This novel by Joseph Zobel has something fascinating about it. Since its publication,* the novel has spanned generations of readers, each time gaining a sympathetic audience that would only grow after Martinican director Euzhan Palcy adapted it to film in 1983. When it was published, the Caribbean literary landscape was already solid: increasingly popular key texts such as Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire (1939) and Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain (1944) were already well established . . . Romantic and poetic militantism (relating black people’s suffering in post-slavery fields, condemning accusation béké plantation owners,* denouncing poverty and colonial exploitation) was an active movement already occupying the militant consciousness. Yet, while Black Shack Alley subscribes to this common militant vein, it still manages to catch the eye. The touching naïvetés of the narration, its realism, the simple accuracy of his language, and at times, the writing’s undeniable beauty, will indulge to say the least a considerable, long-term audience. This success is not inexplicable.
Zobel wrote this text only a few decades after the abolition of slavery. It is then that the plantation system in Martinique sustains the blow that will lead to its inevitable decay. Plantation workers begin to leave their quarters in order to find salvation in towns and cities. Zobel’s sensitivity immediately takes on the intuition of deep forces that structured Caribbean realities at that time, and by extension plantations in the Americas. His novel allows successive generations of readers to recover extremely delicate accounts or unforgettable experiences that their mothers and fathers underwent. Yet most notably it highlights the cultural and sociohistorical archetypes that persist in the Caribbean and plantations in the Americas.
This story is largely autobiographical, hence its naturalism and touches of truth. It recounts how little José Hassam will successfully leave the plantation’s Black Shack Alley (with the help of his grandmother, M’man Tine, and later his mother, M’man Délia) to embark upon the town and on to the big city, on a laborious quest for knowledge. The hell that is the sugarcane fields progressively destroys M’man Tine and will poignantly fuel José’s success. He manages to earn his diploma, also guaranteeing that he will not become another plantation fatality. The first part of the story offers a glimpse into daily life in Black Shack Alley quarters. The second tells of the experience in the town school, located between a sugar factory and plantation. Last, the third part of the work takes us along with little José into the big city, where he attends high school and begins to acclimate to urban life. With the gift of divine intuition, Zobel will go on to explore determining archetypes: four structural agencies that come from the plantations in the Americas and from the imaginary of slaves’ descendants.
The plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean each possessed their own Black Shack Alley: a row of basic shacks, located somewhat far from the master’s house. That’s where the slaves were penned up. After abolition, farm “workers” would find themselves assigned there under identical conditions. In these quarters, the slaves who were ripped from Africa and their descendants alike found ways to survive amid the traumatic incomprehensibility of their situation, passive or active resistance, and dubious declarations of submission to the plantation owners. It is in such quarters that M’man Tine will provide José an education, which, roughly summed up, will equip him with the tools that he needs to escape the plantation. The negro mothers of these quarters (whether on plantations in the Caribbean or the Americas) will share the same obsession: push their children far away from the curses of that futureless place as much as possible. Every Black Shack Alley will then appear either as an unavoidable cemetery (M’man Tine, Médouze, and so many others will die there) or as a launchpad toward a new life. The transitional role of these quarters will be affirmed as the plantations are dismantled during the sugar crisis and, later, due to the rural exodus enticed by the fascination for city life. Though shrouded in fatality, these quarters were also paradoxically an unexpected lifeline, a door left ajar, an improbable path of escape within the totalitarian enclosure of the plantation. Unlike many of his little friends, José will find the resources to escape by the only means possible: school, the gateway to another imaginary within, all thanks to M’man Tine and the old negro Médouze. The sting of suffering, the extraordinary ingenuity of Black Shack Alley, and a bit of luck, will secretly lift him both physically and mentally from the cesspit that is the plantation. There is not one single Caribbean family, nor one single descendant of slaves from the Caribbean or the Americas, who was not either directly or indirectly shaped by this place of force and counterforce, of certain death or possible awakening.
The unforgettable M’man Tine figure fills the memory of those who have read this work. With this character, Zobel is able to reveal an archetype of the plantations in the Americas. In the slavery system, families were structured around women. They maintained the gardens and shacks, and took care of babies, children, and adolescents as well. There was a sense of community among great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and allies of all sorts. This created a very complex, female ecosystem in the heart of the plantation, which ensured that children would have opportunities in a life that could only be imagined. Men remained mostly on the outskirts of this system. The father’s place was occupied (both violently and symbolically) by the slave master. This place will also be held by the all-powerful plantation boss who will take on farm workers after abolition. From then on, the intrafamilial power would fall back on women. The privileged role was often that of the grandmother, who held the reins of progeny, while the mother’s role was seeking ways to survive.
Little José Hassam’s mother, M’man Délia, tried her luck outside of the plantation: she lived in the city and worked for the béké importers; and the grandmother, M’man Tine, was making sure that little José got an education and worked hard to get him out in all ways possible. Helping her daughter and her grandson meant that M’man Tine resolutely made the conscious decision to die on the plantation, thus sacrificing herself. Anthropologists have designated the term “matrifocal family” for this cooperative, self-sacrificial, women-focused family, within which various functions, power, and legitimacy are managed along maternal lines. In Zobel’s work, M’man Tine is the one who holds the familial “power.” It is she who, with tough love, takes on the formidable task of forging a destiny for José. She will do so in the purest form of matrifocal tradition. José says, “She did not kiss me: she would hardly ever kiss me.” M’man Tine did not hug or kiss him. She most often grumbled, grouched, and reprimanded him. This emotional distance signaled that M’man Tine never put herself into a position of feminine tenderness or motherly love. She displayed vertical authority; one that is not intimate but disconnected. She was, in fact, the father that José did not have, and above all a figure of authority who stood up to that of the plantation: “My grandmother who was stone and iron!” he rightly says.
On the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas, Africa will become spectral. The immense protean land will be but a remnant of a lost country, a memory that fades more with each generation, but that persists in everyone—for some more intense, for some more obscure. Africa is found within the secret depths of Black Shack Alley: remaining unsuspected in its bits of traditions, rituals, and sacred values—as well as in its knowledge and skills, though they were oftentimes altered. This wisdom used to float within everyone’s grasp. They inhabited any and everyone, from youngest to oldest. They would go on to nourish, often unbeknownst to them, the survival strategies of the slaves, then those of the farm workers. As resistance to slavery and economic oppression strengthens and people gain awareness, the African legacy will prove to be just as useful as it is precious. In José’s imagination, the Africa that was lost will take on a human form in the old negro Médouze: “He is the oldest, most miserable and loneliest person on the whole plantation. . . .” Médouze remembers his father, who was seemingly born in Guinea. He is, so to speak, inhabited by this specter who lived through slavery and who vaguely passes the great lost land down to him. Médouze is as mysterious as this foggy memory that he harbors and he embodies the great lost land without really having been there. Africa will be present in his proverbs, riddles, enigmatic chants, postures, and gestures, and in the cloth that he wears. Africa will come to life through his tales, strange chants, and silences. It will in fact constitute an “elsewhere,” crystallized as much by Médouze’s narrative obscurities as by the mineral archive of his flesh: “. . . the combination of his cloth, the board, the stone, the ground, and his body, formed a single indistinct mass. . . .” His voice “had the effect of an old, dusty thing.” Médouze lives somewhat on the fringes of the plantation—both on and off of it. Out of reach of the place of perdition, he strides along his own path in unwavering solitude, which draws José in. Without realizing it, José is then slowly pushed toward the outside, the inaccessible, the impossible, and the unknown. When the old man dies, José feels as though Médouze is “being lifted into the night and leaving for Guinea. . . .”
If all the sons and daughters of the Caribbean or the Americas are found within M’man Tine and find a M’man Tine within themselves (just as they did in Old Médouze and the transitional space of the old negro quarters), they can equally be found within the persistent quest for knowledge that will fulfill José’s childhood. Caribbean mothers knew that the only possible way off the plantations was through good education. Each mother sacrificed herself so that her children could have access to education as early and for as long as possible. On the plantations of the Americas, it was the primary objective of maternal fervor. M’man Tine will never accept José’s being drafted into the fields. Children who began working on the plantation did not have time to learn how to read or write, or to free their minds. The trap of an inescapable fate would therefore irremediably close in on them. M’man Tine knows this. She will put forth all of her energy, her anger, and her entire life to push José toward the town school and on to the city high school. José’s mother, M’man Délia, takes over this crusade in the city and will work just as hard to find the means to make up for what the scholarship could not cover. José had long developed his thirst for knowledge, beginning with his fascination with Old Médouze and his appetite for mysterious tales. In the school environment, he will tap into his curiosity, bending his mind toward the inaccessible. M’man Tine would have sacrificed herself in vain had José not already possessed this grand desire, similar to that of Old Médouze, guardian of a great enigmatic elsewhere and keeper of this longing desire for Africa alive within the realm of imagination.
In addition to the sensitive exploration of these four archetypes, Zobel accomplishes another great feat: that of language. With him, we are far from the rhetorical splendors of Césaire. We let go of the stylistic embellishments that were law in Caribbean literature. We are in an almost naive or innocent simplicity. But Zobel does not surrender to the French language without caution. Each of his formulations is replete with linguistic depths wherever possible. The language of the plantation is Creole. By day, it is spoken as much by the masters as it is by the slaves in order to plan and carry out the day’s work. By night, it becomes the intimate language of the negroes, of their relationships and secretive strategies. The French language will never catch hold, and will remain somewhat distant: it is the language of administration, police, governors, the law, and colonial forces. M’man Tine speaks and thinks in Creole. The same goes for José. He will have to attend school so that the French language builds upon his Creole foundations. French will be the only language authorized in school, and Creole will be forbidden, decried and returned to illiterate orality and for working in the fields. In Zobel’s writing, the French language still leans into the depths of the Creole language and universe: it is thus more faithful to the language of the characters of Black Shack Alley. Creole is the silent language that still speaks through Zobel’s words. It seeps from everywhere, appears unexpectedly, in a pronounced or subtle way. As such, Zobel’s writing foresees the intersection of Creole and French, between written and oral, between transparency and obscurity, that will be implemented by literary generations to come.
With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land emerges a long literary tradition of denunciation of slavery and colonial oppression. Zobel will not escape this paradigm. Black Shack Alley is a harsh political denunciation that criticizes béké exploitation, racism, mind-numbing poverty, and unanswered injustice. Never will this story be told better, never will it send as strong a message as through the ruthless misery and exploitation of (his beloved, his wonderful) M’man Tine: “Now, when evening had come, her old straw looked like a headdress made of manure to me, the tattered fabric covering her was soaked and clung to her skeleton; and, with her hands and feet covered in mud and swollen like stale bread tossed in the water, her joints rusted, M’man Tine, the greatest and most beautiful of grandmothers, abruptly became a dreadful apparition that resembled nothing like a mother nor an old woman, nor a negress, nor a human being.”
Zobel’s novel marks the departure of Caribbean literature from the plantation world to tackling the obstacles and challenges of the urban world. Zobel, a major figure of this movement, once again had great intuition. He does not describe the city of the wealthy, or the beautiful villas on Didier Road, but the urban mangroves, and the working-class neighborhoods, where all of the Black Shack Alley survivors from near and far would come together, squeeze in, and remain.
PATRICK CHAMOISEAU