33 - Caribbean literature in French: origins and development

Summary

Caribbean literature in French is the symbolic, imaginative expression of the peoples of the French-speaking regions of the Caribbean, including Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guyana, and their dependencies. Each of these areas has in common the legacy of French colonialism. However, differences of history and geography have meant that though fundamental commonalities inform literary production across this linguistic and geographic zone, marked divergences are to be noted in the relative development and importance of various literary styles and themes. The challenge, then, in presenting a brief survey of this literature, is to respect its diversity (of genres, styles, themes, and regional concerns) while offering the reader the means to conceive of this field of writing as a whole. Briefly put, do these texts have anything in common besides the contingency of their common recourse to the French language?

Any attempt to encompass francophone Caribbean literature in this fashion within the boundaries of a conceptual, explanatory apparatus is at once an imperative of critical thought and the staging of an impossible task. Not only is it inevitable that certain texts will remain excluded, others misrepresented. That a world will never fit within the limits of its symbolic representation, that any analysis, no matter how detailed and thorough, will always leave out a stubborn empirical remainder is not simply a vexing logical truism. It also has the advantage, in the context of francophone Caribbean literature, of presenting as a methodological dilemma a more general existential and epistemological impasse whose reappearances and transformations can be traced throughout Antillean history. This chapter will invite the reader to consider francophone Caribbean literature in light of the divisions and alienations characteristic of francophone Antillean experience, as well as their possible transformations and resolutions.