Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 32

Mauritian literature, from the time one can speak of a local literature on the island, has always embraced and celebrated the pluralism of culture from all perspectives. While no known indigenous population precedes the colonial occupation of either island, the region was traversed by different adventurers, traders, and seafarers. The first literary writing in the region is seen in published journals; poetry of a more predictable kind celebrating colonial culture as well as the landscape makes up early French literary creation. Novelistic creation is seen much later. The Mauritian novel L’Etoile et la clef. (The Star and the Key) was published in 1945 by Loys Masson, a white Mauritian author who went to France before World War II, never to return. His situation as a British national (since Mauritius was then a British colony) disqualified him from enlisting in the French army and his presence in France also complicated his enlisting on the British side. Masson was a successful journalist, poet, and novelist, was part of the Résistance, and in fact served as the editor of the strongly left journal Lettres françaises (French letters). He was known to be quite hotheaded: he was expelled from the Communist Party of France, as he had been, early on in Mauritius, expelled from the College de Curepipe for striking a teacher.

Masson’s novel celebrates Mauritius at the height of the colonial enterprise as the star of and key to the Indian Ocean. Its main preoccupation is to legitimize not just the colonial venture in Mauritius but to present the colonials as forging a more hardy and enlightened version of Frenchness than that to be found in France. So whilst the most spurious of colonial hierarchies anchors and cradles the narrative, there is also the simultaneous effort to distinguish the hardiness of the colonial whites (who live amongst other races, who are transplanted from their natural habitat in Europe, and whose lives glorify the Empire) from metropolitans who, for their part, reap the benefits of these adventurous lives without an understanding of their courage. The tension in the colonial novel plays out in the aspirations of the colonial writers to mark their presence within the French tradition and to present themselves as distinct from it.

Les Marrons (The Maroons, 1844), considered the first Réunionese novel and written by Louis‐Timagène Houat, registers an earlier critique of slavery. It recounts a fictional tale between an African slave and a white colonial woman with whom he had grown up. The mulatto author wrote the novel while in Paris, where he took refuge after being expelled from his native island for having taken part in anticolonial activities. Appearing just before Abolition on the island, the novel takes up emblematic themes in Réunionese history of maroons (runaway slaves), of métissage (racial mixing), and of the community of slaves and/or their supporters that took refuge in the mountainous and volcanic regions to survive. The illustrations in the original contain remarkable images that pay homage to the Réunionese landscape and present it as sympathetic to the anticolonial, antislavery cause.

The most substantive body of fictional work is provided in the form of the colonial novel by the Réunionese duo Aimé Merlo and Georges Athéna, prolific writers who were journalists and critics and who co‐wrote under the pseudonym Marius‐Ary Leblond.³ These authors also wrote an authoritative account of the older Leconte de Lisle, whom they presented as anticolonial and progressive and in whose footsteps they wanted to follow. Amongst the many journals they founded or to which they contributed between 1911 and 1941 was La Vie (Life), where the typical prejudices and orientation toward “primitive” peoples, their culture, and art imitate those that we might find in the progressive circles in France and which tinge literary movements such as Symbolism and later Surrealism. The Leblonds, in both their critical and literary work, subscribe to the particular notion of cultural mingling that was prominent in the Indian Ocean intellectual context.⁴ The fact that different races and cultures lived in close proximity was promoted as something unique and essential to the identity of these new branches of the nation, which the colonies were. While “race,” as used in French in the nineteenth century, also conveyed the sense of culture and civilization, it is clear that the hierarchy of “races” as we understand them today, and which were grounded in colonial phantasms, was well established in and through colonial practice and policy, and particularly through anthropology and medicine. These hierarchies were internalized and completely naturalized through the very mission of colonialism, which sought to civilize and enlighten backward cultures distantly located from Europe while at the same time improving the lot of Europeans. Such improvement for Europe was certainly in the economic sense, but its architects also had a more ambitious aspiration of enrichment and an inevitable and welcome process for Europeans that adventurers, missionaries, sailors, colonial heroes, and subalterns in the army, for example, all believed in and represented. The evolved version of this narrative of improvement of the white race figured in colonial writers such as the Leblonds in Réunion island and Loys Masson in neighboring Mauritius.

Emblematic of these aspirations and their accompanying prejudices in the colonial novel is Marius‐Ary Leblond’s Miracle de la race (Miracle of the Race, 1914) set on Bourbon (as Réunion island was called). The story takes place in the period following economic crises that came from competition in the sugar‐cane industry from foreign sugar and other sources such as beets. At this time, the region was also waning in importance after the opening of the Suez Canal, so it was no longer the first stop for ships that passed the Cape of Good Hope. This Bildungsroman recounts the life of Alexis Balzamet, who is an impoverished white orphan, expelled from the prestigious spaces of whiteness and banished to the school for nonwhites. Alexis’ descent into nonwhiteness, his déclassement (loss of class), and his resistance to these forces make up his Bildung. Frequent collusion of race and class occur, with la classe blanche (the white class) being explicitly named. Mr. Izabel, a pale mulatto, becomes Alexis’ mentor; he himself has entered the colonial administration as a fonctionnaire through the goodwill of some whites. The hierarchy is somewhat imbalanced, with Alexis seeking Izabel’s help, but the order makes sense because Alexis has been declassed due to his status as an orphan. The “miracle” of the (white) race alluded to in the title of the novel is pronounced by another mentor of Alexis, Mr. Vertère. He explains to his ward that the white race will only get to that miraculous stage when it has absorbed all the best qualities and the essence of the original civilizations of the various other races in the colony (Leblond 1914, 301). Gradually, Alexis emerges as the prototype of this fortified white. In this way, the Leblonds were considered progressive for their time: they could imagine that an impoverished, lowly white orphan could represent the best of European culture. On the other hand, the blatant exploitative attitude to peoples of other races who serve the polishing and honing of this whiteness is quite extraordinary in its presumptuousness and in the obliviousness these writers manifest of the contradiction this presents to their concept of humanity, universal beauty, or brotherhood. It is notable that the fortification of the French race comes through a contact of culture that is not read as a contamination of whiteness, and it is the basis for the “new” man.

The uncomfortable coexistence of progressive ideas of universalism with the overt or covert reliance on racial hierarchies in which white Europeans were superior to the people of the cultures and regions they dominated might find traces in other forms of contradiction or ambiguity in contemporary radical thought in postcolonial, African, and cultural studies. The more successful cases of transcendence of these hierarchies occur when there is a direct engagement and willingness to grapple with these genealogies. It is thus no surprise that the work of Victor Segalen has always been important to Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and even, perhaps less evidently, Frantz Fanon. The enigmatic Segalen, whom we might call a true “exoticist,” embraced the experience of otherness as a way of life and thought. Segalen is often cited as one of the first French writers to use the colonial structure in which he encountered others (his expeditions in China) to actually internalize and represent the perspective of those he embraced. While he is lauded for his poetry (Stèles) or his posthumous novel, René Leys, Segalen, from his early writing, was fascinated by the notion of encounter. Before his romance with China, Segalen went to Tahiti as a doctor in the navy. His novel Les Immémoriaux (The Immemorials, 1907) is notable in the way it manages to estrange Europeans, missionaries, and the entirety of the colonial apparatus in order to embrace the perspective that his nation was intent on erasing. The protagonist, Terii, a native “Maori,” as he calls him, is exiled from his island and, upon his return, confronts a world that has been transformed by the missionaries who brainwash his people: “Sabbath” (sabbat) and “lord” (seigneur) become strange, imposed concepts that his people struggle to incorporate, though they are imposed (Segalen 1921, 27) by these “strangers” (étrangers) with their narrow gestures and crude language (gestes étroits et la rudesse de leur langage) (1921, 35). This early critique by Segalen oriented his resolute departure from the bulk of French exoticist writers, such as Baudelaire, Loti, or Chateaubriand, and was based in his true curiosity about the other, a curiosity that was open to self‐transformation through its encounter with the other.⁵ Through this romance with the “East,” Segalen quite consciously sought to modify an entire literary trope: that of exoticism. Stèles (1912) testifies to his study of Chinese characters whilst, already in Les Immémoriaux, his attention to Polynesian language and his interest in its nuances to the extent he could postulate them are remarkable. Also remarkable is Segalen’s invention of a rhythm and register of the French language estranged to itself, in his embracing of a Polynesian world view. More generally, white colonial ideology as it is identifiable in the novel of the time was also about self‐transformation, but the ultimate aim was to become a sort of Übermensch, a superior being, one that did not yet exist and was to be brought into being. In Segalen, transformation is sought through openness, an open‐endedness devoid of the specific aims that the genre of the colonial novel established as its essence. The totality of the encounter (and its effects) was, for Segalen, in and of itself the end. The kernel of Edouard Glissant’s (1990) theory of Relation, his concept of Diversity, and the importance of “shock,” in the intellectual encounter as well as a more intractable notion of difference, are all already to be found in Segalen. Drawing attention to Segalen and linking his thought to Glissant’s allows us to bring into relief a different lineage that coexists with the tendencies of the colonial novel and its hierarchies, of exoticism and its underlying inability to transcend the European male subject’s dominating perspective. These colonial structures transfer to the present when we encounter a vague and unconvincing notion of hybridity, where probing reveals that race is often elided via vociferous expression of ethnicity, and where ethnicity also obscures the functioning of class. In colonial hybridity, exemplified by the colonial novel, racial hierarchies were reiterated within a notion of mixing that was always couched in the vocabulary of “culture” (and in academic parlance, “ethnicity”). Our interest in postcolonial versions of hybridity can get beyond the colonial version when we pose the question of genealogy, which would lead to colonial exploitation, slavery, and other forms of subjugation; rape, and the racially inflected hybridity of human beings whose identity questioned the hierarchical categories that made the colony coherent. When hybridity elides these issues to adopt the language of culture alone, it links more directly to colonial hybridity, which has a vested interest in difference to consolidate the colonist’s superiority. It is for these reasons that some anthropological or cultural understandings of hybridity have come under severe critique for toying with pernicious ideas about race, gender, and class without exposing and touching upon the constitutive role of colonial hierarchies and of colonialism itself. Hybridity in a less rigorous version that focuses on “mixing” inadvertently gives new life to tendencies that undergird the version that affirmed and validated colonial culture and the colonial project.