Gladys M. Francis
Daughter of the African diaspora, Fabienne Kanor was born in Orléans, France, where she witnessed her Martinican parents’ resolute desire to integrate and blend into the Métropole française that relentlessly regarded them as foreigners. At an early age, Kanor thus began to question her sense of belonging at the crossroads of France (where her French citizenship was questioned due to her black skin), the Caribbean (where she was perceived as a négropolitaine), and Africa (a point of origin, yet unknown). These violent identity negotiations would nurture the projects she would lead in her career as a journalist (at Radio France Outre-mer, Radio France Internationale, France 3 Télévision, and Radio Nova in Paris, among others). These compound praxes would later become evident in her fiction and cinematic writing. It is through these polycentric avenues that Kanor critically observes and questions colonial history and memory and how they affect relationships to the body, race, gender, place, and borders.
During a visit to the archives in the city of Nantes, France, Kanor found and read the logbook of Louis Mosnier, the captain of the slave ship Le Soleil, in which he reports an incident dating from 1774: fourteen unnamed African women (described as goods) jumped overboard into the sea, all together, to escape their enslavement. The report succinctly notes that six of them survived while the others died from shark bites. When Kanor encountered the fourteen women’s objectified bodies in the archives, she experienced the captives’ “intextuation” (Certeau 140), that is to say, “a bureaucracy of literacy as instruments of [their] control and displacement” (Conquergood 35; Francis, Odious Caribbean Women). As the scholar Hershini Bhana Young explains: “Rereading the imperial archive requires immersion into the painful forces that have constituted our strategic communities today. This immersion necessitates not just a resistance to imperialism but a visceral reliving of its trauma” (9). Faced with this imperial archive, Kanor questioned how she could shoulder the legacy of the fourteen women; she struggled with the ways in which she should give voice to their voiceless, intolerable, and unwatchable black experiences. She ultimately decided that the fourteen women would be characters sharing their fictional testimonies from the belly of a slave ship where they are held captive. Fusing her journalistic, literary, and visual virtuosity, Kanor published Humus, her second novel, in 2006.
A very interesting aspect of Kanor’s preparation for writing the novel is her personal exploration of the role and importance of the slave trade. To gain her own interpretation of this part of history, she sought tangible ways to be a part of it. As a result, she began to trace what the scholar Françoise Lionnet calls “geographies of pain” through meetings with experts and walks in the city of Nantes with a former sea captain and scholar of the slave trade, all the while documenting herself. In addition, Kanor literally performed a physical and transatlantic passage into the spaces that witnessed the slave trade or into the places that continue to reveal the brutalizing and dehumanizing effects of slavery on the inheritors across race, gender, and class (Césaire). Thus, she traveled to Ouidah, Cape Coast, Gorée, and Badagri, where she met the king’s historian and visited an old slave market. Convinced that she was developing a framework that would allow her to write the captives’ stories “from the heart” (Francis, Amour, sexe, genre et trauma), Kanor returned to Saint-Louis, Senegal (where she lived at the time), and started to compose Humus by hand. Two years later, during an artist-in-residence program at a former sugarcane plantation in Guadeloupe, Kanor completed the novel’s first draft. In an interview, she explains how “Each word was first spoken aloud before being set down in ink. It was important [for her to] restore the words of these voiceless captives. [She] was looking for the right word [and] sometimes it seemed that the women themselves whispered these words to [her]” (Francis, “Fabienne Kanor ‘l’Ante-llaise par excellence’”). It is from the (physical, emotional, and psychological) confining space of slavery that the readers can witness the corpomemorial awakenings, wanderings, and renderings of the fourteen women, who, until Kanor’s novel, were forgotten goods in the colonial archives. Echoing Édouard Glissant, Kanor sees in places of confinement (whether geographical, psychological, emotional, or social) a space that holds embodied “Fermentation, transformation, Creolization, dilution and exchange” (Francis, “Fabienne Kanor ‘l’Ante-llaise par excellence’”). Her creative process is embodied through movement, development, and transformation. From Nantes to Guadeloupe, Senegal to Martinique, Cameroon to Louisiana, Spain to Benin, or Haiti to Nigeria (to name but a few), Kanor’s cartography of creation marks her own acts of resistance as she refuses to lose sight of her own humanity.
Shortly after its publication, Humus was awarded the Réseau France Outre-mer Prize (an annual literary award given to a Francophone work). The same year, Kanor wrote Homo humus est, a play based on Humus. Staged at the National Theatre of Toulouse (in 2006) and the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris (in 2008), Homo humus est also received the ETC Caraïbe Playwright Prize. Seemingly inspired by the captives’ experience in the slave ship’s hold, Kanor wrote her second play, La grande chambre, which was staged in 2016 at the National Theatre of Marseille (La Criée) by La Part du Pauvre Company. To date, Humus is Kanor’s most studied novel, inspiring hundreds of academic works ranging from dissertations, articles, and book chapters (in postcolonial studies, women’s sexuality and gender studies, cultural studies, French and Francophone studies, human rights studies, as well as migration and border studies). Since the original publication of Humus in 2006, Fabienne Kanor has made her mark as a notable francophone writer, filmmaker, activist, and scholar. Maryse Condé, the illustrious Guadeloupean novelist and recipient of the 2018 Alternative Nobel literature prize, named Fabienne Kanor her “beloved literary daughter.” In fact, Kanor is one of the foremost figures of the emerging generation of Caribbean filmmakers and writers after Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, Euzhan Palcy, and Derek Walcott. The latter have been influential forces in her body of work, which is revealed through the following shared themes of study: identity formation and “homelessness” (at the crossing of Africa, America, the Caribbean, and Europe); race, colonialism, and its legacy; the notion of roots from different spaces/cultures; water as a sacred space of passage; the enclosed ship hold as a space with the potential for transformation; the body as memory; and the complexity of love and sexuality in these neocolonial spaces (among others). In 2010, Kanor was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture; she is the author of fourteen documentary films, nine novels, eight audio documentaries, two movies, two plays, four short stories, and numerous critical essays and live performances.
In the early spring of 2016, Fabienne Kanor was preparing for an upcoming live performance that would combine a short film she directed, Le corps de l’histoire (2015), English excerpts from Humus, as well as a new spoken-word essay on police brutality and systemic racism. After the poignant inaugural presentation of the live performance in April 2016 in Atlanta, Le corps de l’histoire expanded to a larger body of work meant for larger stages and audiences. As Kanor shared her English translation needs for longer Humus excerpts, we began to vigorously discuss the translation of the entire novel. She expounded upon the importance of having this novel translated in English: “In the United States, there is a place for these enslaved women, there is a place to listen to their testimony. There, it is not a time gone by or a settled matter. We must live in the footsteps of this history, for we are its product. Whereas it is a truth that can be told and shared in the United States, however, France continues to proclaim itself as a post-racial Republic, which makes it difficult to have these necessary conversations” (Fabienne Kanor, email message to the author, May 29, 2016). An English translation of Humus would hence disseminate the truth of a French colonial past that continues to be subdued. Through Humus, Kanor questions the genesis of, memory of, and voids left by traumas resulting from the Middle Passage. She contends that all the heirs of this colonial trauma must contribute to the difficult yet indispensable dialogue.
A few months later, I recommended Dr. Lynn E. Palermo for the translation of Humus, and the two arranged a videoconference to feel things out:
It was in July. A Saturday morning . . . I remember the calm and the intensity in the tone of her voice. She asked me about my timeline, because she wanted to take the necessary time to complete the translation with attentiveness. She wanted to be careful not to flatten its poetics, hinder any portion of it. I could feel that she was completely moved by the captives’ stories, as if something had happened between them, like a mystic dialogue. The conversation we shared was very honest, and we just said, “Let’s do it!” She promised to reach out to me as needed. Yet, she did not come back too often. She worked on Humus like a soldier fighting against ghosts. (Kanor, Interview)
There were times when Kanor could not respond to Palermo’s need for clarification. As she explains:
She would ask me what I meant, and sometimes I could not answer. Maybe it is because I wasn’t totally myself when I wrote Humus; these women haunted me; I was only channeling their voices. Lynn gave me the opportunity to take my narrative back, to talk about it as its author instead of being at the service of my characters and expressing myself solely through them. This translation project provoked this distance, which forced me to take ownership and to explain myself. (Kanor, Interview)
This English translation of Humus is indeed the result of a close and genuine cooperation between Palermo and Kanor. I vividly recall phone and email conversations with Palermo at various stages of this translation project. The most memorable exchange is certainly the one that followed her first reading of Humus in 2016. She pointed to the novel’s literary virtuosity and to its atemporal uniqueness. As she felt an urgency to make it accessible to a broader audience, she never stopped carrying a profound feeling of responsibility toward the fourteen captives’ voicing. She pointed to some challenges: “Humus requires constant attention; I must track the countless movements of deracination, displacement, and dislocation for each captive [as each moves through physical and esoteric spaces]” (Lynn Palermo, personal communication with the author, July 2016). As Palermo stressed, in Humus, retracing the captives’ steps is a complex venture. The process implicates a variety of “passing experiences” through lands (those of the Peuls, the Mossis, the Mandés, the Bambaras, the Yorubas, and the colonial islands); the spiritual; liquids (the ocean, sweat, menstrual blood [embodying the tactile and haptic passing of months and years in the slave boat and the plantation], snots [symbolizing sickness once on the island], tears that become rivers, and the fluids relating to rape and jouissance); and many more. This profusion of spaces makes the reader feel a sense of loss and confusion—the very same feelings the captives are experiencing. In an email conversation we had in 2018, Palermo wrote, “To fully connect and do justice to the original story, I am haunted by the desire to trace Fabienne’s journeys to Nantes, Africa, and the Caribbean.”
Humus contains textual representations of performance (what the scholar Jeannine Murray-Román calls “ekphrasis representations”) that can be easily overlooked by readers unfamiliar with the language, oral traditions (oralité), myths, and rituals of the (French) Caribbean and African cultures. This repertoire creates a complex level of reading and contributes to a literary decolonization of the Caribbean francophone novel (Toman in Francis, “Review of Women Writers”). Indeed, it is through oralité that Kanor provides her female characters with expressions of self-agency and rebellion. As a result, the testimonies, dances, chants, storytelling, Creole proverbs, and all embodied gestures (such as jumping collectively overboard into the ocean) become an embodied record/trace of the fourteen women’s sociopolitical agency signifying their black bodies becoming historical archive, landscape, and text (Francis, Odious Caribbean Women). Palermo made every effort to render the Afro-Diasporic performances and mnemonic transmissions that bear the fourteen captives’ complex experiential negotiations and identity formation. Humus is also a polyrhythmic text that reveals the beauty of Creole imagery and rhythmic structures (such as call-response patterns and [folk]tales) that nurture the lived experiences of some of the women as an embodied discursive site (Probyn, “Travels in the Postmodern; Probyn, “Anxious Proximities”). The second challenge for Palermo was to capture, in English, the subtle forms of the creolisms found in the text, which are often noticeable only to native speakers of Creole. To maintain the Creole essence of the original text, the author, the translator, and Carine Gendrey, a professor of Creole based in Martinique (whose research focuses on translatology studies in Creolophone and francophone settings), worked closely together. Palermo’s effort to render a brilliant translation is undisputable.
When Kanor chooses to give voice to the fourteen captives through their oral testimonies, she is able to reveal the heterogeneity of identities and backgrounds that individuals of African descent can possess and negotiate. Kanor, as Palermo understood during this translation project, creates a complexity of identities and a density of textures that prohibit the readers from reducing Africa or blackness to a homogeneous or simplistic entity. Similarly, the reader can hardly draw “victim versus hero” or “good versus bad” portraits of the characters. Kanor creates intricate intersectional spaces that the readers are free to decipher. In fact, Kanor feels very connected to la vieille (the old woman), for she is the only one who understands the danger of losing what makes her African once she is in the colonial plantation, and she is also the only one who remembers how joyous and playful life used to be in motherland Africa. Kanor marvels at la vieille’s level of consciousness, the depth of her memory, her inability to forget, her resilience (as she keeps moving forward), and her unwillingness to become a Creole woman: “She failed inside the belly of the slave ship and realized that it is the entire continent that will be enslaved and will lose its identity. On the slave ship, she acknowledges more than the people from her own tribe. She is the only one who declares: ‘tout partout l’Afrique’” (Kanor, Interview). L’amazone (the amazon) also captivates Kanor through her resolute desire to fight the fate of slavery. Kanor admires her complex and fluid idiosyncrasies: “She is man and woman, strong and weak, glorious and disgraced. She is also the king’s most devoted soldier and then his fierce enemy. She looks like a bachelor when she falls in love with Makandal. She is the link or what we call in the playwright world ‘a utility’ since there is no jump, no plot, no novel without her” (Kanor, Interview). Like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, Beloved, Island beneath the Sea, or For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Humus puts women at the center. As a French Caribbean woman of African descent, Kanor coins the expression “fanminism” from the French creole word “fanm” (meaning “woman”) in order to analyze the effects of patriarchy and sexism in society. Humus holds fanminist agency as, despite their violent objectification, the captives still attempt to create their own intimate and private spaces. Kanor doesn’t shy away from unveiling their sexual subjectivities and forbidden desires.
Humus possesses various original features. From its diegesis emanates what has undoubtedly become a signature aesthetic for the author: the difficult “seeing” of black bodies in pain. Indeed, the novel enfolds specific modes of representing “uglified” spaces, transgressive “deglamorified” female bodies in pain and explicit corporeal behaviors:
It is through the barren and inhospitable setting of the boat’s hold that Kanor develops the corporeality of her characters. From their narrative minimalism [or] the compositional bracketing of empty spaces (the slaves’ barracks in the colonial plantation)—the black women, just as the spaces that do violence to their bodies, create a space of impropriety. [The] body is environment. We must make the journey of its construction and reflection . . . The transgressive body is to be “seen” as it creates “memory,” as it creates sense-driven aesthetic and cognitive perceptions that are palpable. In Humus, pain is not located inside the raped body, it is inside every object or being that comes into contact with that pain. (Francis, Odious Caribbean Women)
This palpable and transgressive aesthetic of the odious circumvents any simplistic attempt to gain the readers’ empathy. Rather, it encourages an engaged witnessing (as opposed to a voyeur posture) and embodied transformative lived experiences that break the distance vis-à-vis the “other” black body. Humus is therefore an invitation to engage in an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about invisible or silenced traumas caused by capitalism, imperialism, (neo)colonialism, and (forced) immigration. It is a phenomenology of the transgressive that mobilizes the readers and makes them confront what they might rather dismiss, which conjointly tests their tolerance. This difficult “seeing” of the fourteen captives combines corporality, orality, memory, and history. In fact, Humus challenges the Western conventional perception of genres through an interweaving of oral and esoteric practices, the empiric archive, and literary writing.
Humus’s impact is manifold. In this novel, Kanor takes on the imperialist discourse of slavery and shifts the national archive’s value as illustrated in Humus, where she complicates the context of the archive and changes its significance and meaning. In this instance, she does so by reinterpreting the enduring archive from a March 23, 1774, captain’s report focused on justifying the loss of a valuable cargo of fourteen unnamed African women (who escaped from his ship’s hold to jump overboard) and by reinvesting them with embodied experiences, identities, and voices as she narrates their own stories. By re-presenting the experiences of the fourteen captives and by naming them, Kanor ritualizes and symbolizes them as embodied recollections—while inscribing them as (noncanonical) historical archives of public records. Through a Sankofa process, Kanor invites the daughters and sons of the African diaspora to “go back and fetch” their disremembered African heritage. By critically reassessing the colonial archives, Kanor can holistically engage black history as a contemporary voice in the present and the future. She creates space, knowledge, visibility, and humanity for the black bodies rendered invisible and silent in colonial history. Humus examines what can be painful and powerful when black bodies are positioned at the crossroads of dehumanization and self-resilience, just as it represents the complex frameworks that police, politicize, and imagine black bodies. In Humus, Kanor presents black bodies as a contested space continuously controlled or challenged by pernicious orthodoxies and racialized bio-logics that hinder their advancement or visibility. It mirrors today’s configurations through which politics of power, discipline, surveillance, and mediated representations are carried (Strauss 45; hooks, Black Look; hooks, “Transformative Pedagogy”). In fact, the forms of discrimination and oppression visible in Humus are not foreign to our twenty-first-century racial nomenclatures, which have a direct impact on our economic, political, sociocultural makeups. Kanor subverts the conventional frames of the colonial archives, allowing the fourteen captives to exercise embodied freedom as they reinstate their identities moving in and out of time and space. Hence, they are able to resist colonial taxonomies by shifting their bodies from passive to active embodied beings. Kanor calls us to be attentive to by what degrees and means our black cultural memory is being institutionalized—for instance, how museums elect to display our collective memory, preserve black cultures, or reduce complex events to isolated objects made public as an exhibit behind a glass case (Rein 97). Kanor challenges the process by which an object is detached from its original setting for its exhibition in a museum-like manner and environment. This musealization removes “cultural expressions [and functions] from their original context, in order to integrate them into the academic environment of the museum institution” (Rein 97). Humus is a call to maintain an emancipatory pedagogy of Black lived experiences, a call to reinvest ownership. Humus is a form of maroonage, of extricating oneself from slavery.
In Humus, Kanor also judiciously questions the tourists who have become the contemporary explorers of yesteryear. She wonders if the tourists’ postcards and cameras function as the captain’s logbook, objectifying and consuming the black body. Kanor, in her novel Humus, tells us the black bodies must be engaged in the multilayered contexts within which they come to be and create. It is inside these settings, we (just as Kanor and her fourteen captives) experience the humus of life: exertions of community building, power, resistance, and (transgressive) belonging. Humus is—as readers will now be able to enjoy through this English translation—ongoing; it is contemporary.
In January 2020, Kanor made her first journey back to Benin since her last visit fifteen years ago. She shares her thoughts: “I have a copy of Humus in my suitcase. The pages are yellow, some are missing . . . Books are fragile, but stories are strong” (Kanor, Interview). She plans to revisit the sites that gave birth to Humus and prepares for a performance she will do in Ouidah the following month titled Paroles de revenante:
Today, at the Saint-Michel market, I bought a calabash that I will fill with Ouidah’s sand-soil-humus. It will be a part of the performance. I do not expect to meet with “my fourteen women” again, but I just want to reconnect with my former self . . . When I had not yet published, did not know about the African American community, when I was just a young French Caribbean woman looking for her ancestors. (Kanor, Interview)