Literature of Reconstruction

Whereas, on the heels of a devastating hurricane’s passing, the final pages of Maximin’s L’Île et une nuit (Chapter 4) hint at both architectural and architextual (re)building in the wake of catastrophe, Chapter 5 examines two works by Haitian Yanick Lahens that directly address the task of (re)construction in the aftermath of large-scale destruction. The chapter begins with a discussion of so-called writings of disaster (Jenson) that have, from the early days of colonization to the present, cast Haiti in a negative, counter-productive light. To the contrary, as a creative counter-discourse to discourses of disaster, literary works from Haiti can be understood as literature of reconstruction. As a phenomenon that is by no means new to Haiti, literature of reconstruction is conceptualized not only as a blueprint or framework for reassessment and rebuilding in/of Haiti, but is demonstrated to constitute, in and of itself, an example of the very reconstruction of which it speaks. In this light, close readings of Lahens’s post-earthquake texts Failles (2010) and Guillaume et Nathalie (2013) illustrate the architextuality of Haitian literature and how, precisely, this vibrant body of works embodies both the path and potential for identity-building in the French Caribbean.

Righting/Writing the Faulted House in Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde

Set in Martinique, Glissant’s La Lézarde (1958) focuses on the years leading up to the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in 1946. In exploring the “spatial logic” (Hitchcock) of Martinican space found in the novel, and the links that characters have with specific parts of this signifying landscape, initial textual analyses demonstrate how these individualized relationships inform each person’s views and actions, and, together, are representative of the competing interests and perspectives involved when attempting to negotiate expressions of French-Caribbean identity. In the context of these conflicting positions articulated by different members of the novel’s young revolutionary group with respect to determining Martinique’s future and chronicling the country’s elusive past, both the conspicuous placement and (in)occupancy of the novel’s principle architectural structure—the Maison de la Source—and La Lézarde’s own (meta)construction serve to illustrate how identity-building in the French Caribbean is fraught with conflict and uncertainty.

Reflections on Interior Design

Chapter 4 considers issues of identity in the context of hurricane Hugo’s gale force winds and rain battering a house and its solitary inhabitant in Guadeloupe, as recounted in the third and final novel of Daniel Maximin’s Caribbean trilogy, L’Île et une nuits (1995). The chapter focuses initially on both implicit and explicit architextual elements of the novel, including Les Mille et une nuits and Traversée de la Mangrove, as well as the contractual assumptions involved in so far as the novel’s role as the trilogy’s final installment. Subsequently, it is argued that the necessarily conditional resistance to external forces exhibited over the course of the storm by the protagonist’s house, Les Flamboyants, can be interpreted as a Caribbean architectural archetype akin to identity-building in the region. This dual architextual-architectural reading leads, in conclusion, to reflections on the outcomes of insularity and the assertion that Les Flamboyants’s survival, destruction and potential reconstruction reveal, on a larger scale, the complex and ongoing negotiations of identity at stake in the French Caribbean.

Gouverneurs de la … Mangrove

As a means of illustrating the central albeit conflicted place that issues of authenticity occupy in the French Caribbean, Chapter 3 examines Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s canonical novel, Traversée de la Mangrove (1989). Consideration of the somewhat heated discussion of Caribbean authenticity prompted by Patrick Chamoiseau’s public reading of Condé’s novel, in evidencing the authors’ stark differences of opinion on the matter, also serves to further inform the fundamentally identitarian dilemmas surrounding the construction of French-Caribbean expression. Subsequent close textual analysis of Traversée de la Mangrove on two distinct architextual and architectural levels illustrates how issues of authenticity are divulged and addressed in the text. Additional consideration of the novel’s architextual properties—in particular with respect to Haitian Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée (1944)—leads, in conclusion, to an examination of the architectural significance of the house that Condé’s main character inhabits and in which he undertakes the (metatextual) project of writing a novel entitled Traversée de la Mangrove.

Questioning the Construction of Dogma

As a means of situating the correlative concepts of authenticity and identity within the historical context of the region, the Introduction discusses the frustrated notion of origins in the French Caribbean and the inherent obstacles faced in negotiating a murky, ambivalent, (pre)colonial past. After an initial assessment and discussion of what the authors of Éloge de la Créolité describe as the “domination of an elsewhere”—the external forces to which the colonized is subject as a direct result of the colonial project—critical attention is devoted to the different means of identity-building that have been proposed by French-Caribbean authors and critics. In subsequently asserting that “reading structure” in the region’s vibrant literature corpus illustrates well how endeavors of authenticity in the French Caribbean might be both conceived and realized in literary terms, the chapter concludes by clarifying the dual methodological approach (architectural and architextual) that constitutes the framework of analysis for this book.

Past and Present Matter(s)

As a complement to the in-depth literary analyses that follow, Chapter 1 begins by examining a bona fide architectural structure, the Haitian gingerbread house, as a literal—i.e. physical—manifestation of authentic French-Caribbean construction. Drawing from both (past) traditional techniques and present-day technologies and innovations, the Gingerbreads’ vernacular architecture is described as a fundamentally localized, transformative building process that, for the purposes of this book, equate with what can be understood as the vernacular architexture of the French Caribbean. Hence, the recent “spatial turn” (Conley) in literary criticism should encompass not only natural but human landscapes in so far as their integral role as characters in the telling and creating of the region’s identifying narratives. Consequently, three brief textual analyses of French-Caribbean works serve to illustrate how the construction of individual and collective identities is informed by the architectural and architextual structures found within literature. The chapter concludes with an overview of relevant literary criticism, in particular as pertaining to the role of literary form in the evolving fields of spatial and postcolonial theory.

Reconquering Dimensions

By way of a brief summary of Ulysses’ return from Troy to Ithaca in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Conclusion begins by juxtaposing the fundamentally different notions of the house as found in traditional epic narratives—the mythes fondateurs of which Édouard Glissant is so wary—and the literatures of the French Caribbean. The static, unchanging nature of Ulysses’ home, as well as the tree whose literal roots remain part of its construction, are what allow him to reclaim his identity and be duly recognized. Whereas the Caribbean house plays a no less integral role in the negotiation and construction of identity, the architectural and architextual analyses of previous chapters are revisited as a means of illustrating that such identity-building is, in the French Caribbean, a necessarily long and arduous process. In conclusion, the dual methodological lenses of architecture and architexture are demonstrated to be informative critical tools with which to gauge the dynamic notion of constructing identity—a near-cyclical processes of destruction and/or reassessment followed by subsequent (re)construction that, while by nature not absolute, is no less defining of a people’s perceptions and expressions of place and self.