Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Interminably anchored in the wakes of the Middle Passage, Francophone Caribbean literature constructs language simultaneously as a side of destitution and agency: language as the condition of possibility for relation, as a principal instrument of destitution and as a medium of resistance itself in the Black Atlantic archive, language as inaccessible and out of reach while simultaneously an inherent, biological imperative. Decolonial Francophone writers interrupt the record of History by inserting narratives that wouldn’t otherwise be told and imagining what could occupy those voids and silences of History— a version of what Hartman has elsewhere called critical fabulation. The authors in question, Maryse Condé, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Edwidge Danticat, counter these silences in two ways—with their literary projects themselves and within their novels thematically. They do not, however, (re)discover a mother tongue or create a new literary richesse in that mother tongue. Their works witness an imagining otherwise and testify to strategies of sensing, believing and knowing that survived the utter destitution of coloniality not through return or restoration, but through a kind of transmutation of the colonizer’s language. This paper traces and delves into the ways that Afro-Caribbean authors manipulate, experiment on, and intrinsically alchemize the colonizer’s language to create their own idiom that restores their own relationships to matrilineage, inheritance, and language with the tools at their disposal.