, the 2005 effort to pass a memory law lauding the positive effects of the French presence overseas, particularly in North Africa. See Adamowicz-Hariasz, Maria, “Le trauma et le témoignage dans Le livre d’Emma de Marie-Célie Agnant,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 64.3 (2010): 149–168 Google Scholar .
38 Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
39 Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
40 Agnant, Marie-Célie, Le Livre d’Emma (Montreal, Canada: Éditions Mémoire, 2002), 7 Google Scholar . “For a long time, the only words she could utter described the intense blue that permanently encircles a strip of abandoned land in the middle of the ocean, the place where her eyes had first opened on the world.” All English translations of Le Livre d’Emma are by Zilpha Ellis unless otherwise noted. See Marie-Célie Agnant, The Book of Emma, trans. Zilpha Ellis (Ontario: Insomniac Press, 2006), 7.
41 Selao, Ching, “Les mots/maux de l’exile/ex-ile: les romans de Marie-Célie Agnant,” Canadian Literature 204 (2010): 11 Google Scholar .
42 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 105. “More than anything else, I would like to talk to you about several women. After them, all the sounds will be silent. In my throat, in my head, in my blood, there will be absolute silence.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 132.
43 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 62–63. “for all those to whom they deny the right to be heard.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 78.
44 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 128. “to which I felt no particular tie except that History had willed that I get my education in its language. Deep down, however, my project was taking shape: to examine the routes taken in the old days by the ships.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 159.
45 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 116. “a woman with blue skin, skin without a glimmer of light.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 144.
46 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 181–84.
47 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 173.
48 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 112. “The water that has washed it since the day it was born, this water, with its blue so blue, hides centuries of blood vomited from the holds of the slave ships, blood from all the blacks that were thrown overboard. That’s how the curse arrived. It infiltrated the water of our rivers, the water that we drink, it mixed with our blood, spoiled it.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 139–40.
49 Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 524.
50 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 105. “all the sounds will be silent. In my throat, in my head, in my blood, there will be absolute silence.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 132.
51 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 118. “her body emptied itself of the images thrust up from the depths of an ancient memory, words extracted from the archives buried in her entrails.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 146.
52 Said, “Reflections on Exile.”
53 Gabriella Ghermandi, “Dialogo a distanza con Gabriella Ghermandi,” interview by Federica Sossi, 2008. Retrieved from www.storiemigranti.org.
54 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, England: Routledge, 1995), 78.
55 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 78.
56 “Hence why I like to emphasize the chorus of histories which can give a global, local, singular, and plural dimension all at once” (my translation). See Ghermandi, “Dialogo a distanza con Gabriella Ghermandi,” 2008.
57 Clarissa Clò, “African Queens and Italian History: The Cultural Politics of Memory and Resistance in Teatro delle Albe’s Lunga vita all’albero and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle,” Research in African Literatures 41.4 (2010): 26–42.
58 Giovanna Sansalvadore, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text,” 22.
59 Gabriella Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 2007), 6.
“Hold on tight to that curiosity of yours and collect all the stories you can. One day you’ll be the voice that will tell our stories. You will cross the same sea that Peter and Paul crossed, and you will take our stories to the land of the Italians. You will be the voice of our history that doesn’t want to be forgotten.” Yacob later reiterates his expectations of Mahlet, the storyteller: “Then make a solemn promise in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary. When you grow up you will write my story, the story of those years, and you will take it to Italy, so that the Italians won’t be allowed to forget.” All English translations of Regina di fiori e di perle are by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto unless otherwise noted. See Gabriella Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, trans. Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 2, 58.
60 Klabjan, Borut, “‘Scramble for Adria’: Discourses of Appropriation of the Adriatic Space Before and After World War I,” Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2011): 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
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62 Acts 27:27–28:5 New International Version.
63 Christianity in the region dates back to the Aksumite empire (what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea), arriving in the fourth century by way of merchants and making the Ethiopian church the oldest precolonial Christian church on the continent.
64 Sansalvadore, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text,” 18.
65 Ghermandi, “Dialogo a distanza con Gabriella Ghermandi.”
66 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, “Introduction,” in Italian Colonialism, eds. Ben-Ghiat and Fuller (New York: Palgrave, 2005): 1–9.
67 “The initiative of [anti-Semitic] racial laws was the worst mistake Mussolini as a leader, who in many other ways did well” (my translation). See Silvio Berlusconi’s Keynote Speech, Inauguration of the Monument Dedicated to Italian Jews Deported during the Shoah, Milan, 2013.
68 “an Italian citizen of the Aryan race with a person belonging to another race” (my translation). See “Leggi Razziali in Italia,” Documenti Storici 1935–1945, July 1, 2011. Accessed November 25, 2018. https://cronologia.leonardo.it, article 1.
69 Jacqueline Andall, Derek Duncan, and Charles Burdette, “Introduction,” in Modern Italy 8.1 (2003): 1.
70 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 198. “In Italy they are all convinced that the Italians came here on a sightseeing trip . . . and that they beautified and modernized our lousy country with roads, homes, schools. You can’t imagine how many times I had to listen to this version . . . I never answered because I did not know how to object.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 212.
71 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 198. “Today I know what I would say. Everything they built, we paid for. Actually, we have already paid for all the buildings of the next three centuries. Considering the great number of Ethiopians they killed, they owe us a lot of war reparations! . . . It is over, but not so over that we should stop talking about it. We should give them our version of the story.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 212–13.
72 Sansalvadore, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text,” 20.
73 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 181.
74 Sansalvadore, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text,” 24.
75 Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 250.
76 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 198. “It is over, but not so over that we should stop talking about it.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 213.
77 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 164. “make the return trip . . . to go back to the route of the big boats and join the others.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 201.
78 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 165. “[she] wasn’t dead; she had joined the others, over there.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 202.
79 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 251. “I made a promise . . . And so, that is why today I am telling you his story. Which is also my story. But now, yours as well.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 251.
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82 Quayson, “Periods versus Concepts,” 344.