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Mobility and Memory: Maritime Crossings of the Storyteller in Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2019
Abstract
This article offers a comparative reading of Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle. Acknowledging the distinct geographical and temporal contexts of the Francophone Caribbean and the Mediterranean, I argue that the authors’ employment of frame narratives and (ch)orality as a mode of collective remembrance and cultural transmission can be read as interventions in the debates on maritime perspectives and the figuration of the sea in contemporary literary studies. This argument is grounded in the mobility, fluidity, and dynamism of oral storytelling and the frame narrative’s pre-novelistic transnational path historically and in the present works, examining the authors’ stylistic and thematic practices as linked to the sea. By putting Agnant and Ghermandi in conversation, this article explores a maritime practice of reading and its potential application to other texts.
Keywords
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 220 - 236
- Copyright
- © Cambridge University Press 2019
References
1 Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Agnant moved to Montréal in 1970 at the age of seventeen. She published her first collection of poetry, Balafres, in 1994. She was later named a finalist for the Prix Dejardins in 1995 with the publication of her first novel, Le Dot de Sara, and her collection of short stories, entitled Le Silence comme le sang, was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Prix du Gouverneur Général in 1997.
2 “At first, I did not really know what form to give to Emma. Should it lean toward fiction or essay-testimony? . . . We can talk about fiction but sometimes, even in Emma, I wonder which part is fiction and which part is the unconscious, my unconscious.” All translations from this interview are mine. See Agnant, Marie-Célie, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” interview by Florence Raymond Jurney, The French Review 79.2 (2005): 384–394 Google Scholar .
3 Born in Addis Ababa, Ghermandi moved to Italy in 1979 at the age of fourteen. She began writing at the end of the 1990s, receiving first prize for her short story “Il telefono del quartiere” in 1999 from the intercultural association Eks&Tra, an organization dedicated to the promotion of migrant authors writing in Italian. Ghermandi is also a founding editor of El Ghibli, the first online journal dedicated to migration literature in Italy.
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35 Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
36 “a way of measuring the damage of alienation.” See Agnant, “Entretien avec Marie-Célie Agnant,” 388.
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43 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 62–63. “for all those to whom they deny the right to be heard.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 78.
44 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 128. “to which I felt no particular tie except that History had willed that I get my education in its language. Deep down, however, my project was taking shape: to examine the routes taken in the old days by the ships.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 159.
45 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 116. “a woman with blue skin, skin without a glimmer of light.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 144.
46 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 181–84.
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48 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 112. “The water that has washed it since the day it was born, this water, with its blue so blue, hides centuries of blood vomited from the holds of the slave ships, blood from all the blacks that were thrown overboard. That’s how the curse arrived. It infiltrated the water of our rivers, the water that we drink, it mixed with our blood, spoiled it.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 139–40.
49 Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 524.
50 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 105. “all the sounds will be silent. In my throat, in my head, in my blood, there will be absolute silence.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 132.
51 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 118. “her body emptied itself of the images thrust up from the depths of an ancient memory, words extracted from the archives buried in her entrails.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 146.
52 Said, “Reflections on Exile.”
53 Gabriella Ghermandi, “Dialogo a distanza con Gabriella Ghermandi,” interview by Federica Sossi, 2008. Retrieved from www.storiemigranti.org.
54 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, England: Routledge, 1995), 78.
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56 “Hence why I like to emphasize the chorus of histories which can give a global, local, singular, and plural dimension all at once” (my translation). See Ghermandi, “Dialogo a distanza con Gabriella Ghermandi,” 2008.
57 Clarissa Clò, “African Queens and Italian History: The Cultural Politics of Memory and Resistance in Teatro delle Albe’s Lunga vita all’albero and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle,” Research in African Literatures 41.4 (2010): 26–42.
58 Giovanna Sansalvadore, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text,” 22.
59 Gabriella Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 2007), 6.
“Hold on tight to that curiosity of yours and collect all the stories you can. One day you’ll be the voice that will tell our stories. You will cross the same sea that Peter and Paul crossed, and you will take our stories to the land of the Italians. You will be the voice of our history that doesn’t want to be forgotten.” Yacob later reiterates his expectations of Mahlet, the storyteller: “Then make a solemn promise in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary. When you grow up you will write my story, the story of those years, and you will take it to Italy, so that the Italians won’t be allowed to forget.” All English translations of Regina di fiori e di perle are by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto unless otherwise noted. See Gabriella Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, trans. Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and Victoria Offredi Poletto (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 2, 58.
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71 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 198. “Today I know what I would say. Everything they built, we paid for. Actually, we have already paid for all the buildings of the next three centuries. Considering the great number of Ethiopians they killed, they owe us a lot of war reparations! . . . It is over, but not so over that we should stop talking about it. We should give them our version of the story.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 212–13.
72 Sansalvadore, “The Uses of ‘Orality’ in an Italian Post-colonial Text,” 20.
73 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 181.
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75 Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 250.
76 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 198. “It is over, but not so over that we should stop talking about it.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 213.
77 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 164. “make the return trip . . . to go back to the route of the big boats and join the others.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 201.
78 Agnant, Le livre d’Emma, 165. “[she] wasn’t dead; she had joined the others, over there.” See Agnant, The Book of Emma, 202.
79 Ghermandi, Regina di fiori e di perle, 251. “I made a promise . . . And so, that is why today I am telling you his story. Which is also my story. But now, yours as well.” See Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, 251.
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