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jBecoming a Madman, Becoming a Madwoman: Ex-centricity in Caribbean Writing

John Thieme

Earl Lovelace’s 1996 novel Salt has a chapter entitled ‘Becoming a Madman’ and this paper
discusses some of the ways in which Caribbean texts represent people becoming, or being
deemed to be, madmen and madwomen. It asks whether there are commonalities in the ways
in which madness is depicted in the six texts it considers, whether there are any significant
differences in the representation of male and female ex-centricity and whether Anglophone
and Francophone Caribbean texts view madness in dissimilar ways. Without wishing to
suggest that madness is not a clinical condition, it starts from the Foucauldian premise that it
is culturally constructed, a discursive formation, in which a group, usually a dominant group,
designates deviations from its supposed norms as ‘mad’. In the Caribbean one such form of
‘madness’ is indelibly associated with colonialism’s identification of its non-compliant others
as deviant, but, just as Foucault demonstrates that the classification and treatment of madness
underwent marked shifts in ‘the age of reason’,1 Caribbean notions of what constitutes
madness also changed significantly in the second half of the twentieth century: during the
period of decolonization and the attainment of independence in the Anglophone Caribbean,
around the time of the movement to DOMs (Départements d’Outre Mers) in Francophone
territories such as Martinique and Guadeloupe, and as a consequence of the political
vicissitudes of Haiti, particularly during the years of the Duvalier regimes.
National and regional notions of what constitutes ‘normality’ are invariably made up
of loose coalitions of discourses, but this is acutely the case in colonized countries and post-
colonial nation-states that have been forged from different ethnic groupings, faiths or
linguistic communities. In such societies supposedly consensual norms tend to be
fabrications, welded together by ruling elites, while individual subjects are left trying to
reconcile the disparate parts of a fragmented heritage. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the best-
known ‘madwoman’ in Caribbean fiction, Jean Rhys’s Antoinette, a reworking of the lunatic
in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, feels her alienation is a product of her
predicament as a white Creole. She sees herself as someone who is scorned by both the
majority Afro-Creole population of the Caribbean and by white Europeans: referred to as a
‘white cockroach’ by the one group and a ‘white nigger’2 by the other. Antoinette belongs to a
minority community, but arguably her sense of interstitial subjectivity is not altogether
different from that of the Caribbean’s various other post-Columbian communities, all of
which have been shaped by double or multiple cultural heritages, though most have been less
socially privileged than Rhys’s heroine. One finds similarly dissociated characters in the three
texts from the Anglophone Caribbean discussed in this paper: Derek Walcott’s Dream on
Monkey Mountain (1970), Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980)
and Lovelace’s Salt; and dissociation is also to the fore in the three Francophone Caribbean
texts considered alongside them: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows
(1986), Gisèle Pineau’s Macadam Dreams (1995) and Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger,
Madness (1968).
Walcott’s expressionist masterpiece Dream on Monkey Mountain is a brilliant
dramatization of the dissociated Caribbean psyche, pulled in divergent directions – towards
both Africa and Europe – by the cultural schizophrenia3 that has resulted from the colonial
subject’s induction into two diametrically opposed value-systems. Initially it may seem that
the play’s protagonist, the St. Lucian charcoal burner Makak, is a case-study of a particular
aberrant psychology, but as the action unfolds it becomes clear that he is far from alone in
suffering from a split consciousness: the imbrication of European and African cultural
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legacies in the Caribbean affects all the characters. Both of the epigraphs to the two parts of
the play are taken from Sartre’s Prologue to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and they
foreground the extent to which Walcott is consciously dramatizing a dissociated colonial
psychology. Part One is prefaced by a passage from Sartre’s Prologue which explains how
madness ensues when psychotic hallucinations of jeering demons are replaced by the
congratulatory compliments of angels;4 and the epigraph to Part Two is an oft-quoted passage
from the Prologue, which talks about the double bewitching that characterizes the ‘nervous
condition’ of the ‘“native”’, who alternates between ‘Mass’ and ‘mumbo-jumbo’ (DMM
277).5 This double bewitching is at the heart of Makak’s expressionist ‘dream’. In the
naturalistic action that frames this dream, he has been thrown in prison for being drunk and
disorderly. His detention seems to be a trope for the colonial predicament and his release at
the end of the play suggests a movement beyond a colonial psychology. In his dream he
imagines a White Goddess figure calling him to become a Messianic leader of his people,
transforming him from a mimetic colonial monkey (a meaning suggested by his name) into a
lion-like ‘black warrior,/ The king of Ashanti, Dahomey, Guinea’ (DMM 228). So the play
revolves around the paradox that ‘a white mist in the mind’ (DMM 235; italics added)
initiates Makak’s fantasy of a return to Africa; and his vision seems to reflect Fanon’s
view that the black man’s ‘self-division’6 seeks recognition through the
love of a white woman. Hence his desire to ‘marry white culture, white
beauty, white whiteness’.7 Ultimately, though, the dream cannot be sustained and the
play concludes with an Epilogue in which he decides to go ‘back home, back to the
beginning, to the green beginning of the world’ (DMM 326), the mountain hut where he has
always lived. His liberation, from both jail and his dream, suggests emancipation from a
colonial mentality, in which Europe and its obverse Africa have come together to shackle his
mind: the ‘double bewitching’ that Sartre finds in Fanon. Makak views himself as having
been the rootless flotsam and jetsam of the Middle Passage – he speaks of having been
‘washed from shore to shore, as a tree in the ocean’ (DMM 326) – and prior to this, in the
penultimate scene, he has exorcised both the dream of Africa and the ‘white light’ that that
has ‘paralysed [his] mind’ (DMM 319) by beheading the woman who has bewitched him.
One possible reading is that the play, written and first produced at a time of Black
consciousness raising in the Caribbean,8 represents Walcott’s attack on ‘back to Africa’
movements, but its trajectory suggests the extent to which these have been generated by a
Eurocentric construction of the region. Dream on Monkey Mountain is dismissive of the
legacies of both Europe and Africa, which together have induced a condition of ‘nervous’
dissociation in the Caribbean subject’s mind. Makak returns to his home in the Caribbean
natural world; and Walcott’s dramatic practice roots itself in Caribbean folk forms.9
Both the ‘Africa’ and the ‘Europe’ of the play are creations of Makak’s imagination,
but his dream is far from being a product of the wandering mind of an old man. Walcott’s
production note says that ‘The play is a dream, one that exists as much in the given minds of
its principal characters as in that of its writer’ (DMM 208), and as the psychodrama unfolds it
becomes clear that it issues from the collective consciousness of all the characters, including
Makak’s fellow-detainees and their jailer, Corporal Lestrade, who shares a name with the
bumbling Scotland Yard inspector of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The mixed-race Lestrade is
initially characterized as an authority figure, a staunch upholder of the colonial order, but the
sequence in which whiteness is put on trial and which culminates with his urging Makak to
decapitate the white Muse is located within his mind. At the end Lestrade is reinstated as a
colonial administrator, but in the dream sequences his fantasies of Africa display the play’s
most extravagant reactions against Eurocentric colonialism. Put simply, the dissociation that
Dream on Monkey Mountain dramatizes is a collective predicament that cuts across class,
race and colour, though the characters respond to it in different ways. While Makak may
 3

seem to be the play’s central case-study of colonial ‘nervousness’, all the characters have
dissociated psyches.
Makak may not be a Caribbean Everyman, but he is certainly a St Lucian Anyman.
And something similar might be said of the protagonist of Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa
Will Soon Come Home, which explores the alienation experienced by its narrator/protagonist,
Nellie, employing a fragmentary, radically disjunctive narrative mode, a range of Jamaican
registers, and a battery of time-shifts that frustrate attempts at linear reading. Its
defamiliarizing structure seems to foreground ruptures in Jamaican women’s experience and
Nellie seems to be a Jamaican Anywoman, a figure who like Makak has a representative
significance, a figure who is a product of what Brodber’s Jamaican contemporary Olive
Senior has spoken of as double socialization.10 Passages such as the following, in which
Nellie comments on her family history, lend credence to such a view:
My father grew with the pale faces. He learnt from them that a man is worthy of his
hire only after he has served well in his station; that he should stick to principles and
know his limitations: the rich man in his castle; the poor man at his gate. That’s what
we learnt: of principle, the love of the underdog and Shakespeare.
Our mother’s father fought in the Boer War. The Germans called him monkey
and he hated them with all his gall but she didn’t know why. The English were
hypocrites and worse than the Americans who at least told you plainly to your face
that they didn’t like you. That’s what he taught her. Corpie was angry all right. He had
been to Africa and seen men’s golden stools stolen and he was angry. […]
We had patriarchs. The one pale etchings of principle, invisible gifts of
daffodils fluttering in the breeze, Hamletian castles and wafer disintegrating on your
tongue; the other black with anger.11
However, the view that Nellie is a Jamaican Anywoman is thrown into question by an
interview comment of Brodber’s in which she said that ‘the initial purpose of the novel was
[…] to serve as a case study of the dissociative personality for her social work students’;12
and the interviewer, Evelyn O’Callaghan, glosses this by saying that:
The notion of dissociation, [Brodber] clarifies, encompasses the idea of a once-
integrated personality fragmented through a traumatic experience, or a series of
experiences. The dissociated personality is unable to connect all the aspects of the
past, or to connect past with present – “the bits are scattered”.’13
That said, although Nellie’s syndrome may be particular, the ‘scattered’ bits suggest it can be
read as a metonym for Jamaican women’s experience. As a ‘case study’, she seems, like
Makak, to point towards dissociation as a more general Caribbean phenomenon. Again the
collision of the Eurocentric and Afrocentric strands in the protagonist’s mental make-up
appears to produce psychic fragmentation and in this case the ‘nervous condition’ is
compounded by the inculcation of feelings of inferiority in black, and mixed-race, women.
Additionally, Jane and Louisa suggests that the fissures in Jamaican women’s
experience have resulted from incompatible discursive traditions. Brodber has argued that
Caribbean historiography needs to counter the ‘disvaluing of any source of knowledge but
book learning’ by engaging in work, analogous to that of the West African griot, in order to
collect hitherto unrecorded oral histories, because, ‘contrary to what happened in other non-
literate societies, a vigorous oral tradition in which the group’s history was handed down, did
not develop’ in the Caribbean’.14 And in Jane and Louisa she counters ‘daffodils fluttering in
the breeze’ and ‘Hamletian castles’ with what Carolyn Cooper has referred to as ‘a Neo-
African folk aesthetic of functional form: literature as wordhoard, the repository of the
accumulated wisdom of the community’.15 This aesthetic informs the whole novel and is
central to the image that provides its title: ‘Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home’ is a
popular Caribbean children’s song game,16 and it functions in the text both as an index of
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childhood innocence, and as a possible portal into a future in which the divisions of the
Caribbean past may be resolved.
The novel’s central symbol, the kumbla, a
gnomic trope for Jamaican women’s situations, helps to illustrate how this aesthetic is
developed. Like Makak’s dream, the kumbla suggests entrapment in a mind-set that thwarts
personal fulfillment. In a pivotal passage, Brodber explains:
A kumbla is like a beach ball […]
But the kumbla is not just a beach ball. The kumbla is an egg shell, not a
chicken’s egg or a bird’s egg shell. It is the egg of the August worm. […] It is a round
seamless calabash that protects you without caring.
Your kumbla is a parachute. You, only you, pull the cord to rip its seams. From
the inside. For you. Your kumbla is a helicopter, a transparent umbrella, a glassy
marble, a comic strip space ship. You can see both in and out. You hear them. They
can hear you. They can touch you. You can touch them. But they cannot handle you.
And inside is soft carpeted foam, like the womb and with an oxygen tent. Safe,
protective time capsule. Fed simply by breathing!
They usually come in white. (JL 123)
‘Kumbla’ is not a word that exists in Jamaican Creole and, in Carolyn Cooper’s view, it is ‘a
subtle linguistic metaphor’ that draws on the ‘playful disguise, characteristic of the Jamaican
Creole lexicon’,17 a point that she develops by quoting a comment of Frederick Cassidy’s on
the word ‘coobla’, which, he says, is ‘probably a reduction of calabash’.18 The kumbla
functions in the novel as a round protective cocoon that offers women womb-like insulation,
but in a majority of cases the security it offers comes at the expense of agency in the external
world. In the penultimate section, Brodber expands on the kumbla’s hitherto puzzling nature
and its association with whiteness: ‘When a thing successfully protects, it becomes your
talisman, a part of your personal culture. When it is used by many others and they begin to
believe in its powers, it becomes part of the life of the group and they make for it whenever
the need arises’ (JL 142). And this is followed by an account of how persuasive older voices
on the female side of Nellie’s family have taught her that ‘the black womb is a maw’,
inculcating a negative view of black women’s sexuality from which she and her
contemporaries need to protect themselves ‘in the shade of a kumbla’ (JL 143). The
discursive elements that have shaped her socialization are divided, but the dominant voices
have encouraged abstinence, or disinfecting the black womb with ‘white lint’. Ultimately,
then, the kumbla, is a shell that offers protection, but at the price of a denial of black
womanhood. Nellie says ‘With every orgasm, a white lie must be born, an image, a cowl, a
kumbla to cover its fruits’ (JL 143). The novel ends, though, with her emerging from her
kumbla, saying she is ‘getting ready’ (JL 147) and dreaming she is carrying a fish, an Afro-
Jamaican sign of pregnancy.19 If the remedy for dissociation is a regression into one’s past
that enables one to piece together apparently disconnected fragments, then the trajectory of
the text has taken Nellie through this process and she emerges on the threshold of achieving a
new-found awareness of self that has its roots in Jamaican folk culture. In the words of the
song game, Jane and Louisa will soon come home. So, like Walcott’s Makak, Nellie can be
read as a specific case study, but if one sees the two protagonists as dissociated victims of a
Fanonian nervous condition, then they emerge as communal figures, metonyms for the larger
Afro-Caribbean and mixed-race populations that have had to construct a sense of self from
disparate, seemingly incompatible cultural strands. Both end their psychic and discursive
journeys by coming ‘home’ to the Caribbean.
Lovelace’s Salt also focuses on the relationship between seemingly dissociated people
and the communities to which they belong. Salt particularly examines the roles played by
individuals in the making and unmaking of notions of community in the late colonial and
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early post-independence period in Trinidad. Lovelace employs an ensemble cast to explore

the range of possibilities available to Trinidadians during this watershed period, but
particularly focuses on two potential leader figures in this transitional period of Trinidad’s
history, Alford George and Bango.20 Alford George is a product of the colonial education
system and he remains within its fold in early adulthood, when he becomes a teacher himself.
Dumb until he is six years old and subsequently something of an outsider– he becomes an
umpire while others play cricket – he is the eponymous ‘madman’ of the chapter ‘Becoming a
Madman’, which inspired my title. In his case, the subaltern community in which he grows
up is the group that decides what constitutes madness and it considers him ‘mad’, because he
pursues ideals that are alien to them. He dreams of travelling into ‘the world, the world,
already to him more than a place, a mission, a Sacred Order that brought him into meaning,
into Life’;21 he reads Marie Corelli, Somerset Maugham, Gibbon and Hazlitt; he adopts
Classical Greek heroes as role models and rejects local terms such as ‘jook, mamaguy and
obzocky’22 for a formal English, with so-called ‘correct pronunciation’ and ‘better elocution’
(Salt 33). In short, Alford George subscribes to a colonial mentality, which seems an
aberration in the rural Trinidadian world in which he grows up, though by the end of the
novel he will seem less of a madman than at this early stage and one interesting reading of his
character has seen him as a Gramscian peasant intellectual.23
In contrast, there is no suggestion that his complementary opposite, Bango, is mad.
Bango is a carnivalesque storyteller, with a developed sense of subaltern history – a character
who also invites a Gramscian reading: he has a commitment to Trinidadian popular culture
(cricket, steelband and stickfighting) and a stubborn resistance to succumbing to what he sees
as the continuing condition of ‘unfreedom’, under which most Trinidadians live. In the
opening chapter he is introduced as the teller of a folk legend, the tale of his ancestor Guinea
John who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa, ‘taking with him the mysteries of
levitation and flight’ (Salt 3). This, though, is just part of the mini-history of the Caribbean
past that Bango narrates. He also tells tales of Columbus’ arrival in the New World and
Emancipation Day, when his great-grandfather JoJo was arrested and flogged, because he
cursed the governor for ‘granting him a half-way freedom instead of giving him the liberation
that was his due’ (Salt 45); and, most importantly, he relates these historical events to the
present social situation, in which the problem is no longer ‘how to keep people in captivity. It
[is] how to set people at liberty’ (Salt 7). Bango’s thinking is close to the position advocated
by Brodber in her essay on the need to recuperate submerged oral histories. He emerges as a
Trinidadian griot, a contemporary incarnation of JoJo, equally unwilling to accept anything
less than full freedom, which he feels should take the form of reparation through the openly
acknowledged granting of land that he believes is rightfully his. And, in a central episode in
the novel, he lectures Alford George on the need for an alternative oral historiography:
‘They write their history down and you don’t ask them nothing. You swallow it down
even when it don’t make sense. But as soon as Blackpeople start to talk, you want
date and name and time and place as if you more interested in the scenery than in the
story.’ (Salt 187)
The conversation persuades Alford George both of the justice of Bango’s case and of the
historically determined inequalities that have been perpetuated in the post-independence
nationalist politics, in which he has become involved by this point in the action.
The novel moves to a conclusion amid Independence Day celebrations, with Alford
George realizing that ‘Bango had kept the self that he, Alford, had lost’ and in an epiphanic
moment feeling ‘shame, at himself and his community that had left it to Bango alone to be
outraged at the indignity its people continued to live under’ (Salt 257). Moving beyond the
colonial values that have made him ‘become [ ] a madman’, he now aligns himself with
Bango, who, as on an earlier occasion, has assembled an inter-racial troop to represent the
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different races of the island as his personal statement of independence and communal unity.
Salt ends with the ‘I’ narrator of its final section marching with Alford George and Bango and
his troop, and hoping that representative members of Trinidad’s French Creole and Indian
communities will join them in this inter-racial action. Significantly, whether they will or not
is left as an open question: there is no suggestion that there can be an easy reconciliation of
the ethnic divisions that have fragmented the society. Nevertheless this conclusion opens up
the possibility that what has been a dissociated community is coming together in an
egalitarian vision of national unity, rooted in Creole popular culture and led by a subaltern
figure who has refused to surrender to colonial appropriations.
Lovelace uses a polyphonic technique in Salt, a mode of writing which he has likened
to the multiplicity of voices that ‘appear in a Shango ceremony’,24 and the net effect of this is
to give the sense of a people trying to talk itself into existence through an Afro-Creole
mélange of discourses. The focus of interest changes repeatedly and biographies of minor
characters are introduced late on in the novel, expanding notions of what constitutes
Caribbean Creole community by demonstrating both its diversity and the distinctive
individuality of its various members. The novel exposes some of the limitations of the
nationalist politicians of Trinidad’s independence generation, but it offers an alternative to
dissociation through its own inclusivist nationalist project, which not only encompasses a
broad repertory of characters, but also fashions a fictional technique that expresses their
medley of viewpoints.
Patrick Chamoiseau’s ground-breaking first novel Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows
(Chronique des sept misères) is very similar to Salt in its attempt to forge a communal
aesthetic, though it displays a theoretical awareness of créolité, the theorizing that has been to
the fore in Francophone Caribbean thinking about identity, which has no equivalent in
Lovelace’s engagement with subaltern historiography. The novel comes with a preface by
Edouard Glissant, which expounds on the activities of the ‘word scratcher’ (‘marquer de
paroles’),25 a neologism for the writer who attempts to carnivalize the text by introducing
Martinican oral traditions into the supposedly scribal medium of the novel; and the first
section has an epigraph from Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, which anticipates the way in
which the rhizomatic subaltern histories that structure the novel’s narrative will subvert
colonial historiography: ‘… History is fissured by histories that cast away upon irremediable
shores those who never had time to see themselves through the tangle of tropical vines’.26
Lovelace achieves a vision of community through the use of a polyphony of voices.
Chamoiseau goes further by using a collective narrative voice: the novel is narrated by the
‘djobeurs’, a vanishing breed of wheelbarrow porters, who once moved goods between Fort-
de-France’s markets, in Glissant’s words, performing odd-jobs that are ‘free-form and created
afresh each day’.27 They begin by saying ‘the story of nameless men offers only a single
sweetness, that of words’ (CSS 7) and gradually channel their readers into a world of words
which gives voice to the underclass’s ‘tangle of tropical vines’. The novel has a wandering
rhizomatic trajectory and, when it appears to have reached a formal end, is supplemented by a
series of appendices: a newspaper report about the rebuilding of Fort-de-France’s central
market; a series of poems about the everyday life of the market, which formed part of the
original text of the novel, and a collection of snippets and notes. Extracted from the main
body of Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, but still present as an addendum, these fragments
frustrate the notion of a definitive text, suggesting rather that the djobeurs’ narrative is a
provisional, dialogic hotchpotch, a formal equivalent of their piecemeal, odd-job work.
The djobeurs recount numerous overlapping histories, many of which circle around
ex-centric behaviour, induced by social changes. The novel’s wandering tangle of stories
includes several accounts of characters who flout conventional notions of normality. The
djobeurs comment that ‘Those who clung to the market often succumbed to a kind of
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madness that became commonplace’ (CSS 99). The fates of the djobeur Bidjoule and Odibert,
a market pepper-seller, afford two of many instances of this. Bidjoule is plunged into a spiral
of despair after his barrow loses a wheel and snaps its axle. This culminates in his burying
himself ‘up to the waist and claiming to be a yam’, and being admitted to an ‘appalling’
psychiatric hospital where he dies (CSS 100). Odibert suddenly announces she is a nun,
recites psalms every ten minutes and refuses to sell her pepper to men or to allow them to
‘use her section of the sidewalk in front of the market gates’, only permitting ‘girls, ladies
and certain pederasts’ (CSS 121-2) to come near her after this. And, when she subsequently
hears her own obsequies, while listening to funeral announcements on the radio, Odibert
disappears into a fountain, seemingly fried from inside after drinking its waters, which are
immediately coveted as magical by a multitude of ‘quimboiseurs’ (folk healers) (CSS 124).
Such episodes may seem to be the stuff of oral fable, or possibly magic realism,
which is how the novel’s translator, Linda Coverdale, following Glissant’s characterization of
it, describes the novel’s mode.28 Certainly Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows blends fabulist and
realist discourses in a manner that embodies the aesthetics of créolité and interrogates
metropolitan norms; and one could argue that its method is a formal correlative of its
representation of ‘madness’. At the same time, its meandering structure is a counter-
discursive response to linear, progressive narrative and this particularly suits those aspects of
its theme which suggest madness has been occasioned by a particular set of social
circumstances. Bidjoule’s decline is only the most striking instance of the collapse of the
djobeurs’ way of life in post-World War II Martinique, a decline which is partly, the novel
suggests, caused by modernization, but also very specifically by the assimilationist policies
introduced after Martinique became a DOM in 1946. As Michael Niblett points out,29
the djobeurs’ social world is destroyed by the increase in imported French
produce that accompanies Departmental status and, to borrow Glissant’s
words, Bidjoule’s condition is symptomatic of a people whose ‘relation
with its surroundings (what we would call its nature) is in a discontinuous
relation to its accumulation of experiences (what we would call its
culture).’30 Odibert’s bizarre behaviour can also be seen as a direct result
of the conferral of DOM status on Martinique. Prior to becoming a pepper-
seller in the market, she has been a small-time dealer in funeral goods,
but, the djobeurs explain, ‘Once we were officially declared French […],
made-in-France funeral parlors began offering complete service packages:
hearse, interment, and all the trimmings’ (CSS 122). Odibert is unable to
compete with this streamlined commercialization of death and so the
event that leads to her death, hearing about her own obsequies on the
radio, has a particularly grim appropriateness.
Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows is an elegy for an older Martinican
way of life, personified by the djobeurs, but also embodied in a range of
other characters, and anthologized in the novel’s accounts of folk
practices, inventories of everyday activities and retellings of oral legends,
all of which give life to the tangled vines of Caribbean nature and its
storytelling traditions. It does not sentimentalize the past – the legacy of
slavery is omnipresent and in a central section a zombi from the slave
past, Afoukal, tells the master-djobeur, Pipi, who is the pivotal figure in the
elegy for the demise of the pre-DOM market culture, ‘eighteen Dream-
Words’ that document the ‘most searing day-after-day distress’ (CSS 110;
italics in original) suffered under the plantation system. Nevertheless the
suggestion is that in the pre-World War II period a self-sustaining subaltern
 8

community created a culture that existed more or less autonomously

under French colonial rule. After this, with the coming of departmental
status, this has been destroyed by greater interference from metropolitan
France. The reality of such supposed equal status, as the novel portrays it,
is that Martinique has been co-opted into French economies that
disadvantage overseas satellite departments and this generates various
forms of madness. So, as in the three Anglophone texts considered here,
the conflict between two value-systems afflicts Caribbean subjects with
forms of cultural schizophrenia, but while Walcott, Brodber and Lovelace in
their different ways all dramatize a process of mental decolonization as a
first step on the road to sanity, Chamoiseau depicts a process of social
change, in which such independence appears less possible.
Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows ends with an account of the decline and
death of Pipi, which has striking affinities with Walcott’s Dream on Monkey
Mountain. Like Makak, Pipi becomes obsessed with a spectral woman, a
jablesse, whose love he seeks to win through discovering a hoard of gold,
protected by the zombi Afoukal. Prior to this he has left the market and
found success as a wonder-working gardener, who has the ability to grow
and harvest crops at times of the year when they would not normally
come to fruition, one of many instance of the subaltern world’s organic
relationship with nature, and a clear index that this extends beyond the
urban market milieu of the djobeurs. Pipi’s success as a gardener is,
however, comparatively short-lived, since his fame attracts the attention
of local politicians, notably Aimé Césaire (CSS 142-4),31 the mayor of Fort-de-
France and one of the main architects of the conferral of DOM status on
Martinique. Viewing Pipi as a symbol of Martinican independence, the
Establishment finances the ‘industrialization’ of his ‘garden techniques’
(CSS 144), with disastrous results. Officialdom then intervenes further by
bringing in scientists to rectify the situation and soon all the miraculous
plants are sterile, shrivelled or ruined, it would seem by pesticides.
So Pipi, too, becomes a victim of Martinique’s changing World War II
political climate and he is subsequently reported to have covered himself
with earth in the clearing where he had formerly cultivated his ‘madhouse
of plants’(CSS 141), sometimes ‘chang[ing] himself into grass’ or finding ‘a
way to move about underground’ (CSS 152). This is the stuff of rumour, told
to the djobeurs by a group of Rastafarians, but it also represents an
interesting incorporation of the botanical tropes that have been prominent
in Francophone Caribbean literary commentary, as well as postcolonial
theory more generally,32 into the literal substance of the novel. Pipi’s
horticultural methods offer a magical alternative to the Europeanized
imperatives of newly departmentalized Martinique and, although his
Rasta-like alternative economy collapses in the face of the
Establishment’s commodification and is ultimately destroyed by the
jablesse with whom he becomes infatuated, the novel provides a
repository of the older values that are being eradicated by the new
dispensation. Pipi’s quest for gold is abortive: just before he dies, Afoukal
tells him that the only real gold is memory. The djobeurs’ narrative ends
with their suggesting something similar: they huddle together, apparently
fearing a form of madness, since they feel their disappearance is
 9

imminent, but saying that telling this ‘version’, one of many possibilities,
may have done some good. In a remark reminiscent of the Glissant
epigraph, with which the novel opens, they comment that ‘History only
counts through what remains when the story’s done’ (CSS 173) and what
remains in this instance is the story they have told. An appended
‘Ethnographer’s Note’ records that both the djobeurs and their memory
have ‘ceased to exist’ (CSS [174]), but of course they remain vitally alive in
the text of Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows.
Gisèle Pineau may be indebted to Chamoiseau for the title of her
novel Macadam Dreams. In Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, ‘macadam’
features prominently as a food ‘dish of rice in saffrony yellow sauce and
codfish simmered with green peppers’ (CSS 32). Originally it is relished by
the djobeurs, but later, like so much in the novel, it becomes a casualty of
changing tastes, as newer market vendors turn to eating fast food. In
Macadam Dreams it has two connotations, both of which resonate with
Chamoiseau. As Renée Larrier has noted, it refers both to the tarmac of
road surfaces and the Creole dish,33 a meaning which reinserts the word
into the lexicon of Guadeloupe’s Creole folk culture and which Pineau has
indicated is the main meaning she attaches to it.34 And, although Pineau’s
place in the créolité movement has been debated, particularly because
she was born in France and returned to live there after two decades in
Guadeloupe, her writing practice seems to propose a creolization of both
experience and language in a novel less concerned with the displacement
of the returned exile than with the alienation of those who have been
rendered exiles at home, because they are victims of an incestuous
patriarchal culture.
Like Chamoiseau, Pineau writes about the experiences of a
subaltern community, in a narrative mode that resembles ‘a tangle of
tropical vines’. However, while he uses a collective narrative voice, she
offers a series of case-studies of women, sometimes blurring the lines
between particular characters, so that notions of discrete subjectivity are
undermined and madness and alienation seem to be shared
predicaments; and any possible consistency in point of view is further
disturbed by her moving between first- and third-person voices to render
the consciousness of her dissociated central protagonist, Eliette. Eliette
has had her world turned upside down in 1928, when she was eight years
old and a hurricane hit Guadeloupe. This drove her mother Séraphine
mad; and as Eliette, now a twice-widowed elderly woman, apparently
remembers these events in the present of the novel, the island is
threatened by the advent of a second ‘Cyclone’, Hurricane Hugo, which
struck Guadeloupe in 1989. In an interview, Pineau has spoken about how
Hugo affected her:
At the time I was thinking about writing this book, we had Hurricane
Hugo. […] After spending the night praying and struggling against
the elements, the next day, when we opened the doors and saw the
land with its devastated features, I told myself that Guadeloupe had
been raped […]. That cyclone had fallen upon Guadeloupe the way a
father raping his daughter falls upon her.35
 10

Eliette appears to have escaped her mother’s madness after the

1928 Cyclone, but in Séraphine’s words, this ‘Passage of the Beast’36 ‘left
a great whirlwind in [her] head’ (MD 13); it wounded her mentally and
physically and left her unable to speak for three years afterwards. What
Eliette does not know, though, is that she suffered from a more personal
cataclysm, which her mother displaced onto the Cyclone. Eliette has been
raped by another ‘Beast’, her father; and her supposed memories of what
happened to her in the Cyclone are not memories at all:
[T]he truth is, Eliette didn’t remember a thing. It was her mama who
had always told her about the night when Guadeloupe had capsized
in the cyclone and been smashed to bits. She called that nightmare
the Passage of the Beast. And to better burn the story into Eliette’s
mind, she was constantly rehashing the memory of the head and
belly wound, the bloodstained sheets […]’. (MD 88)
In the more recent action of the novel, a similar pattern of abusive
incest has been repeated by Eliette’s neighbour, Rosan, who unbeknown
to her is her step-brother. The first section finds her puzzled to see Rosan,
whom she regards as the epitome of honest reliability taken into police
custody, but as the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that he has been
abusing his daughter, Angela, over a period of years. The suggestion is
that, just as hurricanes recur, Guadeloupe’s women are trapped in a cycle
of incestuous abuse, which leaves them traumatized by forces beyond
their control in the domestic world of the home, as well as by events in
the external natural world.
Glissant has written extensively about the destruction of community
in the French Antilles, and argued that a ‘collective “We”’ should be the
‘true subject’ of Caribbean discourse37 – a project that Chamoiseau seems
to be engaging with in his use of the djobeurs as the narrative voice of
Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows – but while Macadam Dreams suggests the
strength to be found in female bonding, its women are for the most part
isolated. Violated at home and unable to articulate their traumas in public,
they are condemned to suffer in silence, and until the dénouement the
novel mirrors this by telling their stories monologically, as a series of
disjointed narratives. And the incestuous abuse to which they are
subjected, horrific enough on a literal level, also serves as a trope for the
more general rape of private space and the sundering of notions of
community and family. The prevalent social and familial structures have
left Eliette, Angela and several other women, whose stories suggest the
extensiveness of abuse, alone and dissociated, but as the original French
title, L’Espérance macadam, suggests, there is hope that the cycle can be
broken. Angela finally denounces her father to save her younger sister
from a similar fate; and the childless Eliette, who now knows the truth
about her own past and Renan, effectively becomes a surrogate mother to
her. Hitherto Eliette has cultivated detachment, preferring not to see what
is going on around her, and this assumption of responsibility represents a
move towards a mutually sustaining ‘We’, a way out of the seemingly self-
perpetuating cycle of abuse suffered in isolation.
Angela’s abuse has continued for so long, because her mother
Rosette has been living in a dream world of fairy tales, Bob Marley songs
 11

and Rastafarian-inspired visions of an idealized Africa 38 and has turned a

blind eye to Rosette’s situation. Like Eliette, she has chosen not to see
unpalatable realities and this attitude seems to typify the response of the
ghetto community in which they live: at one point its residents are
referred to as ‘witnesses to murders, that never saw or heard nothing,
nothing but the rain on the tin roof, the mopeds backfiring, the yapping of
homeless dogs’ (MD 176-7). Their deliberate closing of eyes involves
another kind of blindness, a failure to see the potential of Caribbean
space. At the end, though, with Hurricane Hugo approaching, a sense of
community emerges, as people unite to help to resist its impact. And,
after the hurricane has passed, the novel ends with Eliette planning to
return to her cabin to rebuild it for Angela, the daughter she never had.
Reconstruction will not be easy, but the suggestion is that ‘macadam
dreams’ – the novel ends with these words (MD 215) – hold out the
possibility of an escape from the cycle of madness and abuse; and at this
point ‘macadam’ does seem to refer to more than the folk rice dish; it may
connote the new road on which Eliette is embarking.39 In short the
conclusion is similar to that of Dream on Monkey Mountain, though Pineau
does not emphasize the extent to which the divisions in Guadeloupean
society have been engendered by twentieth-century colonialism and its
aftermath to the same extent as Walcott.40 The underlying causes of
dissociation seem to lie in the failure of family, a failure that can be traced
back to the fragmentation of kinship ties during the period of slavery,
which has been perpetuated across the decades. And seen like this, the
conclusion of Macadam Dreams, in which the affiliative relationship of
Eliette and Angela is replacing conventional filial patterns, seems to be
offering a new version of what ‘family’ might be. Again it holds out the
tentative promise of a move beyond dissociation.
Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy of novellas about Haiti, Love, Anger,
Madness (Amour, Colère, Folie), is less obviously related to colonialism
and its legacy than the other texts discussed in this paper. However, the
action of all three novellas, which are considered in reverse order here, is
set against a backdrop of political tyranny and brutality and the second
and third parts of the trilogy present a stark picture of twentieth-century life
in the America’s first black republic. François Duvalier is never mentioned, but the trilogy
was written during the period of his dictatorship,41 and Anger and Madness readily lend
themselves to interpretation as allegories about life under their regimes.
Madness is everywhere in the novella that bears that name. It is narrated by a mixed-
race poet, René, who has barricaded himself inside a shack with three fellow-poets. René
feels terrorized by menacing ‘devils’, whom he feels uniquely qualified to depict:
No one until now has managed to describe them as well as I have, so intuitively.
Before I even saw them, I pictured them booted, armed, dressed in resplendent red
and black uniforms with gold buttons. I understood the symbolic shorthand:
incandescent flames burning at the bottom of an abyss out of which the damned, in a
supreme and vile temptation, would see a rain of gold. Red, black, gold! Flames,
abyss, ambition!42
However, the reality of the poets’ situation is hard to assess, because facts about their past are
disputed and it is impossible to say whether René is a reliable narrator. When they are
eventually taken into custody and René believes he and a wealthy woman he has loved from a
 12

distance are about to be executed, he envisages this as a crucifixion and anticipates their
being carried into the skies by angels. Throughout, the surrealist mode of narration makes it
hard to distinguish fantasy from reality, but one obvious inference is that poetic creativity is
akin to ‘madness’ – a variation on the aphorism, ‘Great wits are to madness near alli’d’43 –
but the novella is also clearly placing both madness and poetry in direct opposition to the
brutality of the authoritarian regime. So whether the devils René perceives are real – agents
of the state – or whether they are emanations of his tortured mind, the implication is the
same: madness is preferable to the putative sanity of a despotic regime in a state where moral
values have been inverted.
This is a fairly simple thesis, only given life by the vividness of Vieux-Chauvet’s
imagery, a mode akin to René’s ‘symbolic shorthand’; and the mode of ‘Anger’, another
allegorically suggestive fiction, is similar. A family of black petit-bourgeois landowners wake
up one morning to find their property surrounded by sinister ‘men in black’, who are driving
stakes into the ground around their house. The opening sections are fairly abstract –
characters are referred to as ‘the grandfather’, ‘the son’, ‘the mother’ and only gradually
become more individualized – and the action seems to be set just after World War II, but the
paramilitary men in black clearly evoke the ton ton macoutes who terrorized the Haitian
populace during the period of the Duvalier regime. Again the allegory seems to operate in a
fairly straightforward, albeit politically charged, manner. However, in the middle of Anger,
there are two extraordinary chapters, in which Vieux-Chauvet deserts the studied neutrality of
the third-person voice that she uses elsewhere in the novella in favour of first-person
incursions into the minds of the son and daughter of the family, Paul and Rose, both of
whom, like the whole family, find themselves victims of the brutal new politics that is taking
their land and destroying their way of life.
Rose sacrifices herself to try to save the family’s land, agreeing to sleep with a so-
called ‘gorilla’, a thug who is an embodiment of the new tyrannical regime, every night for a
month. As Joan Dayan points out, the regime’s assertion of power has to be enacted through
the possession of land ‘annexed to a woman’s body’.44 In Paul’s interior monologue, which
precedes Rose’s, he plans to kill the ‘gorilla’ rather than compromise. In hers, Rose initially
believes she retains her virginity, because she only gives her body, not her soul, but as her
account of her sexual relations with the gorilla develops, she sees herself as a complicit
partner in this liaison, equally guilty of what she considers to be bestiality. In a shocking
reversal of her belief that she remains an inviolate virgin, she imagines herself as a
‘lascivious and insatiable panther’ and views her seducer as a ‘poor dog craving affection
who turns into a wolf as a result’ (LAM 252).
This section, out of keeping with the general moral tone of the allegorical method of
Anger, is a brief return to the complex psychoanalytic mode of the first part of the trilogy,
Love. In Love, the narrative takes the form of a journal kept by Claire Clamont, a thirty-nine-
year old spinster, who is the oldest of three sisters in a once-prosperous aristocratic family.
Thought to be a demure asexual woman by most of those around her, Claire reads Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, thinks of herself as a Haitian Madame Bovary and fantasizes a sexual
relationship with her sister Félicia’s French husband, Jean Luze, who represents the romance
of metropolitan France to both her and her two sisters. Initially she vicariously projects
herself onto her youngest sister, Annette, who appears to have a brief affair with Jean Luze;
and later she thinks of herself as his wife, when Félicia is taken ill and she looks after their
child and the household.
The main events in Love are much easier to locate in a specific
moment of twentieth-century Haitian history. They take place at the end of
the 1930s, probably in 1939,45 a period after the end of the American
‘occupation’ of Haiti and years before Francois Duvalier’s assumption of
 13

power.46 There is none of the surrealism of Madness, nor the abstractions

of Anger, only the intense brooding ‘madness’ of Claire’s journal, which
also records how the family’s fortunes have been transformed across the
decades and details ways in which their privileged life-style has been
eroded during a period of changing social mores. She feels particularly
terrorized by the local police Commandant, Calédu, whom she introduces
as ‘a ferocious black man who […] wields the right of life and death over
us, and […] abuses it’ (LAM 8). Allegory is far less obvious here, but Love,
too, lends itself to being read as an indictment of the Duvalier regime.
Claire’s responses remain highly individualized and her journal
shows her self-conscious awareness of the extent to which her repression
has been determined by the social imperatives of her upper-class, Catholic
upbringing:
[…] I imagined sexual relations, caresses, even kisses, to be
shameful acts that only the Church could absolve through the
sacrament of marriage. […] Shamefaced, I learned to repress my
instincts. Any intimacy with those who did not belong to the highest
level of society meant dishonor for my parents. (LAM 12)
So, like Brodber’s Nellie, she has been indoctrinated with negative beliefs
about women’s sexuality, which are particularly associated with her class-
race position in the society, and as she puts it herself, her desire for Jean
Luze is enough to ‘make a woman lose her mind’ (LAM 45). She is very
lucid about the extent to which unfulfilled desire can lead to madness, but
for all her awareness fails to understand another strand in her psychic
make-up. As the novella progresses, her reveries of lovemaking with Jean
Luze are occasionally disturbed by ‘a dangerous and unbidden thought’
(LAM 84). At one points she imagines herself in the role of a criminal
handcuffed by Commandant Calédu and subsequently she has a dream in
which a phallic statue of Calédu comes to life, thrusts a weapon into her
and then beheads her. It is, she says, part of a recurrent pattern of
nightmares she has suffered from throughout her life, nightmares in which
she is ‘chased by mad bulls, by low beasts, monsters, all wanting to rape
or kill me’ (LAM 121). This pattern effectively inserts her into the role
played by Makak’s white Muse in Dream on Monkey Mountain, but though
the action – right down to the detail of the beheading is very similar – the
gender roles have been reversed and the psychic trauma is played out in
the mind of the woman. Calédu is, of course, real enough, but the terror
figure of her dreams invests him with a level of cruelty that exceeds his
undoubted brutality in the social world of the novel. The figure in her
nightmares is a projection of her subconscious, albeit a creation that has
its roots in her Manichean upbringing, which, as with Rose in Anger, has
prohibited any possibility of her being sexually attracted to blackness. In
the stark binaries of her upper-class Haitian socialization, any such liaison
is supposedly unthinkable, but Vieux-Chauvet vividly dramatizes the
conflict that this causes in Claire’s mind and the real action of the novel
culminates with her actually killing Calédu, after a dénouement in which it
has seemed likely that she may be contemplating suicide or just possibly
murdering one of the family. So while Makak is able to liberate himself
from the Manichean fantasy of his dream and Brodber’s Nellie also stands
 14

on the threshold of a new beginning at the end of Jane and Louisa, Love
ends in tragedy for Claire. She, too, suffers from a form of dissociation
that can be seen to be a product of the cultural schisms in the society, but
in her case there is no way out of the psychic splits that they generate.
Whether one should attribute this to the specifics of the Haitian situation
under the Duvalier regime, when the novella was written, is debatable,
but ‘race’ clearly plays a part and Vieux-Chauvet emphasizes this by
making Claire the darkest-skinned member of her fair-skinned, mixed-race
family; and she never seems to escape from the syndrome explored in
Jane and Louisa, in which the black womb is seen as a maw.
So what conclusions can be drawn from this cross-section of texts?
Recognition of the need for community and a belief in local nature and
folk practices seem to be recurrent patterns in the search to move beyond
the madness instilled by colonialism, and the need for this movement is
incorporated into the fabric of the narrative in Lovelace, Brodber and
Chamoiseau. The Francophone novels are less optimistic about the forging
of a new notion of community, either because of the perpetuation of
external forms of control through the assimilationist policies that come
with DOM status or, in Haiti’s case, the internal control of the Duvalier
years. In their different ways, Walcott, Lovelace and Brodber all offer hope
for a saner post-colonial future. Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven
Sorrows is ultimately elegiac. Vieux-Chauvet narrates a trilogy of
tragedies. Among the Francophone writers only Pineau holds out any real
hope for the future and this depends on female bonding. So there is more
optimism in the Anglophone texts, but the gender politics are very similar
in both the Anglophone and Francophone works: communal bonding
seems altogether more possible in the male texts. The female texts depict
lives lived in isolation, but Pineau’s conclusion offers hope and Brodber
suggests that communal awareness has always been possible through the
folk tradition: her novel has been structured around the song game ‘Jane
and Louisa’. Only Vieux-Chauvet sees no escape from isolation and
madness, predicaments that ensnare both her male and female
protagonists and perhaps this can be explained by her view of twentieth-
century Haitian history, in which it is difficult to find the incipient post-
independence communal consciousness that one finds elsewhere,
particularly in the Anglophone texts.
 1
NOTES
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1961; trans. Richard Howard,
London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
2
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968: 85
3
Cf. Walcott’s poem, ‘Codicil’, where he represents himself as ‘Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles’, The Castaway and
Other Poems, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965: 61; and ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture’, the Prologue to Dream on
Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970: 16-17, where Walcott argues that ‘the New
World Negro [sic]’ can be delivered from ‘servitude [by] the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry’ and stresses
the importance of ‘the writer’s making creative use of his schizophrenia’.
4
Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970: 211. Subsequently
cited as ‘DMM’.
5
Cf. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s use of the same passage for the title of her novel, Nervous Conditions, London: Women’s Press,
1988, where the primary emphasis is on the predicament of Zimbabwean women who suffer from this Fanonian syndrome.
6
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952; trans. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto, 1986: 17.
7
Ibid.: 63.
8
The first production was at the Central Library Theatre in Toronto on 12 August 1967 (DMM 210).
9
See my discussion in Derek Walcott, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999: 70-6.
10
See Senior’s reference to herself as ‘a child of mixed worlds, socialized unwittingly and simultaneously into both’, Olive
Senior, Interview with Charles Rowell, Callaloo, 11, 3 (1988): 481.
11
Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, London: New Beacon Books, 1980: 30. Subsequently cited as
‘JL’.
12
Quoted in Evelyn O’Callaghan, ‘Rediscovering the Natives of My Person’, review of Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come
Home, Jamaica Journal, 16, 3 (1983): 61.
13
Ibid.
14
Erna Brodber, ‘Oral Sources and the Creation of a Social History of the Caribbean’, Jamaica Journal, 16, 4 (1983): 7.
15
Carolyn Cooper, ‘Afro-Jamaican Folk Elements in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home’, in Out of the
Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press, 1990: 279.
16
See J.D. Elder, Song Games from Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain: National Cultural Council, 1964; revised edn.,
1973: 77, for a text of the song.
17
Cooper, ‘Afro-Jamaican Folk Elements in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home: 284.
18
Frederick Cassidy, Jamaica Talk, London: Macmillan and Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1961; 2nd. edn., 1971, 400; cited
in Cooper, ‘Afro-Jamaican Folk Elements’: 284,
19
Cooper, ibid.: 286.
20
The novel makes particular reference to the nationalist phase of twentieth-century Trinidadian politics, when the PNM
(People’s National Movement) was in power, under the premiership of Dr Eric Williams. For a fuller discussion of this
aspect of Salt, see my essay ‘“All o’ we is one”: Carnival Forms and Creolization in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t
Dance and Salt’, in Caribbean Literature after Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, ed. Bill Schwarz, London:
Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2008: 146-60.
21
Earl Lovelace, Salt, London: Faber and Faber, 1996: 27; italics in original. Subsequently cited as ‘Salt’.
22
Respectively Trinidadian Creole terms for ‘stab’ (or ‘dance suggestively’), ‘ridicule’ and ‘awkward’.
23
M. Keith Booker and Dubravka Juraga, The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
Kingston: Ian Randle and Oxford: James Currey, 2001: 181-3.
24
Kelly Hewson, ‘An Interview with Earl Lovelace’, Postcolonial Text, 1, 1 (2004):
http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/view/344/122. Cf. a reference to ‘chanting voices in the Shango palais’,
Salt: 44.
25
Edouard Glissant, ‘A Word Scratcher’, in Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, 1986; trans. Linda
Coverdale, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999: vii-ix. Subsequent references cite ‘CSS’.
26
CSS: [5].
27
Edouard Glissant, ‘A Word Scratcher’, CSS: vii.
28
Linda Coverdale, ‘Afterword’, CSS: 214.
29
Michael Niblett, The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form, and the Nation-State, Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2012: 97.
30
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1989: 61.
31
The passage stops short of overt satire, but in viewing Césaire as a figure who is partially responsible for the capitalist co-
optation of Pipi’s garden techniques, it seems to imply that his policies are the antithesis of the values represented by the
djobeurs.
32
Discussed in my forthcoming essay, ‘After the Bounty: Botany and Botanical Tropes in Caribbean Writing’, in
Re/membering Place, ed. Catherine Delmas and André Dodeman, Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2012.
33
Renée Larrier, Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006:
98; cited in Lorna Burns, ‘Patriarchy and Paradise: Celebrating Macadam Dreams’, The Society for Caribbean Studies
Annual Conference Papers, 8 (2007): 12, ed. Sandra Courtman:
http://www.caribbeanstudies.org.uk/papers/2007/Burns07.pdf. Accessed 18 November 2011.
34
Pineau has commented in an interview, ‘Macadam can evoke the roadway, but in my mind, macadam is a dish, a
Martinican dish, made with rice, codfish, tomato sauce, and onions, The rice is not cooked like “upright” rice, like we
usually cook rice in the Caribbean, pilaf style. It’s a rice cooked with a lot of water that turns into a thick, compact paste.
The rice triples in volume. It’s plain white rice that will give a good quantity of food. It’s the meal of the poor in Martinique’
(Valérie Loichot, ‘“Devoured by Writing”: An Interview with Gisèle Pineau’, Callaloo, 30, 1 [2007]: 331).
35
Nadege Veldwachter, ‘An Interview with Gisèle Pineau’, Research in African Literatures, 35, 1 (2004), 181.
36
Gisèle Pineau, Macadam Dreams, 1995; trans. C. Dickson, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003: 88.
Subsequently cited as ‘MD’.
37
Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: 149.
38
The implied critique is typical of the attitude of many of the post-Glissant generation of writers to the négritudist
beliefs of the previous generation, viz. the early Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. See, e.g., Angela Chambers,
‘Critical Approaches to the Literatures of Decolonization: Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natale’, in An
Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. Sam Haigh, Oxford and New York:
Berg, 1999, 42-4. Césaire should, however, be distinguished from Senghor, who argued that African consciousness is
innately different from European, since it functions through an intuitive form of thinking in which the analytical
faculties are subordinate to the emotional. Césaire saw Negritude as a historical phenomenon that had evolved from
commonalities in the post-colonial history of African peoples, particularly the experience of the Atlantic slave ships
and plantation slavery. See my obituary, ‘Aimé Césaire: Founding Father of Negritude’, The Independent, 4 May 2008:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/aime-cesaire-founding-father-of-negritude-811812.html
39
Beverley Ormerod takes the view that the novel’s title ‘plays upon the meanings of “macadam”, suggesting first of all the
idea of a road: for all the characters are embarked on journeys towards or away from loss’, but sees this initial meaning as
‘negatively qualified by the creole meaning of “macadam”: namely, a mash of rice, codfish and odds and ends designed to
fill the bellies of the poor,’ ‘Displacement and Self-Disclosure in Some works by Gisèle Pineau’, in Ici-Là: Place and
Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French, ed. Mary Gallagher, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003: 219.
40
Exceptions include Pineau’s comment: ‘And even if Papa De Gaulle had eradicated the word colony from maps of the
world, elevated Guadeloupe and it dependencies to the rank of a French overseas département, [Eliette] understood quite
clearly that this gratification alone could not fill one’s belly. She had to work’ (MD 101; italics in original).
41
See Rose Myriam Réjouis, ‘Translator’s Preface’, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness, trans. Rose-Myriam
Réjouis and Val Vinokur, New York: Modern Library, 2009: xix-xxi, for details of the trilogy’s composition and publication.
It was written in Paris in 1967 and published there by Gallimard in the following year. François Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) was
President of Haiti from 1957 to 1971; his son Jean Claude Duvalier (‘Baby Doc’) from 1971 to 1986.
42
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness, 1968; trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, 2009: 290.
Subsequently cited as ‘LAM’.
43
John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, I, line 163.
44
Joan Dayan, ‘Women, History and the Gods: Reflections on Mayotte Capécia and Marie Chauvet’, in An Introduction to
Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. Sam Haigh: 80.
45
Claire is thirty-nine at the beginning of the novella and says she was born in 1900, LAM: 3, 4.
46
The U.S. occupation of Haiti lasted from 1915 to 1934.