This paper will focus on violent relations between the sexes in novels set in Guadeloupe by Gisèle Pineau, with particular reference to L’Espérance-Macadam.

As in other works by contemporary Antillean writers (including some male ones), Pineau most frequently represents violence as sexual or sexually-motivated, sympathetically portraying women as the principal victims who, if they survive, often suffer the lasting symptoms of trauma. However, she also inscribes herself in a distinctively Antillean, as differentiated from French metropolitan, literature by politicising dysfunctional private relations between men and women/girls: beatings, rape, murder and abuse are shown as having specific local characteristics linked to social and psychological deprivation, perceptions of race, gender roles and patterns of sexual behaviour all established during the plantation era.

Having briefly demonstrated the above premises by pointing to literary strategies such as plot, dialogue and the use of setting and location, this paper will go on to focus more closely on metaphor in order to question Pineau’s judgement of, and prognosis for, the violence she portrays as commonplace. In L’Espérance-Macadam, for example, plot and character hint at the possibility for women to heal their wounds by discovering the truth of the past, overcoming the silence inflicted by their trauma, and supporting one another across the generations. At the same time, however, the text powerfully associates incestuous abuse with the devastating cyclones that regularly sweep the Caribbean, a metaphor suggesting that sexual violence by men against girls may be experienced as an inevitable phenomenon in the Antilles.
By probing these tensions and the language in which they are expressed, the paper will ask, in conclusion, how they shape the politicised, postcolonial specificity of the French Antilles as it emerges in Pineau’s work, and how her work portrays the future of gender roles and relations in a society still marked by colonial conditions.