Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination

The world of my childhood included the incomprehensible mystery of the Nazi genocide. I returned to it compulsively like a painful wobbly tooth. It appeared to be the core of the war, and its survivors were all around us. Their tattoos intrigued me.

—Paul Gilroy, Between Camps

Blacks—African Caribbean people whom I know best—have had a long history of resisting these systems [of humiliation]. We understood what the fight against Hitler meant, and many Black men joined up and fought overseas on behalf of the Allied powers to prevent the culmination of an obscene racist ideology that had fingered everyone who wasn’t “white.” As a matter of course, many of us have taken the Jewish experience in World War II into our lives as I did as a teenager. We have had to.

—M. NourbeSe Philip, Showing Grit

The deepest question of the 20th century has to be the question of the Holocaust. I still think that there is no historical event equal to it.

—Derek Walcott, “An Interview”

As chapter 5 demonstrated, Holocaust history is not fundamentally divorced from the postslavery landscape of the Caribbean. Instead, the Holocaust’s reach extended into the Caribbean in the form of Jewish refugees from the Nazis who sought safe haven in the islands and Caribbean mainland, where some were also interned as enemy aliens.¹ Moreover as M. NourbeSe Philip notes in the epigraph to this chapter, this influx of Jewish refugees from the Nazis coincided with an inverse movement of Caribbean soldiers into the European theater of war—among them Frantz Fanon, who fought in the Free French Army. Not only soldiers, however, but other Black emigrants to Europe, including students and musicians, also found themselves caught up in the events that were unfolding in Europe. Accordingly, the present chapter moves outward from the Caribbean archipelago to address European landscapes of African diaspora Holocaust memory.

In particular, this chapter examines the Holocaust as a site of surrogate memory for Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during the war or in the decades immediately following. Drawing on Rothberg’s and Silverman’s discussions of multidirectional and palimpsestic memory to elucidate NourbeSe Philip’s Holocaust fiction and poetry, I suggest that not only early postwar anticolonial theory but also late twentieth and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature exhibits a predominantly identificatory rather than competitive orientation toward the Holocaust. I further argue that this cross-cultural identification between slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust finds expression at the level of genre. A series of texts that I describe as Black Holocaust narratives adopts the strategies of both postslavery and Holocaust fiction to recover a lost chapter of Holocaust history—that of Black victims of the camps.² In these Black Holocaust narratives, and particularly in Michèle Maillet’s novel L’étoile noire, connective tropes such as tattoos and modes of address such as testimony serve as a bridge between slavery and Holocaust fiction. Black Holocaust narratives not only expose historical intersections between slavery and the Holocaust but also illustrate how postslavery and Holocaust genres of writing interact with and overlay one another in the Caribbean literary imagination.

THE HOLOCAUST AS A “SURROGATE ISSUE” IN POSTWAR CARIBBEAN THOUGHT

Critical discussions of individual Caribbean/diaspora texts that invoke the Holocaust often treat these instances of cross-cultural identification as unique and exceptional.³ In this chapter I want to suggest that, rather than being isolated cases, such texts represent a broader phenomenon of adolescent crosscultural identification with the Holocaust that emerges among Caribbean/diaspora writers and intellectuals who came of age during World War II or in the several decades following. Compare the following passages from British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe and a lesser-known essay by Caribbean Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip:

As a child, in what seemed to me a hostile country, the Jews were the only minority group discussed with reference to exploitation and racialism, and for that reason, I naturally identified with them. At that time, I was staunchly indignant about everything from the Holocaust to the Soviet persecution of Jewry. The bloody excesses of colonialism, the pillage and rape of modern Africa, the transportation of 11 million black people to the Americas, and their subsequent bondage were not on the curriculum, and certainly not on the television screen. As a result I vicariously channelled a part of my hurt and frustration through the Jewish experience.

(Phillips, “In the Ghetto” 54)

At twelve, possibly, thirteen, I was outraged and upset at what had happened to the Jews. In the silence surrounding my own history and my own memory, I took to myself the pain of what had happened to Jewish people in Europe. Perhaps—I am sure that at some deeper level I knew what had happened to my own people (this knowledge, even if not spoken, is passed on, sometimes infinitely nuanced from one generation to another), and that I was on the journey to my own past albeit through a surrogate issue. It matters not how we come to understand oppression, provided we take the lessons to heart and apply them to our lives.

(Philip, Showing Grit 84)

In these two strikingly similar accounts, the Holocaust enables the adolescent Caribbean/diaspora subject to explore the slavery past in societies—both metropolitan and colonial—that disallowed such discussions. Caryl Phillips, born in 1958 in St. Kitts and raised in the north of England, and NourbeSe Philip, born in 1947 in Tobago and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, came of age in a postwar moment in which the Holocaust had become an accepted topic of discussion but slavery had not yet been afforded the same recognition. Philip recalls that as a child she “was not exposed, either in school or imaginatively through library books, to the horror that was the Middle Passage and African life under slavery in the New World,” and she did not study Caribbean history until the age of sixteen (Showing Grit 84). Instead, in the absence of books such as The Souls of Black Folk and Up from Slavery from her local library, her first contact with the subject of genocide came through Leon Uris’s novel Exodus.⁴ Similarly, as we will see in chapter 7, for the adolescent Caryl Phillips, viewing a television documentary entitled The World at War served as his initiation into questions of historical trauma and displacement. Accordingly, both writers turned to the Holocaust as a “surrogate issue” (in Philip’s phrase) through which they could gain access to a suppressed slavery past.

The lines from Caryl Phillips’s essay “In the Ghetto” from his collection The European Tribe are frequently cited, but, set alongside this lesser-known passage from NourbeSe Philip’s essay “Black/Jewish Relations,” they point to a pattern of cross-cultural identification and of linking the histories of fascism and racism that extends well beyond Phillips’ oeuvre.⁵ Indeed, a number of other Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora examples are available.⁶ Phillips’s contemporary Paul Gilroy, born in 1956 in London to a Guyanese mother (the author Beryl Gilroy) and raised like Phillips in Britain, describes in his introduction to Between Camps how he was compelled as a child by the Holocaust like a “painful wobbly tooth” to which he “returned…compulsively” (4). Like Cliff’s Clare Savage in her novel Abeng, the young Gilroy secretly and obsessively pursued a study of the war out of a sense of “an obligation to know” (Gilroy, Between Camps 3). And, just as the youthful protagonists of the Caribbean Holocaust fiction that I examine in this and the following chapter come to a critical understanding of racism and colorism through the Holocaust, so as a boy Gilroy began to make connections between British fascism and Nazism. In Between Camps Gilroy recalls his early awareness that West Indians such as his uncle “had participated bravely in the anti-Nazi war” (2). He also writes of his youthful friendships with the children of Holocaust survivors, recounting how he “struggled with the realization that their suffering was somehow connected with the ideas of ‘race’ that bounded [his] own world with the threat of violence” (4). Gilroy thus identifies both his Caribbean heritage and his postwar British childhood landscape as foundational to his critique of race and discomfort with the “attachment to racial identity” that shapes contemporary African American cultural politics (xiii).

Caribbean scholars and writers of the generation preceding that of Gilroy and Phillips have also described the impact of the Holocaust on their intellectual formation. We have already seen how large the Holocaust looms in the consciousness of Cynthia McLeod, who was born in 1936, and whose literary career was partly inspired by her childhood contact with European Jews in Suriname during the war. Equally for McLeod’s contemporary Derek Walcott (b. 1930, St. Lucia), the Holocaust is unrivaled as “the deepest question of the 20th century” (“An Interview” 154). The pervasiveness of Holocaust imagery in Walcott’s poetry reflects the extent to which his adolescence was shaped by World War II and reports of the concentration camps, which came to symbolize for him the horrors of slavery.⁷ The impact of the war was perhaps still more keenly felt by those who left the Caribbean to pursue their studies in Europe. When asked about his interest in the Jewish political theorist Isaiah Berlin, the Jamaican scholar Rex Nettleford (b. 1933) recalled:

I was so concerned about race discrimination, and I had a particular interest in the Jews with all they had suffered with the Holocaust. Because from early I had this concept that our Holocaust was the Middle Passage. And of course you use the word diaspora now liberally. I remember as a student traveling on the train from Paris to Amsterdam, which I did a number of times, and I would go talk to people who might have been in the war, to hear their stories about the war. The Second World War interested me a great deal; the suffering of the Jews interested me a lot.

(“To Be Liberated” 149)

While the life experiences of Caribbean intellectuals born in the 1930s such as Nettleford and Walcott necessarily diverge significantly from those born in the 1950s and raised in Britain such as Phillips and Gilroy, both generations describe the Holocaust as having significantly shaped their understanding of racial and colonial violence.⁸ Moreover, as not only the well-known examples of Césaire and Fanon but also the fiction of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, Maillet, and other francophone writers attests, this pattern of cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust and Jewish experience also extends beyond the anglophone Caribbean context.⁹ For example, Martinican psychologist Simone Henry-Valmore relates how Césaire had once explained to her that a tree in the Place Abbé-Grégoire in Fort-de-France is called “Oreilles de Juif, oreilles de Noir”—a name that suggested to her the suspicion to which both Blacks and Jews have historically been subject (21). Henry-Valmore then proceeds to recall studying under an Italian Jew while living in Paris in the 1960s: “Once my initiation into the Yiddish alphabet and Hebrew grammar began, I heard echoes of my own history, that of Black people subjected to the same misery: deportation—diaspora—ghetto” (22).¹⁰ Henry-Valmore’s autobiographical reflections, while participating in a postwar francophone intellectual tradition of drawing connections between fascism and colonial violence, also exhibit significant parallels with the responses to the Holocaust of Nettleford and other anglophone Caribbean intellectuals.

Such accounts of the Holocaust and of Jewish experience more broadly as a surrogate issue through which Caribbean/diaspora writers could explore their own postslavery histories exemplify the phenomenon of multidirectional memory theorized by Rothberg. Revisiting Freud’s writings, Rothberg rejects some critics’ conception of screen memory as the silencing of one memory by another memory with which it is in competition. Instead, he understands it as a displacement of one memory by another that “functions as much to open up lines of communication with the past as to close them off” (12).¹¹ Rothberg’s multidirectional memory resembles Freud’s screen memory in its substitutive function but operates at a collective rather than an individual level. Moreover, “while screen memory replaces a disturbing memory with a more comforting, everyday scene, the multidirectional memory explored here frequently juxtaposes two or more disturbing memories and disrupts everyday settings” (14). Most important for Rothberg’s theorization of multidirectional memory is the insight that “the content of a memory has no intrinsic meaning but takes on meaning precisely in relationship to other memories in a network of associations” (16).

Rothberg’s conceptualization of multidirectional memory sheds light on the instances of identification with the Holocaust that appear in the Caribbean/diaspora autobiographical reflections I have surveyed. At the same time, it also helps to account for the presence of Holocaust imagery in Caribbean fiction and poetry. Holocaust motifs appear predominantly in the work of Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during or in the decades immediately following World War II in the Caribbean or in the European metropoles. (Indeed it is not by chance that the works that I discuss in chapters 6 and 7 tend to be set either during the war or in the early postwar period and feature youthful protagonists who hearken back to the writers’ own adolescences.) Moreover, it is worth noting that the majority of the Caribbean Holocaust narratives that I examine were published in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that was characterized by public commemorations of the Holocaust and that saw the peak of the Holocaust novel as a genre (Sicher xi, xvii). At the same time, these publication dates also suggest the authors’ desire to respond to and challenge the rising Black antisemitism in the United States during that same period. Now that the history of slavery has become a more established and accepted part of public discourse, the need for a surrogate form of memory is far less acute, and I would speculate that Holocaust imagery will diminish in importance in the work of younger Caribbean/diaspora writers.¹² The fiction and poetry that I discuss in this chapter and the next needs to be understood, then, as tied to a particular historical moment and generation of Caribbean writing.

SURROGATE MEMORY IN M. NOURBESE PHILIP’S HOLOCAUST NARRATIVES

Poet and novelist M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay “Black/Jewish Relations,” which was published in 1993 in her book Showing Grit at the height of Black-Jewish tensions in the United States, forcefully argues against competitive memory as a ruse that only serves to illustrate “how systems of power work to pit us against each other” (93). In the essay, which responds to the controversy that surrounded an early 1990s Toronto production of the musical Show Boat, Philip calls for interethnic cooperation between Blacks and Jews as well as other minorities. Citing her own experience of coming to an awareness of injustice and genocide through her adolescent encounter with the Holocaust, Philip observes that the impact of her early exposure to the Holocaust is evidenced by the presence of Holocaust motifs in her fiction and poetry.

A case in point is Philip’s short story “Stop Frame” (1993), which is set in 1958 on an unnamed island in the British Caribbean.¹³ In “Stop Frame” the twelve-year-old heroine and “war baby” (62) Miranda resists Nazism as a means of indirectly engaging the slavery past. The story is fundamentally concerned with the workings of memory: its unreliability, its gaps, its disjunctive character. For Philip’s young protagonist, the Holocaust functions as a surrogate issue through which she can explore a deeper, unnamed pain that afflicts those around her. Anticipating Gilroy’s “wobbly tooth” metaphor, this pain is symbolized in the story by the rotten tooth that plagues Miranda: “Stop frame! you von’t feel ze pain, just ze pressure—the weight of memories—a tooth impacted, pushing, pressing against gum against bone—the hard white bone of history, and I remembering the tooth black and rotting—the white memory eating and eating away at the creeping black which making the hard white soft, crumbly, and Ma packing it again and again with the dark brown powder she making from cloves, and it stopping the aching—the memory—” (71). Refusing to allow her tooth to be extracted by the émigré dentist Dr. Ratzinger, whom she suspects of being a Nazi, Miranda resists the forgetting of painful memories through their excision.¹⁴ Yet neither, the story suggests, can these memories be approached directly.

Although her mother maintains that she is too young to remember the war, Miranda insists that at night she hears “the bombs dropping on London over the wireless” (63). The War looms large for this “young girl on a tiny Caribbean island—far away from events like ‘the final solution,’ panzer divisions, and the Desert Fox” (63). Moreover, just as Miranda inherits a postmemory of the war, she inherits a postmemory of slavery as well. Slavery and colonialism are never mentioned in the story, but are only alluded to through references to their legacies: miscegenation, colorism, and Hollywood depictions of Africa. Instead, Miranda and her friends pass the time launching their own “war effort” (64), which consists of speculating about and playing pranks on Dr. Ratzinger, whom they imagine as an incarnation of the Hollywood image of the evil Nazi dentist (Sanders 137). Although the young Miranda has little understanding of the true meaning of “Nazi,” she senses from the manner in which her mother utters the word that it “holding in it everything that evil” (70).

Just as slavery is not explicitly addressed in the story, colonial racism is only alluded to indirectly through references to antisemitism. Miranda’s father, for example, draws attention to anti-Black racism through its relationship to antisemitism when he refuses to believe that Dr. Ratzinger could be having an affair with his dark-skinned nurse: “‘Me don’t care how mix-up she is—as far as those Nazis go she is a member of an inferior race. Me read about it—they even killing Jews and they have white skins!” (68). For the adolescent protagonist of “Stop Frame,” living on a Caribbean island in the late 1950s, the Holocaust is the most readily available means of accessing the memory of a deeper historical trauma that remains unspoken, but that is represented by the aching tooth. Miranda’s preoccupation with Nazis and the war substitutes for a more direct engagement with the slavery past. Yet as Leslie Sanders observes in a sensitive commentary, in “Stop Frame” Holocaust memory does not block or compete with the inherited memory of slavery. Instead, “in Philip’s work, [the Holocaust and slavery] are deeply connected, the Holocaust providing access to a documented trauma, even perhaps, a model of public acknowledgement and mourning, that the Middle Passage demands and requires. In ‘Stop Frame,’ the one recalls the other, rather than masking it” (139–40).

The most arresting moment in the story comes in its final pages, in which there is a sudden temporal shift thirty years forward to 1988. Mimicking the stop-frame animation technique used in the King Kong film that Miranda and her friends had watched as children, the story now unfolds as a series of stills. The narrative moves disjunctively and associatively from the World War II theme, and the question of whether Miranda’s Jewish friend Sara knew anything about the Nazis, to Hollywood’s depiction of Africa in Tarzan and Miranda’s ignorance of African history, to pause finally on the image of Miranda’s mother lying on the floor after a suicide attempt. The adult narrator questions her mother in the present time of the story about the reasons for her distress, but her mother resists answering, remarking: “‘You know what I always saying, chile, a memory just like a rotten tooth—if it hurting too bad, you must be taking it out’” (71). Miranda, however, refuses to accept her mother’s solution of forgetting. Instead, her tongue runs over the space where her tooth had ached, “exploring old areas of pain” (72). This final section of “Stop Frame” is illuminated by Silverman’s theorization of palimpsestic memory in which “one element is seen through and transformed by another” (Palimpsestic Memory 4). Silverman prefers the figure of the palimpsest to such alternatives as analogy, metaphor, and allegory because it better captures memory’s overlaying of past and present and straddling of multiple temporal moments. The figure of the palimpsest is apposite to Philip’s story, which layers different histories and temporal moments to suggest the nonlinear workings of memory and the extent to which “the present is…shadowed or haunted by a past which is not immediately visible but is progressively brought into view” (3).

In Harriet’s Daughter Margaret is inspired by the discovery of Mrs. Blewchamp’s bequeathal to her to change her name to Harriet, for “Mrs. Blewchamp had really lived, she was in the war, in a concentration camp, and had escaped and she wanted me to have her name. I mean, like who was Margaret? My father’s mother, whom I didn’t really know, and didn’t like, because HE was always threatening to send me to her for some Good West Indian Discipline” (25). The name Harriet takes on another layer of significance when Margaret comes across the story of the runaway slave and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman. Rebelling against her restrictive upbringing, Margaret seeks to affiliate herself with Harriet Blewchamp and Harriet Tubman rather than accept the patriarchal values imposed on her by the name Margaret. Mrs. Blewchamp, alongside Harriet Tubman and the African American Mrs. B, are mentors who guide Margaret toward an emancipatory path of self-determination.

Particularly noteworthy is the novel’s overlaying of Holocaust memory and the memory of slavery that is emblematized in the name Harriet: “Harriet, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Blewchamp, again I thought of changing my name to one that meant something—like Harriet. Harriet Tubman was brave and strong and she was black like me. I think it was the first time I thought of wanting to be called Harriet—I wanted to be Harriet” (37). Philip offers a sympathetic portrait of the Holocaust survivor Harriet Blewchamp, who shares with Harriet Tubman eyes that “looked like they had seen things” (31). As the novel proceeds, Mrs. Blewchamp becomes less focal as Margaret reconnects with the history of slavery through the Underground Railway game that she devises, as well as with the Caribbean itself through her efforts to help her friend Zulma return to Tobago. Notably, however, the first rule of the Underground Railway game upon which they agree is that “anyone can be a slave” (64), signaling the novel’s resistance to a logic of racial particularism.

At the end of the novel, in another palimpsestic scene, Mrs. Blewchamp resurfaces in Margaret’s dream during a flight back to the Caribbean:

I had lots of dreams that night; I don’t remember much about them, except for the one in which I am carrying old Mrs. Blewchamp on my back, and running after Harriet Tubman. The old lady got heavier and heavier in the dream, then suddenly we were underground, in caves, and I could hear the slave-owners and dogs above us. Mrs. Blewchamp smiled at me and brought her twisted fingers up to her lips and motioned for me to be silent, then she showed me the numbers on her wrist—they glowed red in the dark cave. I reached out to touch the numbers and suddenly there I was in my bed wide awake, hearing my heart beating.

(147–48)

While elsewhere in the novel the Holocaust and slavery are drawn into association through the double resonance of the name Harriet and motifs of suffering and escape, in Margaret’s dream the two historical traumas are folded together, with Margaret saving the concentration camp victim from the slave owners. Mrs. Blewchamp’s appearance in the dream serves to superimpose the space of the concentration camp over that of the Underground Railway cave. Notably, then, Margaret’s reclamation of her Caribbean roots at the end of the novel does not require a rejection of Mrs. Blewchamps’s legacy but instead is accompanied by a reaffirmation of Margaret’s affiliation with her Jewish benefactor. The evocative dream scene illustrates how, in Philip’s writing, rather than competing with one another, Holocaust memory and the memory of slavery interact in a fluid and reciprocal fashion.

While Philip’s corpus offers rich examples of the multidirectional and palimpsestic workings of memory, it also points to the limits of this model. Her poem “St. Clair Avenue West” (1983) stages a Black-Jewish encounter against an urban Toronto background that anticipates the Holocaust focus of both “Stop Frame” and Harriet’s Daughter. Yet in “St. Clair Avenue West” the encounter is a less productive one that calls into question the possibility of connecting disparate experiences of suffering. In the poem an elderly Jewish merchant and a Black female customer meet in a dingy fabric store. As they haggle over the price of the fabric, the speaker contemplates the relationship between her own postslavery history and the other history of trauma that is signaled by the number tattooed on the old man’s wrist:

I fingered the fabric that lay between us,

“Can you do a good job for me?”

The dust settled slowly

on the sparse words,

the creviced silences,

the folds of fabric;

on all that forced us together

the so called common suffering

snapped us rusted links apart.

Broken ends of conversation dangled

in the dusty air, silence

flayed the shaft ridden sunlight…

(lines 21–32)

Here the space between the speaker and the Jewish merchant is not one of communication or empathy. Instead, the pair are artificially “forced…together” by “so called common suffering” and their interaction is confined to “sparse words” and silences—“branded memories that balk at talk” (line 66). The Black-Jewish encounter Philip stages in the poem entails an economic rather than mnemonic or empathetic transaction. Although slavery and the Holocaust are associated in lines such as “Aunt Jemimah stilled / made pancakes for the goosestepping soldiers” (lines 31–32), this connective gesture is undermined by what the speaker refers to as “the mathematics of it all”:

Careful you measured the chair,

“In two weeks time.”

I looked behind, a latter day Janus,

saw them put down the whips, take up the guns.

“You can have it before.”

I looked ahead,

they turned off the ovens, and set up the homelands.

“And how much would it cost?”

I was thinking to trade

one Roots for a Holocaust.

(lines 35–44)

Tension is generated in “St. Clair Avenue West” by the jarring juxtaposition of the language of monetary exchange with the theme of historical trauma. The motif of measurement that runs through the poem suggests a calculus of suffering characteristic of competitive memory, while the “trade” that the speaker considers making—“one Roots for a Holocaust”—signals the substitution of one trauma for another rather than the reciprocal and productive interaction of Black and Jewish traumatic memories that we see elsewhere in Philip’s writing.

BLACK HOLOCAUST NARRATIVES

In some Caribbean/diaspora writing such as NourbeSe Philip’s, the Holocaust is only briefly and intermittently invoked, serving as a gateway to the memory of a different historical trauma. In a second group of texts to which I will now turn, the Holocaust becomes the primary focus of the narrative while continuing to function as a site of identification between Black and Jewish memories of suffering. These works of Black Holocaust fiction concretize analogies between slavery and the Holocaust by positioning their Black protagonists as both descendants of the Middle Passage and victims of the concentration camps. In so doing they contribute to recent efforts to expand our understanding of the Holocaust by drawing attention to the experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, and African Americans under the Nazis. Although, unlike Jews, Blacks were not systematically targeted by the Nazis with elimination, they suffered a variety of forms of persecution during the war, including sterilization, incarceration, and death, so that according to one historian “genocidal intent [was] clear in everyday police and medical practice” (Rosenhaft 164).

In the context of the present study, a particularly noteworthy case of Black victimization under the Nazis is that of the Surinamese artist Josef Nassy. Nassy was born in Paramaribo in 1904 and later moved to Belgium, where he married a Belgian woman in 1939. He was arrested in 1942 as an enemy national and was imprisoned in the Beverloo transit camp in Belgium and then in the Laufen internment camp and in its subcamp Tittmoning in Bavaria. During his three-year internment, Nassy created a substantial visual record of his experience that survived the war and is now held in the United States Holocaust Museum. At Laufen and Tittmoning roughly a dozen other Blacks were interned alongside Nassy.¹⁵ What makes Nassy’s story unique is that, as his surname suggests, he was of Sephardic Jewish descent. Thus, as Clarence Lusane comments in Hitler’s Black Victims, “Here you had, in one individual, the embodiment of two of the most despised and hated groups the Nazi racial hierarchy could possibly conceive. The very existence of Nassy disrupted the racial boundaries established by the Nazis, some of whom believed that Jews were the ‘bastard’ offsprings of Negroes and Asians” (149).

Imaginatively recovering the lost stories of Black victims of the Nazis such as Josef Nassy, the Black Holocaust narratives I will discuss do not merely allude to the Holocaust, but are themselves works of Holocaust fiction that engage with and rework the conventions of the genre. At the same time, they also harness the strategies of postslavery fiction, thereby hybridizing Holocaust and postslavery narrative and exposing the areas of overlap between them. Before turning to Maillet’s L’étoile noire and its dual negotiation of Holocaust and slavery memory, I will briefly examine several other Caribbean and African diaspora Holocaust narratives in order to provide a fuller understanding of this subgenre of Holocaust fiction.

In Michelle Cliff’s short story “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet” (1990), an African American female trumpet player travels to Paris to escape the racism and gender inequality of 1930s America. Initially, the trumpeter finds in Paris a welcome reprieve from the more pronounced racism that afflicts her American homeland: “No strange fruit hanging in the Tuileries” (127). Yet in 1940 the Latin Quarter club in which she is employed shuts down and she is forced to find a new gig in Copenhagen. While working in the Danish capital, she is arrested in 1942 along with a group of Jews. The tragic irony that her flight from American racism has resulted in an even worse fate now confronts her: “Fool of a girl, she told herself. To have thought she had seen it all. Left it—the worst piece of it—behind her. The body burning—ignited by the tar. The laughter and the fire” (128). Here Cliff employs incendiary imagery that links European fascist violence with the anti-Black racism of American lynchings.¹⁶

Cliff’s “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet” as well as John Edgar Wideman’s “Valaida” (1989) were inspired by the story of Valaida Snow, an African American jazz musician who performed in Denmark throughout 1940 and was arrested by the Nazis after they occupied the country.¹⁷ In its reference to the history of Caribbean and African diaspora musicians who were detained while living in Europe during the war, Cliff’s story bears comparison with Hijuelos’s novel A Simple Habana Melody, which I discuss in chapter 2. Although it does not center on a Black protagonist, A Simple Habana Melody similarly enlarges and complicates our understanding of the Holocaust by portraying the internment of a Caribbean composer in Nazi-occupied France. Arrested because of his semitic-sounding name, Hijuelos’s Israel Levis is subject to a case of mistaken identity much like a number of other protagonists of Caribbean and Black Holocaust narratives. Hijuelos based his character Israel Levis on the Tin Pan Alley composer Moisés Simons, explaining in the novel’s afterword that “it was Simons’ life as a Cuban exile in the Paris of the 1930s and his eventual persecution by the Germans during the Second World War that became the basis for this novel’s convergence with the Holocaust” (343). Thus while Hijuelos’s incorporation of Holocaust themes has been controversial, it is grounded in the historical experience of Caribbean expatriates in Nazi-occupied Europe.¹⁸

Hijuelos’s and Cliff’s texts carry out an archival function by rescuing the lost histories of Caribbean and Black musicians who were persecuted in Europe during World War II. Yet if Cliff’s archival method resembles that of Hijuelos, her story more directly anticipates Ghanaian Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s novel Half-Blood Blues (2011). Like “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet,” Half-Blood Blues relates the Holocaust to American racism and adopts jazz music as a device that simultaneously brings into focus a marginalized dimension of Holocaust history and links together disparate members of the African diaspora. In Cliff’s story, when the African American trumpeter jams with a Senegalese steward and drummer on board the French ship that is carrying her to Europe in a “reverse middle passage” (125), their music taps into a shared postslavery legacy: “The horn is brass. The drum, silver. Metal beaten into memory, history” (125). For Cliff’s Black musicians, Europe is transformed by the war from a space of relative freedom to one of increased vulnerability. Similarly, in Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, which also traces the journey of African diaspora musicians from one European capital to another in search of safety and professional opportunity, the musical careers that initially bring greater mobility in late 1930s and early 1940s Europe ultimately raise the risk of arrest and deportation to the camps.

Although Edugyan writes from an African Canadian rather than Caribbean vantage point, much like her compatriot Lawrence Hill she displays a correspondingly angular relationship to U.S. race politics—one that opens up her fiction to a multidirectional engagement with Holocaust memory. Half-Blood Blues tells the story of a group of young American and European jazz musicians who come together to form the band Hot-Time Swingers in interwar Berlin. The most talented member of the band is the trumpet player Hieronymous (Hiero) Falk, an Afro-German mischling and “Rhineland Bastard” whose father was one of the Senegalese soldiers sent by France to occupy the Rhineland in the aftermath of World War I. The novel details the attempts several decades later of Hiero’s former bandmates as well as of musicologists, journalists, and filmmakers to recover the elusive facts of Hiero’s origins and apparent death in the concentration camp Mauthausen (the same camp in which Maillet’s heroine will die). This quest, which generates the narrative suspense of the novel, allegorizes Edugyan’s own authorial search for a forgotten chapter of Holocaust history. The mystery surrounding Hiero’s purported death is analogous to that surrounding the collective history of Black victims of the Nazis.¹⁹

The past haunts the present in Half-Blood Blues, much as it does in postslavery fiction, which “stag[es] how a lost or forgotten past continues to exert its influence, active yet unseen” (Sharpe xii). Indeed, Half-Blood Blues deploys characteristic strategies of postslavery fiction, engaging in a literary archaeology of an obscured past. What is distinctive about Edugyan’s novel is that it directs these strategies toward an investigation of the Holocaust rather than slavery. As a scholar interviewed in a documentary about Edugyan’s Afro-German protagonist Hiero explains toward the beginning of the novel, “Of course, it’s hard to get a sense of how many blacks actually went to the camps, because so many records were destroyed…. These people are lost in the dark maw of history” (49–50). Taking full advantage of her literary license, Edugyan’s novel imaginatively recovers these destroyed and missing archival records. At the same time, Half-Blood Blues displays an awareness of history as a discursive field that, as we saw in chapter 3, increasingly typifies postslavery fiction. For example, a scene in which the novel’s African American narrator Sid attends the premiere of the documentary foregrounds the narrative devices and strategies the filmmaker employs, thereby signaling the film’s discursive rather than mimetic character: “Caspars’ documentary wasn’t told in no straight line. Seemed like one person was still talking when another one shown up onscreen, and then they was both talking over some photograph of someone else” (46).

Half-Blood Blues’ metafictional reflections on modes of narrating the past suggest not only the suspicion with which some postslavery fiction regards the recuperative project but also Holocaust fiction’s concern with the problems of historical misrepresentation and inauthenticity. As Barbara Foley observes, “the very urgency of relating the truth of the Holocaust throws into sharp relief that borderline region between imitation and fraudulence and leads us to scrutinize the difference between artistic license and historical distortion” (345). By foregrounding modes of representation in the scene in which the documentary is screened, Edugyan calls attention to the lacunae of dominant narratives of the Holocaust that neglect its Black victims. Simultaneously, she problematizes Half-Blood Blues’ status as itself a possibly distortive or exploitative representation of the past.²⁰ Visiting Berlin to attend the premiere of the documentary, Sid observes how the city has erased its past: “All that was gone like it ain’t never been” (39). The documentary, made by a rather unsavory Scandinavian director and screened at a festival in Berlin honoring Hiero, serves the interests of the new Germany more than those of historical accuracy. Sid is deeply upset by the film’s distortions, in particular its allegation that he bore responsibility for Hiero’s arrest by the Gestapo. Sid’s discomfort with the documentary points to a tension, relevant to both postslavery and Holocaust writing, between the experiences of individual witnesses to historical atrocities and the way in which the larger society remembers and records these events.

As a Black Canadian Holocaust novel, Half-Blood Blues displays a multidirectionality and rejection of racial particularism that also distinguish Caribbean Holocaust narratives. But while identificatory rather than competitive in its approach to the Holocaust, unlike the Caribbean texts examined in this study, Half-Blood Blues does not present the Holocaust as a site of surrogate memory or as a catalyst for decolonization. Moreover, Edugyan’s novel is notable for the sense of caution, one might even say hesitation, with which it approaches the narration of the Holocaust. Its achronological, disjunctive narrative is replete with distancing devices, strategies of deferral, and motifs that problematize historical representation. At the novel’s end, Hiero as Holocaust victim remains an elusive figure, his camp testimony withheld from both Sid and the reader. The Holocaust itself remains a largely unnarratable and untouchable event for Edugyan. Maillet’s L’étoile noire, by contrast, fully inhabits the genre of Holocaust fiction, offering a detailed portrayal of the deportation and internment of Black victims of the camps.

TESTIMONY IN L’ÉTOILE NOIRE

At first glance, Maillet’s L’étoile noire (The Black Star, 1990) has much in common with Cliff’s “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet” and Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Like these other Black Holocaust narratives, L’étoile noire performs an archival function, imaginatively recovering forgotten histories of Black victims of the Holocaust. Just as Cliff’s story is dedicated to the memory of the African American trumpeter Valaida Snow, Maillet cites as sources for her novel a variety of documentary materials including interviews with Black survivors of the camps. The engagement with the historical archive is as much central to Black Holocaust fiction as it is to the neoslave narrative, as Cliff’s dedication of her story to Snow and the bibliographies that Maillet and Edugyan append to their novels attest. Moreover, all three works employ the Black Holocaust genre to make connections between Nazism, colonialism, and anti-Black racism.

In so doing, however, Maillet’s novel powerfully and explicitly stages the operations of surrogate memory by directly invoking the history of the Middle Passage within the frame of a concentration camp narrative. Thus Maillet, like NourbeSe Philip, participates in a specifically Caribbean tradition in which the Holocaust unlocks the memory of slavery and performs a decolonizing function. At the same time, Maillet’s presentation of Jewish victims of the Nazis is ultimately more ambivalent than either Philip’s, Cliff’s, or Edugyan’s. L’étoile noire at once advances and undermines an association between Black and Jewish traumatic memory by thematizing the persistence of racism and racial hierarchies among the deportees and by specifying the historical difference of Black experience within the camps. While Cliff’s and Edugyan’s presentations of Black Holocaust stories recover this history in a noncompetitive fashion, Maillet’s intervention into French national debates about the legacies of colonialism and her more insistently Afrocentric interpretation of the Black Holocaust genre presses in a different direction. Maillet’s L’étoile noire simultaneously provides one of the fullest examples of the operation of multidirectional memory in Caribbean literature and points to its limits.

Maillet’s novel tells the story of a Martinican woman living in Bordeaux who is deported along with her two children to Auschwitz in December 1943. Sidonie Hellénon is a light-skinned Martinican working as a domestic for Mme Dubreuil, a French Jew who had previously employed Sidonie’s mother while resident in Martinique. Although Sidonie has begun training to become a nurse with the encouragement of the kindly Dubreuils, her studies are interrupted when she becomes pregnant with twins and is abandoned by her French lover Jean. When the Dubreuils are arrested and deported, Sidonie and her five-year old twins Nicaise and Désiré are seized along with them, mistaken for Jews. After becoming separated from Désiré at Auschwitz and losing Nicaise to illness, Sidonie is moved to Ravensbrück and then finally to Mauthausen, where she dies from tuberculosis.

Throughout her ordeal Sidonie manages to hold onto a moleskin notebook in which she assiduously documents her experience and testifies to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has observed that “clandestine literary efforts…served as a primary spiritual resource for the prisoners in the ghettos and camps” (16). Accordingly, during Sidonie’s incarceration, the act of writing is a means of self-actualization and survival. At the same time, Sidonie’s first-person diary, which is presented as the text of the novel, also suggests the importance of art as a mode of defiance. For, as another scholar notes, during the Holocaust, writing “was produced in vast quantities in the ghettos, in hideouts, and in the camps themselves, where every available means of writing and drawing were used to meet the urgency of recording what was happening. The victims knew they must beat the Nazi objective of wiping out the remembrance of the Jews without any trace” (Sicher 5–6). The need to combat the danger that history will be erased is signaled by the editorial note that concludes Maillet’s novel, which indicates that although Sidonie’s diary survived the war and was returned to her mother, the writing was so faint that it had become almost illegible.

Maillet’s generic framing of L’étoile noire as a camp diary reflects the priority of testimony in Holocaust writing as a means of staving off the erasure of memory. Yet, if testimony is “a special inheritance of the Holocaust” (Foley 334), Maillet’s deployment of the testimonial voice at the same time is indicative of the novel’s concern with a Caribbean collective amnesia about the slavery past that Sidonie must challenge through the act of writing. In a compelling image for the multidirectionality of memory, Sidonie writes her diary in two directions simultaneously, both forward into the present of her internment and backward into her Antillean and slavery past, whose memories she attempts to reconstruct. Renée Larrier observes that “this double écriture (double writing) records not only [Sidonie’s] story but also represents that of her African ancestors who were also captured, relocated, and enslaved, but whose story was silenced and erased from official records. By implication, Sidonie’s notebook functions as another archive, providing previously undocumented evidence on the Middle Passage, slavery, as well as the Holocaust” (81). Testimony thus has a double resonance in L’étoile noire, as it wards against the forgetting of two historical traumas as well as the story of Black victims of the camps in particular.²¹ Testimony posthumously restores the stories and humanity of victims of regimes such as the concentration camps and the plantation complex that reduced the meaning of individual lives to their membership in a racial category.

In L’étoile noire the testimonial voice forms a bridge between Holocaust and postslavery fiction. Sidonie’s notebook is situated at the intersection of Holocaust and slavery memory and voices the experiences of victims of both atrocities. In generic terms, then, the novel represents the meeting of the Holocaust diary and the fugitive slave narrative. As a fictionalized Holocaust diary that mediates between testimony and the literary imagination, L’étoile noire is an example of what Foley terms the “pseudofactual” Holocaust novel in which “the object of representation is not an imagined configuration of characters and events, but a putative historical document that records such a configuration” (351). Simultaneously, the novel’s fictionalized autobiographical form corresponds to the neoslave narrative, which mimics the first-person voice and other generic conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives. In chapter 7 I will discuss in greater detail the significance of the diary form for Caribbean Holocaust fiction. What I want to emphasize here is the way in which Maillet’s Black Holocaust novel not only exhibits the palimpsestic operations of memory but also specifically overlays the genres of the Holocaust diary and the slave narrative through its use of first-person testimony.

In an inversion of André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s La mulâtresse Solitude, a novel of Caribbean slavery that invokes the Holocaust in its concluding lines through an anachronistic reference to the Warsaw Ghetto, Maillet unfolds a Holocaust narrative that leads back to the slavery past. Set pieces of Holocaust literature, including the abrupt awakening by the Gestapo in the middle of the night, the cattle car deportation, and the shaving and tattooing of inmates, are here refracted through a postslavery lens that infuses them with additional resonances. In keeping with the dual directionality and temporality of her diary, Sidonie’s deportation provokes a sustained exploration of the slavery past. The novel continually crosscuts between the present time of Sidonie’s internment and residual memories of her Antillean childhood and deeply repressed slavery past that her camp experience brings to the surface. Much like Philip’s “Stop Frame,” L’étoile noire elaborates a palimpsestic structure that straddles different moments in time. While on the train that is transporting her to the camps, Sidonie experiences a series of flashbacks that supply the reader with information about her Martinican upbringing and relationship with her lover Jean. In this scene the narrative works associatively: the appearance of a couple who resemble Jean’s parents provokes a lengthy flashback about her romance with the French pharmacist, while another deportee who resembles the nineteenth-century French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher prompts reflections on her Martinican childhood. Yet, in conjuring up the past and the Martinican landscape, Sidonie also reaches into a deeper ancestral past that helps her to negotiate her present circumstances.

The dual and discontinuous temporality of Sidonie’s diary recalls the cotemporality that Lawrence Langer identifies as a structuring principle of Holocaust testimonies, in which “deep memory” (the traumatic reliving of the past) and “common memory” (the more detached reflection on the past from the perspective of the present) interact (5–6). In Holocaust testimonies, “deep memory…suspects and depends on common memory, knowing what common memory cannot know but tries nonetheless to express,” with the result that “the two kinds of memory intrude on each other, disrupting the smooth flow of their narratives” (Langer 6). Correspondingly, Sidonie’s diary is structured by the disruptive doubling and interpenetration of memory. Yet in Sidonie’s case, the “surge of deep memory that constantly threatens to erupt” (6) is that of an ancestral slavery past. Moreover, inverting Langer’s model, in Sidonie’s Holocaust testimony, the deep memory of slavery is a source of inspiration, identity, and strength rather than a memory from which she must protectively try to dissociate herself.

Whereas before her deportation Sidonie had given little thought to her Blackness, it now becomes primary. As with the protagonists of other Caribbean Holocaust novels, Sidonie’s contact with Jewishness and the Holocaust has a decolonizing effect, prompting her to reconsider her parents’ colorist and assimilationist ideology and reconnecting her with a deeply repressed slavery past. Sidonie remarks that “schoolbooks did not address slavery. Why not? My father spoke very little of it, and my mother always turned the conversation in a different direction. There were only my maternal grandparents to tell me in Creole about this era of Antillean history” (38).²² Against the backdrop of the radically dehumanizing and disorienting experience of deportation and internment in the camps, however, Sidonie looks increasingly to the slavery past to make sense of and survive her ordeal. For in the camps she feels that she has come full circle, returning to the slavery of several centuries prior: “Three centuries after my ancestors, I am back at the point of departure: slavery” (102).²³

Throughout the novel, motifs that standardly figure in Holocaust narratives such as tattoos, shoes, and the shaving of hair function associatively and imagistically to link the two histories of trauma. When, on the eleventh day of Sidonie’s internment at Ravensbrück, a triangle and number are tattooed on her body, the gesture proves to be a familiar one: “Tattooing, that’s for today. A return to slavery. No more name, no more first name, no more surname: a number. A new baptism. A baptism already experienced in the Caribbean” (155).²⁴ Signaling the longer history of this practice, Sidonie remarks that the whites know by instinct and the Blacks by memory the fact that tattooing is an entry into slavery. Similarly, when another inmate at Auschwitz offers to trade drinking water for Sidonie’s shoes, the threat of having to go barefoot recalls for her the condition of slavery, and she refuses. In Maillet’s rendering, the emblematic scene of shaving the camp inmates’ hair is defamiliarized when it transitions seamlessly into reflections on the meaning of hair texture in the Caribbean. Correspondingly, the dogs used by the camp guards evoke for Sidonie an ancestral slave terror of dogs.

Sidonie’s experience in the boxcar and later in the camps encourages her to engage for the first time with her slavery roots, as she begins to consider the cultural and spiritual resources that enabled her ancestors to survive the Middle Passage. At the end of a chapter entitled “La mort,” the death of one of the deportees on the train that is transporting her to Auschwitz prompts her to hear “another song, another moan, an echo of my consciousness, a painful and resounding surge that swells and makes my blood beat and my pulse throb like a sob. Is this what they heard, those whom we called ‘the black slaves’ [le bois d’ébène], from deep in the cargo holds of the slaving ships transporting them to the Americas?” (77).²⁵ At the outset of the following chapter, the cattle car morphs into a slave ship as Sidonie journeys to a different space in which the other deportees cannot join her. Recognizing the slavery-like conditions on the train as already familiar, she begins to recover her inherited memory not only of slavery but also of Africa: “For the first time in my life, I feel reborn in me the memory of Africa, my ancestors, not the Gauls, not the Antilleans, but, still further back, the Africans…. For the first time I think of Africa, I dream of Africa, Africa unfurls in me” (79).²⁶ The chapter includes an epiphanic moment in which Sidonie invents an African god, Agénor, from whom she derives strength, determining that a white God is no longer sufficient. In this scene, Maillet recasts in Afrocentric terms the motif of the death of God that appears in such classic Holocaust narratives as Elie Wiesel’s Night (1972). Instead of experiencing the death of faith like Wiesel’s narrator, who after witnessing the hanging execution of a fellow camp inmate declares that God, too, hangs from the gallows, Sidonie exchanges her old faith for a new, more syncretic one that draws on African spirituality.

L’étoile noire offers a particularly sustained and powerful instance of the pattern that I have been tracing throughout this chapter in which the Holocaust functions as a surrogate memory for the Caribbean/diaspora protagonist to whom knowledge of the slavery past has been denied. At the same time, as some of the passages quoted earlier attest, in a contravening impulse, the Afrocentric perspective that emerges from this new understanding of slavery resists a multidirectional framework. In her authenticating preface to the 2006 edition of Maillet’s novel, Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, lauds Maillet for rejecting the logic of competitive memory. Veil argues that Maillet’s novel reveals how “the experience of suffering brings together much more than it alienates those who are its victims” (15).²⁷ Veil’s emphasis in her preface is on the commonality of Black and Jewish victims of the Holocaust: “Sidonie resembles us and we resemble her” (14).²⁸ Yet Veil’s universalist interpretation does not entirely stand up to a closer reading of Maillet’s novel, which from the outset raises questions about the possibilities for such cross-cultural solidarity.

In Half-Blood Blues Edugyan aligns and identifies Blacks and Jews as common targets of Nazi violence, as coproducers of jazz music, and as engaged in a shared practice of racial masquerade. In the concluding scene of “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet,” in which the African American trumpeter is processed alongside other deportees, Cliff positions her African American heroine somewhat more ambiguously as both apart from and at the same time affiliated with Jewish victims of the Nazis: “She found herself in a line of women. And girls. And little children. The women spoke in languages she did not understand. Spoke them quietly. From the tone she knew they were encouraging their children. She knows—she who has studied the nuance of sound” (127). Cliff’s protagonist is at once alien to the group and a member of it, surrounded by “women and girls and little children—from which she is apart, yet of” (128).

Maillet’s L’étoile noire insists still more firmly on the distance between Black and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. At the outset of the novel, Sidonie recognizes a fellow deportee among those on the truck that is transporting them to a horse-training grounds where they will await a train. Yet the woman refuses to acknowledge Sidonie, denying her the gesture of recognition she craves at that moment of profound uncertainty. The woman’s response angers Sidonie, who insists that she is simply French like the other deportees, the granddaughter of a World War I veteran. Once arrived at the horse-riding ring, where she is made to wait for several hours, Sidonie suffers the racializing gaze of the Jewish deportees: “For my companions in misery, I am not one of them. An intruder, an anomaly, an error. The solidarity of misery, of grief, of suffering? Even here, in this riding school where we are treated, not like male and female enemies, suspects, Jews, Black or I don’t know what, but like animals—the barriers, distinctions, suspicions arise again, arise more than ever. I am an Antillean, a Martinican, a woman of the colonies, a Negress, a daughter of slaves” (28–29).²⁹ Later, on the crowded train that is carrying her north, despite the stifling heat Sidonie is loathe to remove her children’s clothes because she does not want to expose their brown skin to the scrutiny of the other deportees. Her fears are confirmed when, after being moved to a windowless freight train, a Jewish deportee implores Sidonie in a racializing gesture to use her “sorcery” to heal her sick daughter (82).

There is a recurring tension in Maillet’s novel between the leveling effect of the deportation and internment on the one hand and the persistence of racial hierarchies that differentiate Sidonie from other victims of the Nazis on the other. Repeatedly, Sidonie remarks on the equalizing effect of a Nazi racial discourse that places all racial Others into a common category: “I feel that I am part of the same category of humanity as all those who are here. I belong from now on to an indistinct group in which Hitler has classified Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and blacks” (27).³⁰ The dehumanizing camp experience also puts the diverse victims of the Nazis onto a common plane: “We are all different and yet similar. We are no longer anyone. No longer anything. Not even animals” (121).³¹ The degradation that the inmates endure is such that they come to physically resemble one another: “With this thin grey day, we are all the same color, no one would be able to discern that I am Black” (108).³²

However, the novel, at the same time, specifies the experience of Black victims of the camps and questions whether the Black deportees can find acceptance among their fellow inmates. This emphasis recalls Fanon’s shift in Black Skin, White Masks from a universalist argument that aligns antisemitism and anti-Black racism to a more ambivalent reading of the Jew as having the potential to be “unknown in his Jewishness” (115)—a possibility unavailable to the Black man, who cannot pass as white. In the opening scene of L’étoile noire, in which Sidonie is arrested, she is mistaken for a Black Jew but insists: “Nicht Jude. Catholique” (18).³³ The German officers’ reply—“Jude, Negerin, tut nichts, selbe Schweinerei!” (18)—indicates that, from the perspective of Nazi racial ideology, the distinction matters little. However, as the novel progresses, it increasingly suggests that the distinction is in fact an important one. Sidonie’s status in relation to the Jewish deportees is always in question, as is signaled by the fluctuating pronouns that she employs: “How many are they? How many are we, now that I am part of this herd?” (26).³⁴ The deportees gathered at the riding school are all like “exhausted horses,” except that Sidonie and her children are the only Blacks in the crowd: “Never have I been obsessed by the colour of my skin, but since that night I think only of this” (26–27).³⁵ In the camp, despite the horrors to which all the inmates are subject, racism and national divisions persists, so that “none of the other Black women feels accepted” (176–77).³⁶ Two contravening movements may be seen within L’étoile noire, then, as the camp experience at once makes its victims resemble each other and at the same time further entrenches distinctions and hierarchies among them. This pattern is in keeping with the governing logic of the camps, which, as Primo Levi explained, subdivided and pitted its inmates against one another in order to “shatte[r] the adversaries’ capacity to resist” (38).³⁷

While at the outset of L’étoile noire Sidonie had sought to claim her French citizenship, her diary increasingly adopts an Afrocentric discourse. By the end of the novel, Sidonie has formed a community with other African diaspora inmates, in sharp contrast to her unwillingness to fraternize with her African and Caribbean fellow students while at nursing school before the war. The camp brings her into contact with a group of women of color that includes a fellow Martinican, a Senegalese, and an African American. These women are united and empowered by their common ancestral memory of slavery.³⁸ Negritude is a term that, befitting the period in which L’étoile noire is set, appears in Maillet’s novel, which also bears an epigraph from Léon Damas, one of Negritude’s founders.³⁹ In order to survive the camps, Sidonie calls on her African heritage and adopts a primitivist rhetoric: “A Black and wild [sauvage] resistance lives in me: Mother Africa” (163).⁴⁰ The Creole language, forbidden to Sidonie in Martinique, proves to be another resource for her survival as she draws on a Maroon tradition of resistance, organizing a secret meeting of the women of color at Ravensbrück.

In L’étoile noire the Holocaust catalyzes Sidonie’s journey from racial alienation and assimilation to an embrace of Blackness. Encounters with the Holocaust have a similar impact on the young female protagonists of Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter and, as we will see in chapter 7, Cliff’s Abeng. Yet Maillet’s novel differs from these other examples in that Sidonie’s decolonization and reafricanization, although prompted by her Holocaust experience, ultimately lead her away from a cross-cultural identification with Jewish experience.⁴¹ Indeed, in L’étoile noire the narration of Black Holocaust history tends to overwhelm that of Jewish suffering. Toward the end of the novel, the Antillean context comes to overshadow that of the Holocaust, especially in the later chapters in which a struggle arises between a Béké (white Creole) inmate and Sidonie as well as another Caribbean Mulatta in a rehearsal of the slavery past. In these scenes, which recall the dream in Harriet’s Daughter in which the Underground Railway cave and concentration camp are overlaid, Ravensbrück becomes a space in which the contest between slave and master is restaged.⁴² I do not entirely agree with one critic’s view, then, that Maillet “succeeds in stepping beyond the competitive discourse of victimization” (Oppel 89), a sentiment echoed in Veil’s preface. Instead, as Mireille Rosello observes, Sidonie’s diary continually “sway[s] between the discourse of ‘differences’ and the discourse of ‘common denominators’ without being aware that neither theory is inherently enabling or disabling and that dominant voices can use both constructions to oppress minority groups” (199).⁴³

As is evidenced by the appendixes and bibliographies found at the back of L’étoile noire as well as by its earnest (rather than ironic) approach to the recuperative project, the novel is propelled by a strong pedagogical and historiographical agenda. This agenda—to tell the untold history of Black victims of the Nazis and to intervene in French national debates surrounding the legacies of colonialism and slavery—proves somewhat at odds with the model of multidirectional memory theorized by Rothberg. For while Maillet’s novel participates in a larger Caribbean tradition of cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust, it at the same time needs to be understood against the background of the French “memory laws” of the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2001, the loi Taubira, which followed on earlier French legislation mandating the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, declared that slavery was a crime against humanity. Subsequently, a national Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery, headed by Maryse Condé, was charged with promoting the commemoration and popular understanding of slavery and its heritage. Its report led to the creation in 2006 of a national day of remembrance for slavery’s victims. As Veil notes in her preface to L’étoile noire, Maillet’s novel was reissued in 2006 at a key moment in which the legacies of slavery and colonialism were being debated in France.⁴⁴ Accordingly, while the Holocaust functions as a conduit to the slavery past in L’étoile noire, Maillet’s recuperation of this traumatic memory ultimately serves to recenter the Holocaust novel on a different set of victims. Maillet’s narrative works as much through disidentification as it does through identification, asserting difference alongside sameness in its effort to diversify and complicate our understanding of Holocaust experience.

In the Black Holocaust fiction discussed in this chapter, not only do memories of the Holocaust and slavery interact with one another but so, too, do the genres and modes of writing that they inspired. The appearance of linking tropes such as testimony and motifs such as tattoos reflects the overlapping concerns and imperatives of postslavery and Holocaust literature. Caribbean Holocaust narratives thus illustrate the multidirectional and palimpsestic operations not only of memory but also of genre. At the same time, texts such as Philip’s “St. Clair Avenue West” and especially Maillet’s L’étoile noire point to the limits of the multidirectional model. Such tensions also attend another francophone Caribbean novel from the 1990s that invokes Holocaust testimony and focuses on an alienated Caribbean diaspora female protagonist living in France, French-born Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau’s L’exil selon Julia (Exile According to Julia, 1996). The adolescent heroine of Pineau’s partially autobiographical novel, whose Guadeloupean father fought with the Resistance before settling in France, copes with the racism of early postwar French society by composing a diary that is modeled on that of Anne Frank.⁴⁵ In excerpts of the diary that are includes in the chapter “Lettres de France,” Pineau’s heroine describes how her encounter with Frank’s text has altered her perspective on French society. Yet a subsequent letter notably calls into question the usefulness of focusing on other children’s suffering. Pineau’s heroine comes to the realization that she is merely une copieuse, an imitator of Frank: “Today, I would like to tell you that I really have compassion for children who are dying of hunger, who live in countries at war. But I can put all the suffering in the world end to end, force my mind to imagine the horror in all its dimensions, and that still does not prevent me from feeling very unhappy, here in France” (117). Pineau casts doubt in this passage on the universalist model of identification and cross-cultural empathy that her reading of Frank’s Diary initially inspires. Ultimately, although Pineau’s heroine still cares about the suffering of the world’s children, the “invisible threads” that connect her to these other children, and the practice of diary writing that she learns from Frank, appear to be of limited use in negotiating her own colonial anguish. Moreover, the illiteracy of the girl’s Guadeloupean grandmother Man Ya, who takes the place of Frank’s Kitty as the addressee of the diary, casts doubt on the suitability of Frank’s diaristic and textual model to the Guadeloupean context.

Although Frank was, of course, not the only diarist of the Holocaust, her Diary of a Young Girl is undoubtedly the most famous example of this genre. The presence of the diary motif in Maillet’s L’étoile noire and Pineau’s L’exil selon Julia is suggestive of the way in which diaries such as Frank’s become emblematic of Holocaust memory in Caribbean writing. At the same time, these novels’ thematization and intertextual invocation of Holocaust diaries signals their metafictional preoccupation with the act of writing itself. This nexus of associations between Anne Frank’s Diary, literary representation, and Caribbean authorship will be central to the two final examples of Caribbean Holocaust fiction to which I will turn in the next chapter.