Francophone Caribbean Today, Literature, Language, Culture

ISBN: 978-976-640-130-6

Price: US$27 (s)

This collection of essays is dedicated to the memory of Bridget Jones, the pioneering researcher and teacher of francophone Caribbean literature. The broad scope of the essays--topics range from Creole linguistics, socio-political contexts, and Caribbean childhoods, to exile, film, theatre, and gender issues--reflects Bridget Jones's own diverse interests. The editors' intention is to give ah overview of the current state of cultural and intellectual play in the francophone Caribbean; an aim which the contributors achieve with varying degrees of success. The first two essays plod rather unspectacularly through the well-worn sociolinguistic terrain of Creole language and culture: the latter are seen as unquestionably 'good things' which must be preserved, though these essays never quite say how, of more importantly, why they should be. The intellectual frailties of these two essays are inadvertently laid bare in Michael Dash's searching piece, which cuts through the sociolinguists' nostalgic attachment to Creole language and culture, and probes far deeper into the ambivalence expressed in recent French Caribbean thought (especially Glissant) to language as an essential, 'apocalyptic' guarantor of authenticity of identity. Similar intellectual vigour is found in Mary Gallagher's comparative essay on representations of Caribbean childhoods in Saint-John Perse's 'Eloges' and Chamoiseau's Antan d'enfance. Also, Carol Sanders writes incisively on polyphony in Maryse Conde's La Migration des coeurs, and her Bakhtinian analysis goes beyond the facile gender-conscious celebrations of much Conde criticism. One of the most positive aspects of the collection is the close attention paid to Haitian writing, which is so often sidelined in discussions of the francophone Caribbean. Sam Haigh, for example, writes on Dany Laferriere, and provides a solid contextualization for his work against recent re-evaluations of exile and errance. Anthea Morrison deals with the representation of Haiti in Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ton beau capitaine, though her essay veers rather excessively towards an empty celebratory vision of the Caribbean community as 'vibrant, resilient and creative--need I add Caribbean?' (p. 122). No, the addition was not needed, and only serves to perpetuate all too comforting myths of the suffering but joyously artistic Caribbean. Despite itself, and in an unforeseen way, perhaps this collection does achieve its aims, as it provides a snapshot of the 'creole continuum' of current critical thinking on the francophone Caribbean: at one end persists the self-defeatingly nostalgic, unreflective celebrations of all things Caribbean; at the other, a few cutting-edge researchers revitalize the area as they lay to rest the old myths; while the rest of us hover at various points in between.

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