Kaiama L. Glover  (Barnard College, Columbia University)
"Big Voices" and Transgressive Writers - the Consequences of Not-Paris

The Francophone Caribbean literary universe is veritably saturated with author-theorists: writers who are as dedicated to composing works of prose and poetry as they are to producing the tools by which such “primary” texts might be evaluated. As Cilas Kemedjio quite rightly points out, “each generation of writers attempts to impose a prescriptive model in an institutional context where literature consistently posits itself as a component of the quest for solutions to socio-political malaise.” Roger Toumson echoes this notion in his description of Afro-Antillean literature as “a discourse that, constructing itself as a system, comments on its own construction, and that, as it forms, offers a commentary on its own formation." Indeed, responding literarily to the particular socio-political realities of post/colonialism, twentieth century Francophone Caribbean writers have traditionally balanced a creative and a theoretical impulse. The ideological agendas of various authors are explicitly delineated in critical essays and then implicitly (and often not-so-implicitly) confirmed in the context of their poetry or prose fiction.

Ironically – and, in some respects, disappointingly – this reliance on theory for authorization, or this equation of theory and authority – ultimately shores up the very atmosphere of stabilization and containment against which “the empire” is meant to have been writing. As has been noted somewhat polemically by Annie Le Brun, and with greater circumspection by Anthony Appiah, there is without question on the part of post/colonial writers a hyper-awareness of the need for Western theoretical approbation, and even a good deal of outright collusion between said writers and their critical readership. I would argue that this situation is particularly characteristic of those regions formerly colonized by France.

This paper takes a look at relative critical appreciation for writers of the Francophone Caribbean as it is determined (indirectly, to be sure) by a given author's theoretical training in Paris. More specifically, I examine comparatively the attention paid to Martinican and Haitian literature in general in an attempt to understand the varying critical fates of four writers of the French-speaking Caribbean in particular.