"Logiques métisses": Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representations
Author(s): Françoise Lionnet
Source: College Literature, Vol. 19/20, No. 3/1, Teaching Postcolonial and Commonwealth
Literatures (Oct., 1992 - Feb., 1993), pp. 100-120
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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"Logiques metisses":
Cultural Appropriation and
Postcolonial Representations
Franpoise Lionnet
Lionnet teaches French and comparative literature at Northwestern Uni
versity. During 1991-92, she was a Senior Rockefeller fellow at the
Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at U of Minnesota. She has also
participated in the U of California Humanities Research Institute project
on "Minority Discourse." She is author of Autobiographical Voices:
Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Cornell 1989) and co-editor of a dou
ble issue of Yale French Studies on postcolonial literature and culture
(forthcoming Jan. 1993). She is currently finishing Spiralling Tensions,
a booklength study on women writers and universalisms.
If this weird, upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this
land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and
half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives ? this cauldron of mongrels from
all points on the compass?was all I could rightly call home, then aye: I
was of it. (Johnson 179)
Cependant, il n'y a pas de choix: il faut apprendre et avec ce dont on
dispose: un savoir colonise et un langage truqu6. (Herrmann 9)
I rancophone women writers in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, as
well as within France, where they or their families immigrate for various personal
or economic reasons, have given us unique insights into what Renato Rosaldo has
called the "border zones" of culture.1 In those areas on the periphery of stable
metropolitan cultural discourses, Rosaldo explains, there is an incessant and playful
heteroglossia, a bilingual speech or hybrid language that is a site of creative
resistance to the dominant conceptual paradigms. In border zones, all of our
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academic preconceptions about cultural, linguistic, or stylistic norms are constantly
being put to the test by creative practices that make visible and set off the processes
of adaptation, appropriation, and contestation that govern the construction of
identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
These processes are the ground upon which contemporary global culture can
begin to be understood, defined, and represented, as postcolonial writers encode
the everyday realities and subjective perceptions of a numerical majority whose
cultural contributions are still considered to be the products of minority voices. By
reproducing the changing cultural practices of this majority as it negotiates the
conflicts between tradition and modernity, writers create a space for themselves
within the dominant discourses while simultaneously articulating a problematic
that is increasingly becoming accepted as a quasi-universal process. The global
mongrelization or metissage of cultural forms creates hybrid identities, and interre
lated, if not overlapping, spaces. In those spaces, struggles for the control of means
of representation and self-identification are mediated by a single and immensely
powerful symbolic system: the colonial language, and the variations to which it is
subjected by writers who enrich, transform, and creolize it.
Writers such as Maryse Conde, from Guadeloupe, Assia Djebar, from Alge
ria, and Leila Sebbar, a Franco-Algerian, are part of an increasing number of astute
interpreters of the postcolonial condition whose works, published in the 1970s and
1980s, have been redefining Francophone history and literature. They create new
paradigms that represent, through innovative and self-reflexive literary techniques,
both linguistic and geographic exile, displacements from the margins to a metro
politan center, and intercultural exchanges.
In order to understand the cultural and literary praxis of those writers, I want
to make a brief incursion into the field of cultural anthropology, which has
established some of the parameters within which we commonly understand nega
tively coded terms such as "acculturation" and "assimilation." My purpose in this
paper is to develop, first of all, a theoretical argument about postcolonial culture.
This argument is an eminently political one, and on one level it does address the
current academic polemics about various forms of cultural fundamentalism. But my
approach tends to be indirect. A term like "multiculturalism" takes on different
valences in different linguistic and geopolitical contexts, that is, in countries where
the relative power of hegemonic and subaltern groups shifts according to factors
altogether different from the ones that obtain in the United States. That is why, in
the second part of the paper, I draw my examples from the works of contemporary
postcolonial Francophone women whose perspectives on multiculturalism differ
from the ones we are most familiar with in this country. These writers' concerns
and perspectives are an important contribution to these debates, because they echo
and often predate those of cultural anthropologists whose theoretical approaches are
nonetheless very useful for analyzing the processes at work in the women's novels.2
My interest in using these novels to understand cultural configurations studied by
social scientists is grounded in my belief that literature allows us to enter into the
subjective processes of writers and their characters, and thus allows us better to
Franpoise Lionnet 101
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understand the unique perspectives of subjects who are agents of transformation
and hybridization in their own narratives, as opposed to being the objects of
knowledge as in the discourse of social science.
Let me start with some simple, common sense definitions: "acculturation,"
Webster's Dictionary tells us, is "the transfer of culture from one ethnic group to
another," whereas "assimilation" is "the act of bringing or coming to a resem
blance; the merging of diverse cultural elements." Or, as the Oxford English
Dictionary would have it, to assimilate is "to make like, to cause to resemble, to
incorporate ... To become conformed to." Already, we can see some liminal
uncertainty in the semantic fields of these terms: is the "transfer . . . from one
ethnic group to another" only a one-way process that causes one culture to erase
another? Or could we infer that the transformation of both?or all ?of the cultures
in contact is extremely likely, if not inevitable, through this process of "accultura
tion" of one (or several) culture(s) to the other(s)? Is "the merging of diverse
cultural elements" to be understood as the inevitable erasure of one element by
another? Might it not also suggest that a more intricate and complex phenomenon
is in fact taking place, as in those "border zones" where a complex syncretic
cultural system comes to replace two or more ostensibly simpler cultures? In such a
case, acculturation would not simply be the means of making one element conform
to another, assimilate to it, in order to become like that other, but would more
truly be a process whereby all elements involved in the interaction would be
changed by that encounter. Dominant systems are more likely to absorb and make
like them numerically or culturally "weaker" elements. But even then, these
"inferior" or subaltern elements contribute to the evolution and transformation of
the hegemonic system by producing resistances and counter-discourses.3
It has of course been ideologically and politically convenient for the dominant
cultures to entertain the fiction of "assimilation" as a means of incorporating?
"civilizing" ? those cultures viewed as too different and "inferior" to be comfort
ably accepted and integrated into their norms.4 But in the long run, the more
powerful system does incorporate elements of the weaker one, often to the point
where certain of its patterns and practices become indistinguishable from those of
the imported or inferior culture. Kwame Anthony Appiah has recently said, "there
is, of course, no American culture without African roots" (354). But while it is
commonly accepted that African Americans are "more or less" assimilated and
acculturated to "white" American culture, we rarely hear the reciprocal formula
tion discussed in academic or popular circles.5 As Toni Morrison forcefully puts it:
Afro-American culture exists and though it is clear (and becoming
clearer) how it has responded to Western culture, the instances where
and means by which it has shaped Western culture are poorly recog
nized or understood. (3)
Similarly, South African anthropologists study the Westernization of blacks in
Southern Africa, but not the Africanization of whites who adopt the culinary or
102 College Literature
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musical tastes of blacks. Singer Johnny Clegg, the "White Zulu," and the white
Southern African youths who have assimilated (into) black culture have not yet, to
my knowledge, become the object of the anthropologist's scrutiny.6 Here in the
United States, a white rap singer named Vanilla Ice has been called "the Elvis of
rap," whereas the black rap singer named L. D. Shore rose to fame as "the Black
Elvis." But, as Patricia J. Williams recently pointed out, this is "divinely parodic:
Elvis, the white black man of a generation ago, reborn in a black man imitating
Elvis" (and one might add, reborn in Vanilla Ice, a white man imitating the black
rapper imitating Elvis: a dizzying thought [see Bernard]). In all of these cases the
point of reference remains "white culture," even if it is an already "mongrelized"
white culture, to use Charles Johnson's formulation used as epigraph to this essay.
My quarrel, then, with terms such as "assimilation" and "acculturation"
when used in the (post)colonial context, is a quarrel with history: the terms have
acquired a negative connotation because they underscore the relation of subjugation
that exists between the colonized culture and the hegemonic system. Rosaldo
points out that "metropolitan typifications suppress, exclude, even repress border
zones," that
the model for cross-cultural understanding that produces immigration
as a site of cultural stripping away is the academic version of the melting
pot: theories of acculturation and assimilation. In this view, immi
grants, or at any rate their children and grandchildren, are absorbed into
the national culture. Above all, the process involves the loss of one's
past ? autobiography, history, heritage, language, and all the rest of the
so-called cultural baggage. . . . The theory of assimilation appears to
have the inevitability of a law of history. If it doesn't catch up with you
this generation, it will in the next. ("Ideology" 87, 82)
In this view, the "assimilated" are seen as existing passively, not as creative agents
capable of transforming the practices that they come to adopt. The message pro
claimed by contemporary art and literature from Africa and the Caribbean, how
ever, is quite different: it is not assimilation that appears inevitable when Western
technology and education are adopted by the colonized, or when immigration to
the metropole severs some of the migrants' ties to a particular birthplace. Rather,
the move forces individuals to stand in relation to the past and the present at the
same time, to look for creative means of incorporating useful "Western" tools,
techniques or strategies into their own cosmology or Weltanschauung.7
What is needed, then, is a new vocabulary for describing patterns of influ
ence that are never unidirectional. Since the influence is usually mutual and recipro
cal, however much that fact might have been occluded from the political
consciousness and modes of self-representation of metropolitan cultures, a more
appropriate term for describing this contact of cultures would be "transcultura
tion." The Cuban poet Nancy Morejon has used this neologism (transculturacion) to
describe a process of cultural intercourse and exchange, a circulation of practices
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that creates a constant interweaving of symbolic forms and empirical activities
among the different cultures that interact with one another. As she puts it,
"reciprocal influence is the determining factor here, for no single element superim
poses itself on another; on the contrary, each one changes into the other so that
both can be transformed into a third" (23).8 Rejecting the binarism of self and
other, nationalism and internationalism, Africa and Europe, women writers like
Morejon point to a third way, to the metissage of forms and identities that is the
result of cross-cultural encounters, and that forms the basis for their self-portrayals
and their representations of cultural diversity.
Cross- or transcultural exchange has always been "an absolute fact" of life
everywhere, even if, as Edouard Glissant has pointed out, "the human imagination,
in Western tradition, has always wished to deny or disguise" it (Caribbean 251; see
also Lionnet, Autobiographical 9). The realization that "the melting pot" is no
theory of social reality, but a necessary myth, or perhaps an enabling metaphor in
the construction of an American national identity, is opening the way for a more
cautious understanding of the dialectical and complex phenomena of ethnic interac
tions that have existed in this country since the beginning of colonial times.
Similarly, French theories of cultural assimilation that aimed at turning colonized
peoples ?or, at any rate, the educated elites of the colonies?into acculturated
evolues who could speak perfect French corresponds only to one aspect of a complex
colonial picture: although the colonial linguistic enterprise is alive and well in the
"departements d'outre-mer," it now coexists with a strong movement in favor of
creolite, a movement that does not aim at the outright rejection of French, but at
valorizing the multilingual and multiethnic character of Creole cultures.9
That is why the concept of transculturation proves so useful: the prefix
"trans-" suggests the act of traversing, of going through existing cultural territo
ries. Its specifically spatial connotations demarcate a pattern of movement, across
cultural arenas and physical topographies, that corresponds more accurately to the
notion of "appropriation," a concept more promising than those of acculturation
and assimilation, and one that implies active intervention, rather than passive
victimization. It is easy to establish how useful this concept can be for our analysis.
Abdelkebir Khatibi has shown, in his novel Amour hilingue, and his collected essays
entitled Maghreb pluriel, that for Francophone writers whose mother tongue may
be Arabic, Berber, Wolof, or Creole, the French language is a means of translating
into the colonizer's language a different sensibility, a different vision of the world,
a means therefore of transforming the dominant conceptions circulated by the more
standard idiom (see also Lionnet, "Of Mangoes"). To write in French is thus also
to transform French into a language that becomes the writer's own: French is
appropriated, made into a vehicle for expressing a hybrid, heteroglot universe. This
creative act of "taking possession" of a language gives rise to the kind of linguistic
metissage visible in many contemporary Francophone works.10
Acts of appropriation will produce a greater degree of cultural complexity
than the standard anthropological categories (metropolitan vs. colonial, developed
vs. primitive, or civilized vs. aboriginal) would tend to suggest. Indeed, the notion
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of culture has itself become quite controversial among some anthropologists.
Rosaldo contextualizes and summarizes the issues:
Anthropologists hold contradictory notions of culture. The discipline's
official view holds that all human conduct is culturally mediated. In
other words, people act in relation, not to brute reality, but to culture
specific modes of perceiving and organizing the world . . . No domain
of culture is more or less culturally mediated than any other. . . . [But]
if official [anthropological] view holds that all cultures are equal, an
informal filing system, more often found in corridor talk than in pub
lished writings, classifies cultures in quantitative terms, from a lot to a
little, from thick to thin, from elaborate to simple . . . Culture in this
view is defined by difference. Difference . . . makes culture visible to
observers. (78)
If "difference" is what makes culture visible to observers, then the emphasis on
difference has the merit of underscoring specificities which would be muted and
ignored otherwise. But an overemphasis on dissimilarities is likely to lead from
racial and biographical determinism into an essentialist impasse. In this erroneous
view of culture wherein difference is rigidly valorized for its own sake, or for the
sake of identifying authentic and "pure products" (see Clifford 1-17), any process
of acculturation or transculturation (however real, inevitable, and reciprocal it may
have been) is automatically labeled as merely assimilationist. Hence, assimilation is
(mis)construed by the dominant system as the elusive means of retaining or creating
a fictive purity and authenticity within which the colonized "people without
culture" can be absorbed; in opposition to this tendency, the subaltern group, on
the other hand, will seek to retain a sense of its own cultural authenticity by
advocating a return to precolonial traditions, thus contrasting the past to the
present and mythifying its own original ethnic or cultural purity. Difference then
becomes?on both sides of this binary system?the reason for exoticizing,
"othering," groups that do not share in this mythic cultural purity.
The issue of defining identity in a colonial context has always been a highly
charged one: the first generation, represented by Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon,
Albert Memmi (Portrait), and Edouard Glissant (Le Discours), has examined with
some anxiety the processes through which the colonized internalize a vision of
themselves projected by the colonizer, a vision which promotes a form of mimetic
idealization of, and identification with, the colonizer. To a degree, these formula
tions remained dependent upon a Hegelian view of the master-slave dialectic, and of
the importance of recognition as the means of self-validation for both colonizer and
colonized. By contrast, during the last two decades, writers have largely engaged in
a painstaking redefinition of the paradigms of decolonization, thus seeking to
undermine any simplistic understanding of the process of assimilation, and the
concurrent presuppositions regarding "authenticity" in either dominant or native
cultures. As Rosaldo points out,
Franqoise Lionnet 105
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the view of an authentic culture as an autonomous internally coherent
universe no longer seems tenable in a postcolonial world. Neither "we"
nor "they" are as self-contained and homogeneous as we/they once
appeared. All of us inhabit an interdependent late 20th century world,
which is at once marked by borrowing and lending across porous
cultural boundaries, and saturated with inequality, power, and domina
tion. ("Ideology" 87)
The texts and voices of Francophone women map out and interpret for us the
complex interweavings of traditions that philosophers and anthropologists are
beginning to theorize and propound in their own disciplines. As Appiah puts it, "if
there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we
are already contaminated by each other, that there is no longer a fully autochtonous
echt-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists" ("Is the Post-" 354). He is
echoed by Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, who has pointed out that "the
world system, rather than creating massive cultural homogeneity on a global scale,
is replacing one diversity with another; and the new diversity is based relatively
more on interrelations and less on autonomy" (qtd. in Clifford 17). What these
writers and thinkers?"from all points on the compass"?increasingly underline is
the dialectical tension that exists between local variations and a world-wide system
of interdependent cultures, between diversity and resemblance, between relativism
and universalism.
In a controversial book, Logiques metisses: Anthropologic de Videntite en Afrique
et ailleurs, French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle echoes some of the statements
made above, and goes a step further in arguing that even before colonial times, the
interrelations of cultures was the norm, and that it is the Western anthropologist
who has "invented" separate ethnic groups as his objects of study. Arguing against
ethnological reason, and in favor of a form of originary indistinct ion or syncretism,
he critiques the anthropological bias towards cultural relativism, and attempts to
define a universalist "logique metisse":
Les anthropologues culturalistes americains tout comme Levi
Strauss ont eu raison, face a toutes les philosophies de l'histoire et autres
sagas du progres de mettre l'accent sur les specificites et le caractere
relatif des valeurs promues par chaque societe; mais le corollaire de cette
attitude genereuse est Perection de barrieres culturelles etanches qui
enferment chaque groupe dans sa singularity.
N'est-ce pas dans le droit fil de Panthropologie culturelle ameri
caine que se situe la notion de societe multiculturelle dont on a deja
souligne les ambigui'tes? Loin d'etre un instrument de tolerance et de
liberation des minorites comme l'affirment ses partisans, cette expres
sion manifeste au contraire tous les travers de la raison ethnologique et
c'est a ce titre qu'elle a 6t6 revendiquee en France par la "nouvelle
droite." Isoler une communaute par la definition d'un certain nombre de
106 College Literature
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"differences" conduit a la possibilite de son confinement territorial sinon
de son expulsion. L'assignation de differences ou l'etiquetage ethnique,
propheties autocreatrices, ne traduisent pas seulement la reconnaissance
de specificites culturelles, ils sont egalement correlatifs de l'affirmation
forcenee d'une identite, celle de l'ethnie francaise. De la sorte, la proble
matique de la societe multiculturelle conduit tout droit, si Ton n'y prend
garde, a un developpement separe analogue a 1'Apartheid sud-africain?
qui lui-meme procede en partie de 1'application devoyee de la notion de
culture.
A ce fondamentalisme ethnique ou culturel que certains assimilent a
la "defaite de la pensee," il ne s'agit pas d'opposer de facon abstraite les
droits de l'homme, ces principes dont personne ne sait au juste de quoi
ils sont faits. Il faut plutot mettre en avant l'idee d'un melange ou d'un
metissage originaire des differents groupes qui se sont formes tout au
long de l'histoire de l'humanite. (35)
[Given all the philosophies of history and other sagas of human
progress, American culturalist anthropologists along with Levi-Strauss
were right to stress the particularist nature and the relative character of
the values promoted by different societies. But the flip side of this
generous attitude is the erection of impermeable cultural barriers that
imprison each group in its own singularity.
Doesn't the notion of multicultural society, the ambiguities of
which have already been emphasized, follow directly from the concepts
put forth by American cultural anthropology? Far from being an instru
ment of tolerance toward, and liberation of, minorities as its proponents
like to claim, this notion reveals instead all the wrongs of ethnological
reason, and that is why it has been claimed by the "new right" in
France. To isolate a community by defining a set of characteristic
"differences" can lead to the possibility of its territorial confinement,
and its eventual expulsion. Ethnic labeling, and the assignment of differ
ences, are self-fulfilling prophecies. They do not just correspond to the
acceptance of cultural specificities, but are also correlative with the
coercive affirmation of one identity, that of French ethnicity. This is
why, if we are not mindful of it, the problematic of the multicultural
society can lead straight into a state of separate development analogous
to South African apartheid?itself a consequence of the misapplication
of the notion of culture.
To this ethnic or cultural fundamentalism that some would like to
assimilate to the "defeat of thought," one does not need to oppose the
abstract notion of human rights, these principles that no one can truly
define. Rather, one must support and articulate the idea of an originary
mixing or metissage of the different groups which were formed all
through human history.]
Franqoise Lionnet 107
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Amselle's remarks force us to rethink some of the fundamental notions that we are
beginning to take for granted as literary and cultural critics: the respect for
multiculturalism, the vexing questions of separatism and cultural autonomy, and
the need for contemporary societies to respect difference without falling into a
situation of apartheid. It is thus interesting to note that postcolonial women
writers implicitly address identical issues in their recent essays and fictional works:
they depict characters whose originality stems from the fact that the authors give
them universal appeal, letting them live their metissage in the most original,
ingenious, and beneficial ways. These hybrid characters exemplify the inevitability
as well as the benefits and disadvantages of intercultural exchange. For, as Amselle
goes on to add,
Les cultures ne sont pas situees les unes a cote des autres comme des
monades leibniziennes sans porte ni fenetre: elles prennent place dans un
ensemble mouvant qui est lui-meme un champ structure' de relations . . .
La definition d'une culture donnee est en fait la resultante d'un rapport de
forces interculturel... La modification du rapport des forces. . . ainsi que
l'eclosion et la disparition des cultures rendent compte des changements
qui interviennent dans chaque systeme sous-culturel pris isolement. (55;
my italics)
[Cultures are not located next to one another, without doors or win
dows, like the monads of Leibnitz: they are situated in a fluctuating
context which is a structured field of relations . . .
The definition of a given culture is in fact the resultant of a ratio of
intercultural forces . . . The modification of the ratio of forces . . . along
with the appearance and disappearance of cultures explain the changes
that occur in each subcultural system when one looks at them in
isolation.]
To follow Amselle is to come to the conclusion that it is not the existence of
different cultures that induces a comparative (ethnographical) approach, but rather
that the critic's (or anthropologist's) stance as comparatist creates an arbitrary and
singular object (be it "Bambara culture" or "Francophone studies") ? and thus
imposes the constraints of a determinate set of particularisms. Although Amselle
does not deny the specificities inherent in certain cultural manifestations, he is in
fact arguing against all theories of culture that would locate singularity within a
restrained space, an enclosed geographical area, a "nation" or a "tradition."11 Based
on Amselle's extensive field research in Africa, Logiques metisses opposes his own
theorizing of a sociological and historical "espace me'tisse" to the traditional cultural
ist approach of anthropology, which, according to him, is just another form of
fundamentalism, itself the breeding ground for many contemporary forms of fas
cism and essentialist tendencies, as witnessed by the pre-civil rights Southern
ideology of "separate but equal" and the various other forms of apartheid promoted
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in recent years by Enoch Powell in Britain, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and David
Duke in Louisiana.
The works of Maryse Conde, Assia Djebar, and Leila Sebbar make concretely
visible the dialectical tensions present in Amselle's or Appiah's theorizing, and shed
new light on what previous generations of Francophone critics had taught us to
regard as an "alienating" contact between cultures, one in which the dominant
group names and circumscribes the subjected one, instilling a colonized or victim
mentality into the latter. What these writers illustrate instead are the dynamic and
creative processes mobilized by sub-groups as means of resistance to the "victim"
syndrome. They use their transformative and performative energies on the lan
guage and narrative strategies they borrow from the cultures of the West. To
represent their regional cultural realities, they make use of appropriative techniques
that interweave traditions and languages. The way they portray characters trans
forms the way that they themselves see the realities of their worlds, as well as the
way we?readers who are outsiders to the region or culture?will in turn perceive
those, that is, no longer as a radically "other" realm, so different and alien that it
could only alienate itself more through contact with the West, but rather as a
microscosm of the globe. In other words, these recent works point the way back to
a new/old concept: humanism, a word that feminists of different stripes are
beginning to revalorize; or to borrow Evelyne Accad's more precise formulation, a
"femihumanism," a non-separatist feminism committed to bringing about a plural
istic society based on the rejection of oppression and domination, whether globally
or locally (25-26; see also Kofman). This ethical imperative governs their search for
new cultural forms and hybrid languages that better represent the particularisms of
the communities about which they write without locking them into idiosyncratic
dead-ends.
Thus, for Assia Djebar, the French language leads to an ambiguous situation,
because it is the only means through which she can acquire a measure of freedom
from the confinement of the harem. Yet, it is also a language in which she suffers
from a form of "aphasie amoureuse" (UAmour 142) [aphasia of love (125)], that is,
from the complete inability to express "le moindre elan de mon coeur" (145) [the
slightest heart-felt emotion (128)] because it is a language that necessarily creates
distance and artificiality. Hence, emancipation is a way of breaking ties that bind,
but also ties that create a loving, caring community. For Djebar, then, there is this
constant tension between individual emancipation and collective female bonding,
autobiography and history, writing and orality, as well as between verbal self
unveiling and the quiet dialogues of bodies and words that the ancient traditions of
the harem and the hammam make possible among Islamic women. As she
explains,
Comment dire "je," puisque ce serait dedaigner les formules-couvertures
qui maintiennent le trajet individuel dans la resignation collective? . . .
Laminage de ma culture orale en perdition: expulsee a onze, douze ans
de ce theatre des aveux feminins, ai-je par la meme ete epargnee du
Franpoise Lionnet 109
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silence de la mortification? Ecrire les plus anodins des souvenirs d'en
fance renvoie done au corps depouille de voix. Tenter 1'autobiographic
par les seuls mots francais, e'est, sous le lent scalpel de l'autopsie a vif,
montrer plus que sa peau. Sa chair se desquame, semble-t-il, en lam
beaux du parler d'enfance qui ne s'ecrit plus. (177-78)
[How could she say "I," since that would be to scorn the blanket
formulae which ensure that each individual journeys through life in a
collective resignation? . . . My oral tradition has gradually been overlaid
and is in danger of vanishing: at the age of eleven or twelve I was
abruptly ejected from the theatre of feminine confidences ?was I
thereby spared from having to silence my humbled pride? In writing of
my childhood memories I am taken back to those bodies bereft of
voices. To attempt an autobiography using French words alone is to
lend oneself to the vivisector's scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the
skin.. The flesh flakes off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the
unwritten language of my childhood. (156)]
Caught between the urgent need to speak of herself as woman, and the age
old restrictions on self-unveiling, the narrator of L'Amour, la fantasia faces a
dilemma that is crystallized by the use of French: "L'autobiographie pratiquee dans
la langue adverse se tisse comme fiction" (243) [Autobiography practised in the
enemy's language has the texture of fiction (216)]. Djebar can chart the complex
ities inherent in the problem of domination by suggesting that the construction of
self and other, of conqueror and conquered, of France and Algeria, and of the
woman as mother/sister/daughter is always mediated by an intricate set of images,
words, and spaces that are never univocal. The construction of subjectivity is made
possible by means of a complex interweaving of metaphors of imprisonment and
liberation that are not set in opposition to one another, but engage as alternating
patterns in the fabric of self-portraiture, as well as in the evocation of national and/
or female liberation:
Parler de soi-meme hors de la langue des ai'eules, e'est se devoiler certes,
mais pas seulement pour sortir de l'enfance, pour s'en exiler definitive
ment. Le devoilement, aussi contingent, devient, comme le souligne
mon arabe dialectal du quotidien, vraiment "se mettre a nu." (178)
[Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed
to unveil oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it,
never to return. Such incidental unveiling is tantamount to stripping
oneself naked, as the demotic Arabic dialect emphasizes. (156-57)]
To bare one's self in the language of the conqueror is at once a form of betrayal and
the inescapable consequence of any gesture of female emancipation:
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Or cette mise a nu, deployee dans la langue de l'ancien conquerant, lui
qui, plus d'un siecle durant, a pu s'emparer de tout, sauf precisement des
corps feminins, cette mise a nu renvoie etrangement a la mise a sac du
siecle precedent. (178)
[But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former
conqueror (who for more than a century could lay his hands on every
thing save women's bodies), this stripping naked takes us back oddly
enough to the plundering of the preceding century. (156-57)]
To unveil this elusive female self thus complicates all relations of power and
domination, since the female had come to represent the land itself, and the difficul
ties of conquest and appropriation. But here, emancipation and unveiling come to
be the alternating patterns in the palimpsest of history, whereas in Ombre sultane,
the second volume of Djebar's projected quartet, betrayal and liberation again
become intertwined as Hajila and Isma are made to represent two facets of a single
female destiny that is emblematic of the same dialectic of seclusion and dispersion,
confinement and liberation, individuality and collective integrity that forms the
basis of Djebar's continuing reflections on the process of othering, and the prob
lems of being other in one's own culture.
Within the Caribbean context, the focus has been somewhat different, given
that writers, ever since Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee or Aime Cesaire's
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, had been engaged in an enterprise of "creolization"
of the French language. Among women writers, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse
Conde represent the most interesting examples of this phenomenon, although their
respective use of language differs considerably. When it was published in 1972 to
great critical and popular acclaim, Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle did much to
revitalize the genre of the Caribbean novel by harmonizing the Creole vernacular
and a rich and subtle metropolitan syntax. But that was in large part because,
unlike Conde's Traversee de la mangrove, it did not need to contain a glossary of
Creole terms: the French language is appropriated and enriched without apparent
syntactic or semantic dislocation. The French reader can approach Schwarz-Bart's
text and enjoy its exoticism without feeling too disoriented: s/he can entertain the
illusion that the protagonists are from a completely different cultural sphere, but
that they are knowable, and the language of the text perpetuates this illusion. The
originality of Schwarz-Bart is to have succeeded in translating into French a
uniquely Caribbean way of perceiving the world: proverbs and oral tales communi
cate an ancient wisdom. Her use of narrative devices common to the tradition of
oral storytelling, and her deft mixture of genres (fable, legend, historical chronicle,
and realist descriptions) give this novel a richness of tone and a depth of meaning
that make it a major landmark in Caribbean women's writing. But in many ways,
it is also a transitional one. Thematically it is linked, as critic Roger Toumson
holds, to the "mythe ideologique de la quete identitaire" [ideological myth of the
identitary quest] by its portrayal of male revolt (Amboise), and its emphasis on the
Franqoise Lionnet 111
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painful history of slavery that continues to have a profound impact on the life of its
female characters Toussine, Victoire, and Telumee (497). Pluie et vent thus corre
sponds to certain expectations that the non-Caribbean reader has about "tradi
tional" Antillean culture, and that the French have about the natural and timeless
beauty of the tropics. The novel also satisfies the convention of the Caribbean
"roman paysan," a genre that begins with Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la
rosee.
Conde's Traversee also belongs in that tradition of rural novels, but it is a
resolutely contemporary work, without the mythic atemporality of Schwarz-Bart's
novel. Conde's characters are multifaceted and live in the present, going about their
daily lives, self-possessed, and speaking Creole. They do not live under the gaze of
the colonizer, they are self-assured in their difference, and they do not?it seems to
me?correspond to any existing metropolitan stereotypes about the Antilles. The
text does not mythify them, nor does it reveal traces of nostalgia or discontent
about the (pre)colonial past, although the past is present in the person of Xantippe,
the former slave and "neg mawon" (255) [runaway black], and in the figure of
Francis Sancher, the former revolutionary and disillusioned intellectual. As Xan
tippe says, "le temps de la vengeance est passe" (259) [the time for vengeance is
now past].
This is indeed the first time that Conde has a truly Caribbean audience in
mind: although published in Paris, like her previous books, Traversee is not written
for a French public. Creole words and expressions are translated at the bottom of
each page, but this was done after the fact, as a favor to the French reader, and on
the recommendation of Conde's editor. Aside from this linguistic depaysement, the
text offers no major cultural surprises: the cast of characters is a familiar one for a
rural community, with its conflicts among families, its storytellers and teachers, its
village idiot and its healer, its migrant workers and other outsiders who bear the
brunt of xenophobic reactions on the part of long-time residents. These characters
live, love, and die in Riviere au Sel as do humans everywhere. Because the village is
isolated, it is possible to identify particularisms that have disappeared from more
urban settings in other parts of the Caribbean?but by the same token, these rural
characteristics are not unlike those that might be shared by a similarly isolated
village in the heart of France's Berry, for example.12
One might surmise, then, that an anthropologist looking for "culture" and
difference in Riviere au Sel would initially be disappointed, as were Renato and
Michelle Rosaldo when they did their field work among Filipinos who are gener
ally viewed by anthropologists as "people without culture" because, having been
"acculturated" by three and a half centuries of (Spanish then American) colonial
rule, they are not all that "different": they are "rational, not cultural," and "to the
ethnographic gaze, these civilized people appear too transparent for study; they
seem just like us: materialistic, greedy, and prejudiced."13 The point, of course, as
Rosaldo suggests, is that it is precisely those "zones of cultural invisibility" (78)
that pose the most compelling questions for contemporary critics and theorists
because that is where the transcultural process, through appropriation and contest a
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tion, manifests itself with clarity. It is because "they" appear to be like "us"
(Western readers), because "they" are involved in "universal" human problems that
the characters of Traversee are subversive: they undo that opposition between "us"
and "them" which is indispensable to the representation of the exotic other in art,
literature, or ethnography.14 The villagers of Traversee, like Rosaldo's Filipinos, are
human beings whose cultural production and consumption defy the West's attempt
to exoticize them.
To refute the paradigm of exoticism and/or victimization, Conde skillfully
depicts a self-sufficient community unburdened by crises of identity. She gives voice
to each one of a series of characters with a unique perspective on the events that
have caused them all to assemble at the wake for Francis Sancher, the stranger
whose presence in Riviere au Sei caused some major changes in the relations among
the villagers. As a figure that allegorizes both the colonial process and the fate of
nomadic intellectuals such as Maryse Conde herself, he is a cleverly drawn character
who enters into a complicated relationship with the local habitants. He allows
Conde* to be self-reflexive about her writing, and about the role of writing in her
own cultural context (203). Conde appropriates the technique of the novel within
the novel to reflect upon the role of the writer as outsider, and of the outsider as
catalyst or pharmakon, as both poison and antidote, dangerous supplement, chroni
cler, and aide-memoire of the community.15
The organization of the story follows the classic unities of time, place, and
plot. Conde borrows from classical and modernist esthetics to create a novel that
represents "creolite" in all of its complexity. The Creole and Indian characters voice
their own unique perspectives, and it is through them that Conde the writer
achieves a sense of her own humility as a recorder and transcriber of reality, a role
very much unlike the heroic and prophetic ones that male writers such as Cesaire or
Glissant espoused as poets and leaders of the community.
For Leila Sebbar, who writes from within France, the postcolonial condition
is synonymous with exile and nomadism, literary metissage, and bicultural identity.
The theme of immigration is central to all her works, and she focuses on the Beurs,
the second generation descendents of Algerian immigrants, on "marginal" types of
all sorts (runaways, drug addicts) who live in the "border zones" of French cities,
on regional peasant culture, and also on historical or literary characters whose
mythic lives as nomads and ex-centrics fascinate her: Rimbaud, Flora Tristan,
Isabelle Eberhardt, V. S. Naipaul, Jeanne d'Arc, Phoolan Devi, or the Dahoman
amazons of the eighteenth century. Her characters are from nowhere and every
where, they are emblematic of the shock of societies resulting from the major
upheavals of (de)colonization. The very concept of the French "hexagon" and the
notion of "francit6" are questioned in her novels and essays. She belongs, it seems
to me, both to French and Francophone literature and her writing undermines our
academic distinction between "French" and "Francophone" areas.16
Her Sherazade trilogy consists in a geographic and symbolic journey through
the signifying system of French Orientalisms. A seventeen-year-old runaway who
knows very little about her Algerian heritage, Sherazade embarks on a hitch-hiking
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trip through the hexagon that will allow her to discover the Orient, and the
meeting of East and West, through the paintings of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century artists. She writes in a set of notebooks, the title of which is the
same as the one Sebbar gives to the second book in the trilogy: here too, self
reflexive devices allow Sebbar to comment both on the status of writing, and on
the social problems faced by her characters. If, as Michel Foucault has argued, "we
are in the epoch of simultaneity . . . of juxtaposition ... of the near and far, of the
side-by-side, of the dispersed . . . [an] epoch ... in which space takes for us the
form of relations among sites" (22-23), then Sebbar's narratives are exemplary of a
condition of hybridity that allows different historical and spatial configurations to
coexist. By reading texts and images of the past in order to understand her own
situation as a postcolonial nomad, Sherazade uses all the means at her disposal to
survive and contest the negative representations of oriental women that are embed
ded in the dominant culture. Sebbar gives her character the opportunity to refuse to
be made into an "other": although subjected to the male gaze of Julien or Gilles,
who can only perceive her through orientalist codes, Sherazade is able to manipu
late those codes, to historicize them, and to point to the historical Arab or Saracen
influences on southern France, to the always already hybrid nature of French
culture: "Tu sais que les guerriers musulmans arrivaient en Gaule avec leurs
families? lis venaient de loin, depuis l'Arabie en passant par l'Egypte, l'Afrique,
1'Atlas. Il y avaient des Mozarabes, des Juifs, des captifs chretiens rallies a
l'islamisme, des Berberes islamises" (Les Carnets 264) [Do you know that Muslim
warriors would arrive in Gaul with their families? They came from far away, from
Arabia, via Egypt, Africa, the Atlas mountains. There were Mozarabs, Jews,
Christian prisoners who had become allies of Islam, and Islamized Berbers].
Contrary to popular views that hold that "la France profonde" of the prov
inces is the purer, more authentic France (unlike cosmopolitan urban centers),
Sebbar stages heterogeneity among rural people as well. There, regional patois
reinforce difference and plurality:
?Je ne sais pas leur langue, dit Sherazade.
?Moi, je sais parler l'alsacien dit Marie, mais e'est pas le patois
d'ici. L'alsacien e'est une langue; mon pere m'a toujours dit 9a et il
m'interdit de dire que les pay sans parlent en patois; il dit que e'est aussi
une langue et qu'on doit pas les mepriser. (168)
[?1 can't speak their language, Sherazade said.
?I can speak Alsatian, Marie said, but that's not the same dialect as
the one spoken here. Alsatian is a language; my father always tells me
this, and he forbids me from saying that peasants speak patois; he says
that it is a language, and that they should not be despised.]
Sebbar's emphasis on regional minorities mirrors the postcolonial thematics of
diversity. Here, as in Traversee, peasant culture is represented in all of its complex
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ity, while it is implicitly contrasted to the appropriative gestures of the young
urban Beurs whose dress codes reflect their postcoloniality:
? Bon, alors ils disent que c'est leur look a eux, leur style, que personne
peut leur piquer parce qu'ils sont les seuls a oser mettre en meme temps
une chechia, tu sais ce que c'est? comme leurs ancetres de la-bas et un
jean comme tous les jeunes de partout, ou un battle dress des stocks
americains ou une veste de smoking qu'ils trouvent aux Puces, ou un
bolero brode . . .Tu comprends ... les habits traditionnels de leurs
grand-peres tures, arabes, berberes, africains sont a eux et les habits
europeens sont a tout le monde et eux, leur look, c'est de tout melanger,
mais pas n'importe comment, c'est tres etudie . . . (159)
[Well, they say that this look is theirs alone. It is a unique style, and
nobody can steal it from them because they are the only ones who dare
to wear a chechia, you know what that is? like their ancestors from
overthere, along with a pair of blue jeans like young people everywhere,
or an American army battle dress, or a smoking jacket found at the flea
market, and an embroidered bolero . . . You see . . . the traditional
clothes of their Turkish, Arab, Berber, African grandfathers are theirs,
and European clothes belong to everybody, and their look, well, it is to
mix everything, but not just any old way, it is a very carefully studied
way . . .]
Dress is a signifying system that denotes not just the global process of neocolonial
ism and assimilation ("un jean comme tous les jeunes de partout"), but the Beurs*
own rich construction of their lives and transcultural identities, their sense of how
the past and the present, the near and the far, come together in the material things
that they use, in the practices that they adopt. Their control over their sense of
personal identity is evident in this creative use of the means of self-representation,
in the "logique metisse" of their sense of self.
Not surprisingly, Sebbar's text reveals the same conscious control of the
means of representation. Les Garnets draws a new geography of France from
Marseille to the He de Re, from Narbonne to Nantes. In its formal organization,
the text integrates the voices and the idioms of regional or immigrant minorities,
numerous intertextual references to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel nar
ratives as well as to traditional and classical Arabic texts, to film, operatic music,
and popular culture represented both by Carte de sejour ("un groupe rockarabe,
rockmeteque" 148) and by a group of female rappers ("rap arabe" 253) who
perform at a Moroccan country wedding near the southern town of Castres. Like
the Beurs, Sebbar weaves her own tapestry using an esthetics of bricolage that carries
over into her style of writing, and into the way she actually puts words on paper,
since she often writes in cafes, using bits and pieces of paper, "un morceau de
nappe, des papiers-sucre, le dos de la note" [a piece of paper tablecloth, sugarcube
wrappings, the back of the bill] (Huston and Sebbar 9). This image of the unassum
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ing nomad or bohemian writer is also in stark contrast to the heroic and angry
voices of Maghrebian male writers of the immediate postcolonial and nationalist
periods, whose sense of self and seriousness of purpose is derived from an opposi
tional nativist ideology, and not from the studied ("C'est tres etudie") appropria
tion of such objects and techniques that can transform the relations Rosaldo
designates as "inequality, power and domination" that saturate the social and
cultural field but cannot succeed in preventing transcultural exchanges.
Although politically and socially peripheral, Francophone women writers
share with the Beurs this ability to suggest alternative paradigms that maintain
discrete moments of opposition (translated in dress codes, music, idioms, etc.)
without necessarily becoming a counter-ideology. Such moments are not part of a
rigid system, since each context will generate different practices (the metaphoric
link between territorial conquest and the rape of women in Algeria, the use of
Creole in the Caribbean, and rap music in France) that make visible both the
dominant culture's power to impose meaning, and the social actors' power of
agency over configurations that will ultimately undermine those meanings. The
practices thus serve to delegitimate the cultural hegemony of "French" culture over
"Francophone" realities.
What the writings I have briefly surveyed suggest, then, is that the old
dichotomies are no longer tenable, that the local and the global are increasingly
interrelated, and that one cannot be fully understood without reference to the
other. But at the same time, it becomes clear that universality would be an empty
proposition without the gendered specificities offered by particular writers repre
senting different cultural configurations. Francophone women novelists offer us
rich and varied ways of understanding this contemporary dialectic?and the ways
in which it reweaves the problematics of classical European humanism into a new
tapestry in which there can be no room for the normative approaches of the past.
NOTES
Rosaldo uses this term in reference to areas of Hispanic influence in the United
States.
2For a more developed analysis of the novels discussed here, see Lionnet, "Traversie"
and "Parcours."
3I use "discourse" in Foucault's sense. See Archaeology.
4As Albert Memmi has indeed pointed out in The Colonizer and the Colonized, "it is
the colonized who is the first to desire assimilation, and it is the colonizer who refuses it to
him" (125), because to assume "that the colonizer could or should accept assimilation and,
hence, the colonized's emancipation, means to topple the colonial relationship" (126).
Assimilation is thus a fiction uneasily perpetuated by a hegemonic system that simultane
ously fears what it wrongly perceives to be inevitable.
5One notable exception is the work of historian Mechal Sobel, who analyses the
contributions that African notions of time and space made to the slave owner's Weltans
chauung, thus becoming part and parcel of the Southerner's perception of reality.
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6In a recent talk at the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, Jean
Comaroff gave a fascinating account of late nineteenth-century practices of South African
blacks who were adopting Western clothing, including Victorian wedding gowns and
suits.
7Appiah notes that the African sculpture, Man with a Bicycle, is
a figure who is . . . polyglot?speaking Yoruba and English, probably
some Hausa and a little French for trips to Cotonou or Cameroon . . .
Man with a Bicycle is produced by someone who does not care that the
bicycle is the white man's invention: it is not there to be Other to the
Yoruba Self; it is there because someone cared for its solidity; it is there
because it will take us further than our feet will take us; it is there
because machines are now as African as novelists. ("Is the Post-" 357)
8My emphasis; all translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I have discussed
"transculturation" and its relationship to metissage in Autobiographical Voices (16). The
concept of transculturation was first advanced by Fernando Ortiz, as Morej6n explains.
However, Ortiz's view of culture promotes a form of transculturation that implies the
assimilation of Afro-Cuban culture into Hispanic culture. Morej6n's transculturaciSn is more
dialectical, as is my term metissage. I should add that the present essay was written long
before the publication of Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" (an essay
excerpted from her book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation), in which she
makes use of the term "autoethnography" much in the same way that I have used the term
in my 1989 book, although the corpus she studies, and her approach, are different from
mine.
9This is true both in the Caribbean (see Bernabe, Eloge) and in the Indian Ocean (see
Sam-Long).
10For a discussion of the linguistic originality of some of these works, see Bernabe,
"Le travail"; LeClezio; Lionnet, "Traversee"; Zimra, "Assia Djebar" and "In Her Own
Write."
uAmselle's work thus intersects with that of Anderson, Hobsbawm and Ranger, and
Wagner. For a detailed and thorough examination of some of these issues from a different
perspective that emphasizes the importance of relativism as a mode of intercultural critique,
see Miller, esp. chapters one and two.
12I mention the Berry because it is a mostly agricultural region of France, noted for its
healers and storytellers. Marie-Blandine Ouedraogo, discussing the shortcomings of ethno
graphic representations and the problems of the women's movement in Upper Volta, makes
a similar point:
On a parfois l'impression que les ethnologues ne s'interessent pas
beaucoup a la vie des femmes . . . qu'elles cherchent a tout prix a
decouvrir un autre systeme tout a fait etranger au leur, qu'elles tiennent
a se demarquer de nous.
Moi, je trouve que tu mettrais une Africaine devant une paysanne
europ6enne et tu ne verrais pas tellement de difference. De la mSme
maniere, une Blanche urbaine ne me par ait pas tres differente d'une
Africaine des villes. Quand celle-ci veut entrer en contact avec les
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femmes villageoises, elle rencontre les memes difficultes, la meme
mefiance que l'europeenne. (33)
[Sometimes it seems that female ethnologists are not very interested in
women's lives . . . that they try, at all cost, to discover a system
completely foreign to their own, that they insist on differentiating
themselves from us.
I think that if you were to compare an African woman with a
European peasant woman, you would not see a whole lot of differences.
Similarly, a white urban woman does not seem to me to be that
different from an urban African woman. When the latter wants to
communicate with a village woman, she encounters the same difficul
ties, the same level of suspicion as a European woman does].
13The Rosaldos were studying the Ilongots who "lacked the ethnographic staples of
the day: lineages, villages, men's houses, elaborate rituals . . ." (77).
14Hence, these characters are the counterpart of the Man with a Bicycle as described by
Appiah (see note 7 above). For an interesting discussion of the issue of cultural and historical
relativism, see Mohanty.
15I use the term in the Greek sense made familiar by Jacques Derrida: "Le pharmakon
est ce supplement dangereux qui entre par effraction dans cela meme qui voudrait avoir pu
s'en passer" (126).
16On Sebbar and the Beurs, see Mortimer, Woodhull, and Laronde.
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