FRANÇOISE LIONNET
In her 1993 essay, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” Maryse Condé takes a clear-eyed position on the créolité movement, and on its leaders’ 1989 manifesto, Eloge de la créolité.1 She criticizes, in a thoughtful tone, the mots d’ordre or “commands” that the authors of the manifesto have felt entitled to dispense to their fellow Antillean writers. She pointedly surveys the numerous literary taboos and prejudices that have served as creative straightjackets for Caribbean writers, restricting them to themes and idioms that, in her view, deaden the imagination and stifle the ability to dream. She bemoans the continued invisibility of women writers, and of their imaginative contributions to the existing history of Caribbean literature. Her message resonates with those who have embraced her impertinent desire “to challenge conventions, and to defy dogmatisms and totalizing myths of all kinds.”2 It was inevitable that the author of La Parole des femmes would find it difficult to stomach some of the rhetorical excesses of the créolistes and their blindspots with regard to gender representations.3 Since her first novel, Heremakhonon (1976), Condé’s work has consistently focused on the complexities of gender imbalance, including the vexed issue of unresolved racial grief and the melancholic disidentifications that colonialisms produce.4
Condé’s essay, and the volume on Penser la créolité that she subsequently edited, did not endear her to the créolistes.5 They riposted in a 1999 interview with Lucien Taylor in Transition entitled “Créolité Bites.”6 In it, Raphaël Confiant stated that “[c]ertain Antillean authors, whose popularity is in free fall … are scared of being replaced by us…. I guess when I am sixty and see young authors … coming out with new works and a new theory, I’ll fear that they are replacing me…. These Antillean authors who charge us with exoticism are worried that we are stealing their thunder” (153). Using inflammatory rhetoric to reject what they qualify as these Antillean authors’ own brand of “the great feminist discourses still in fashion in the West” (154), the créolistes implicitly mock Condé as a has-been. Such literary and critical jousting is common among Parisian as well as Antillean intellectuals, and my purpose in this essay is not to survey in detail those various critical prises de position. Rather, I want to suspend the question of créolité altogether, and go back to Condé’s early work to disprove the parochial views expressed by the créolistes, and their charge of “selfconscious cosmopolitanism” (151) against her work. Examined in light of current critical concerns about language and power, her early work not only sustains further critical scrutiny, but emerges as a poignant and lasting contribution to our understanding of both political and aesthetic issues. Condé has always engaged with large intellectual questions, from feminism to linguistic diversity, and in this paper, I want to take another look at the way language and loss are thematized in Heremakhonon. To develop this point, I will read Heremakhonon together with the Korean American writer Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s autobiographical fragments Dictée, a book that articulates a similar problematic in a lyrical mode that contrasts sharply with the psychological realism of Condé’s style.7
Long before Condé stated her critical position on the various “commands decreed about West Indian literature” (“Order” 122) by her fellow male writers and critics, Heremakhonon contained in narrative form an implicit theory of “order, disorder, and freedom” and an imaginative engagement with colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial history. To re-read this first novel in the critical contexts of traumatic historical events is to deepen our understanding of the originality of Condé’s early vision, and her choice of a narrative strategy that links the theme of individual grief to the issue of social injustice. Foregrounding the ambiguous powers of language and education in the postcolonial world, Heremakhonon illuminates the role of the writer as cultural translator, border-crosser, and sexual transgressor. Reading this novel with Dictée will allow me to dwell on the spectral elements of both narratives, their hauntings by the ghosts of two young students whose untimely deaths set in motion patterns of disorder, unrest, and possibly freedom for the respective narrators. It is to the disappearance and death of these students that the novels ultimately bear witness, as both authors present the pedagogical as a paradoxical site, one that is linked to both creative and criminal impulses. Condé and Cha focus our attention on the role of education and its complicity with systems of order and power. They both frame experiences of authority and loss within a thematics of grief, and they use as leitmotif the incommensurability of different linguistic systems of meaning. Their sensitivity to the melancholic aspects of racial and linguistic othering reverberates with timely theoretical and cultural concerns in both francophone and American studies contexts.
In Heremakhonon, which was republished under the title En attendant le bonheur (Waiting for Happiness) in a second edition by Seghers in 1988, a heavy burden is placed on the figure of the “teacher” as potential enforcer or instigator, legislator or rebel. But as the title indicates, the waiting game the narrator Veronica Mercier plays makes her a failed agent of freedom for her young African students. In Teresa Cha’s Dictée, it is education as a “site of subject formation”8 that is foregrounded, as well as the exercise or activity of translation (the thème et version ritual of the French school system). Cha’s novel raises the theoretical issue, now commonly discussed in translation studies, of the “ideal of equivalence” and the “ethos of fidelity”9 that can mask the subtle and problematic relationship between the cultures in presence or the historical correspondence between words. Both novels carry a somewhat “hermetic” title that requires translation and explication for the reader to grasp fully the allegorical intent of the narratives. For the average francophone reader of Condé’s text, Heremakhonon is an unreadable Malinké word, whereas within the discipline of Asian American Studies, Dictée is an opaque title that requires elucidation.
When I first read and wrote about Heremakhonon in the early 1980s, I was fascinated by Condé’s satirical tone, her allegorical treatment of exile and desire, and her portrayal of what she has termed (in her interview with Ina Césaire) an “anti-moi.”10 This anti-autobiographical character, Veronica Mercier, journeys to Africa in search of a (racial and cultural) genealogy, a beginning or an origin, “Un commencement possible” (18) [Possibly … a beginning (7)]. She goes to an unnamed country to work as “coopérante” (58) and “professeur de philo” (47).11 Condé’s ironic indictment of the “search for origins,” a common theme of the literature of negritude produced by the male writers of the 1930s and 1940s, was an energizing and productive discovery. But what I did not dwell on is the role or identity of Veronica as a teacher who fails to acknowledge the social bonds that link her to the lycée students eager to engage her in political conversations. This prominent motif engages us as readers and as “postcolonial” teachers who cannot but interrogate Veronica’s lack of involvement in the social and political spheres, and her sexual liaison with the controversial politician Ibrahima Sory. It also puts into relief the role of language and power in the classroom and community, thus echoing the pedagogical concerns that remain central to the field of postcolonial francophone studies.
LOST IN TRANSLATION: VÉRONICA AND THE ABANDONED BROTHER
Upon disembarking from the plane that brings her from Paris to Africa, Véronica is entrusted to one of her “futurs élèves Birame III” (21) [future students, Birame III (8)] (named the “Third” because there happen to be three students “with the same name in the class from the same village”). Birame attempts, in vain, to interest her in the political situation of the country in which she has just arrived. He is also assigned the task of teaching her Mande (36/17), and calls her his “grande soeur” (90) [big sister (47)], revealing the faith he puts in her, and the possibility of kinship that as a black “coopérante” she is led to communicate. She experiences Birame’s reactions as unwelcome demands, feeling overburdened by his expectations. Being too self-involved to become fully aware of the true nature of these expectations, she cannot adequately recognize, let alone acknowledge, that his wishes and his insights are mirror images of her own self-deprecating quest for identity and community. Birame plays the part of a native informant who can “translate” the local culture for her. Their relationship presents the promise and the possibility of reciprocal exchange and learning. Yet it is not until after the students’ strike and the disappearance of Birame—who becomes the first “Martyr de la Révolution Africaine” (134) [Martyr of the African Revolution (73)]—that Veronica begins to pay attention to the historical part he plays in a crucial counternarrative, the one that haunts her own narcissistic quest.
When the seriousness of the situation pierces through to her lulled consciousness, she finally recalls (with a glaring sense of disconnection) her callous indifference to his earnestness about history and politics: “Bizarre comme je recommence à penser à Birame III après l’avoir longtemps tenu éloigné. J’ai rêvé de lui. Notre première sortie quand il me servait de guide à travers la ville et que je l’écoutais si peu” (238) [Strange how I’m starting to think of Birame III again after having kept him at a distance for such a long time. I dreamed of him. Our first outing across the town when he acted as my guide and I hardly listened to him (134)]. She also evokes the forty young men, her class of eager students, who had started out so well disposed and full of affection toward her, but who end up being thoroughly disappointed by her irresponsible connection with corrupt power in the person of her lover, Ibrahima Sory. Veronica’s failure to be an enlightened questioner in the classroom links her to the criminals, the politicians whose reign of terror masquerades as law and order, and who perpetuate a form of violence “sourde et secrète qui s’exerçait quotidiennement et en toute impunité sous les masques de l’Ordre et de la Loi” (299) [underhand and secret, that has become a daily occurrence carried out with impunity under the guise of Law and Order” (168)].
As a pedagogue, Veronica is in the ambiguous position of having to enforce rules while also being expected to encourage her students to develop critical thinking—the task of philosophy—and to question authority in a way that can ultimately lead to disorder and revolution. Having failed to live up to this challenge, she is left with a sense of emptiness and loss, a “Rien” (312) [Nothing] (175) which, at the conclusion of the novel, leaves her trapped as a subject whose identity has been shaped on a postcolonial historical stage of guilt and shame. Although she is able to escape back to Paris, her inability to translate her experiences into the language of grief condemns her to be “Piégée … Parmi les assassins” (314) [Trapped … in the arms of an assassin (176)], who has managed to corrupt the process of independence. The novel delivers us a character that is numb, unable to grieve for the loss of her friends and students, and unable to take a stance with regard to the injuries that have been perpetrated against them. Her ironic posture incorporates an ambiguous relationship to the politics of victimization and violence, and the patterns of passivity and fatalism (252/141) that she suspects she is misreading into the behavior of the local population. She is trapped in a narrative of guilt but continues to blame others around her for her own passivity and inertia, all the while projecting a discourse of grievance onto the Africans themselves.
Veronica’s experiences in Africa constitute her as a subject of law rather than as an agent of freedom because she is unable to make the imaginative leap required of her as a pedagogue. The social disorder that has erupted as a result of the strike finds no concrete or active echo in her. She remains peripheral to these events, waiting on the sidelines, justifying her passivity as a covert strategy of “investigation” and “objectivity” (270/150–51), while maintaining her posture of self-deprecation and derision. Veronica thus comes across as a teacher who upholds the order of power and fails miserably at helping her students articulate their grievances. Failure to grieve for her own sense of racial and social losses makes her unable to hear the legitimate questions that Birame III and the other students put to her, and unable to recognize the structure of grievances that is in fact their common lot. The disappearance and death of Birame III and the arrest of the proctor, her friend Saliou, provide her with tragic opportunities to ask more questions. But she is incapable of doing so and remains inert, at an impasse.
It must be noted however that the book Heremakhonon begins with an epigraph from the philosopher Pascal: “Je crois volontiers les histoires dont les témoins se font égorger” [I am willing to believe the stories whose witnesses have their throats cut]. This paratextual element suggests that the author is signaling to her readers the importance of making the imaginative leap that the character of Veronica cannot. As Lorraine Piroux has shown in her book, Le livre en trompe l’oeil ou le jeu de la dédicace, dedications and, by extension, epigraphs establish a contract between author and reader, and articulate an oppositional aesthetic that undoes the textual order of narrative representation.12 Pascal’s statement, in such a reading, would require of Condé’s reader that he or she make a Pascalian leap of “faith” (“je crois volontiers”) in the plausibility of the counternarratives about the deaths of innocent citizens and about the oppositional practices of the powerless under the official appearance of calm and order. The epigraph warns the reader that Veronica Mercier is an unreliable narrator whose unhappiness and subjection to official power feeds a form of melancholic narcissism.
Véronica is a classic example of the Freudian melancholic subject who maintains a stance of self-deprecation and derision because she is unable to mourn for her own lost “origins.” According to Freud, the melancholic subject’s “complaints are really ‘plaint’ [or ‘plainte’] in the old sense of the word. [She is] not ashamed and [does] not hide [herself], since everything derogatory that [she says about herself] is at bottom said about someone else.”13 Freud’s argument that the melancholic subject suffers from a displacement of affect points to the fundamental confusion or identification between the subject and her object of derision and resentment. When she accuses the citizens of Africa of dissimulation and cowardice, “ils sont restés derrière leurs portes closes, couchés sur leur grabat” (312) [they remained behind closed doors, lying on their lice-infested straw beds (176)], instead of engaging in massive protest against the regime of “Law and Order,” it is her own passive behavior that she is implicitly and ultimately condemning.
In the end, Veronica leaves Africa behind but this “abandoned object” (Freud 248) is figuratively retained within her psychic economy in the person of the “balayeur de la rue de l’Université” (312) [streetcleaner on the Rue de l’Université (176)], whose quiet presence concludes the narrative. Her melancholic ego continues to be haunted by this figure of a “brother” who, one might argue, is but a projection of both her dead student Birame and her dead friend Saliou. Condé’s novel thus thematizes a crucial link between the experience of unresolved grief and the articulation of social and political grievances. Véronica’s return to Paris and her reinsertion into the present time of the immigrant experience is but a provisional solution to the dilemmas of racial and political injustice that continue to haunt and trouble her.
GRIEF, GRIEVANCE, AND PEDAGOGICAL STUTTERING
This link between grief and grievance has been explored, in the American literary context, by Anne Anlin Cheng in The Melancholy of Race.14 Cheng argues rigorously and convincingly that the United States is “a nation at ease with grievance but not with grief” (x) and with the melancholic aspects of unresolved sorrow and suffering. But, she also concludes, this melancholic consciousness may well be productive of cultural change, and “melancholia may be the precondition—and the limit—for the act of imagination that enables the political as such” (194). Veronica as melancholic subject might thus be read as the enabling figure for the possibilities of political action. More to the point here, I would argue that the Pascal epigraph quoted above is Condé’s clue as to this enabling limit and its pedagogical function within the narrative context of Heremakhonon. The psychological stasis of the main character and her self-deprecating language serve as screens that hide, for her, the real work of resistance as well as the actual acts of “disorderliness” performed by the students and the people. Her melancholia veils the Lacanian Real, the unattainable goal of freedom in a political and cultural system where order (the Symbolic) and disorder (the Imaginary) have become confused due to her ambiguous personal and social position.15 Veronica is at once a witness and the one who veils the truth, not unlike the historical Veronica of Christian mythology whose veil kept the marks and the signs of Christ’s martyred face.
What interests me here is that Condé’s novel articulates a different paradigm from Anne Cheng’s theorization of “the melancholy of race.” Condé helps us ask another kind of question: that is, What might it mean to grieve in the face of losses that are so easy to attribute to another’s perceived failures (as Veronica does) that the immediate reaction is blame, anger, revulsion, or flight instead of pain and mourning (as was indeed the U.S. national reaction in the immediate aftermath of 9/11)? Where does grief hide when grievance takes over? The French word grief (grievance) comes to mind as an interestingly ambiguous term, as one of those faux amis as translators like to call words that are identical in two languages, yet have different meanings in each. To grieve is avoir du chagrin, de la peine, whereas to have a grievance is avoir un grief. These terms, their common etymology, and the interesting slippages of meaning that occur between the two languages refine Anne Cheng’s formulation of melancholia and racial grief, forcing us to bear in mind that grief and grievance are co-constitutive linguistically as well as within the psychic economy of loss. They can never be two opposed concepts. The etymology of the word grief in French implies that both concepts—grief and grievance—are actually contained within one another. This suggests that the work of grief and the articulation of a grievance must go together for freedom to be achieved. These two sides of the same process are, however, in constant and unresolvable tension since each functions according to a different logic, lending to this process the air of an interminable search for freedom from sorrow and, simultaneously, for compensation.
The work of translation further underscores the sliding meanings that echo through etymologically close faux amis such as grief and grief, both of which derive from grever, the twelfth-century Old French word the primary meaning of which is grave or heavy. This etymology suggests that the gravity of any injury must be addressed both on the psychic and legal levels, or both within the private and public spheres lest they dissolve into melancholic conditions that would then be “fortified by a spectral drama whereby the subject [or the collectivity] sustains itself through the ghostly emptiness of a lost [and denigrated] other” as Cheng theorizes it (10).
In our own current historical predicament, it may be important to ask, with Cheng, the following question: When we are aggrieved by catastrophic losses that seem naturally to lead us toward the articulation of a just and noble grievance against a putative enemy, what do we do with our feelings of sadness and confusion? What does it mean for an individual, for a nation, to suffer injury and to denounce the political and psychological consequences of that damage in a way that focuses us on the need for retaliation and all the attendant public claims of retribution and reparation? Claims of injury need to be based on the foundational binary paradigms of “perpetrator/victim,” “oppressor/oppressed,” and “innocent/guilty” that require both terms in the opposition to remain yoked to each other, since there can be no victim without an offender. Put another way, claims of collective injury are grounded in the definition of a “we” that is pitted against a “them” whose identity thus becomes firmly delineated in opposition to our own, our group or our nation.
Condé’s novel, however, shows us that, in the case of Veronica Mercier, this binary is unavailable. The distinction between “us” and “them” is not an easy one to make for this “trans/national” citizen whose search for ancestors blurrs national borders and sends her to Africa on a learning (if failed) expedition. Furthermore, her role as teacher constructs her as both innocent and guilty, situated on the side of power but as questioner of the structures she inhabits, and thus as agent of both order and disorder. The realist mode of the narrative and the use of free indirect discourse convey with exquisite audacity the tangled psychic phenomena that burden Veronica. Condé delivers her to the reader as an ambiguously “transparent mind,” and ultimately as a silent one.16 Véronica becomes aware of the limits of language and can only stammer and stutter (to use a Deleuzian term) as she attempts to grapple with the ultimate foreignness of Africa and with the ruptures in the pedagogical fabric and meaning structures of her ovelapping worlds.17 “L’éloquence politique m’a toujours paru une chose abjecte” (278) [Political eleoquence has always seemed abject to me (155)], she declares, and her tentative attitude as a narrator who is “pas capable d’avoir une opinion” (252) [incapable of having an opinion (141)] becomes the thematic equivalent of linguistically challenged speech.
If Veronica’s melancholic self-deprecation keeps her far from lyrical flights of poetic prose, that is, by contrast, the strength of Teresa Cha’s Dictée. But this difference in style underscores a thematic similarity that has uncanny resonances for the understanding of unresolved grief. Dictée offers us the narrative voice of a student, a Korean-born U.S. immigrant, trapped by transcultural forces, disciplined by a traditional set of rules, from grammar to religion, history to geography. Cha’s book is striking for its multiplicity of languages, characters, images, and its intricately intertwined stories that shift from prose to poetry, words to images, past to present, history to fiction. The dominant note is one of anxiety about language and representation, visible on both the levels of theme and structure.
Learning to read, write, and spell in the proverbial manner of the French school system, the narrator takes dictation, “mimick[ing] the speaking” (3) of her teachers, and the proper order of words and their punctuation. Learning to translate herself into a system of historical representation that can only accent her difference of intonation and the different modulations of her family’s journey through many layers of colonial encounters with Japan, China, and France, the narrator’s exile is punctuated by many losses, especially that of her brother. To deal with these losses, she chooses a path of lyrical dis-order. In the middle section of the book, titled “Melpomene Tragedy,” a site of memory and trauma is linked to the figure of this brother who was killed in a 1962 student demonstration in Korea. The cadence of Cha’s poetic language opens a space in which there is a sorrowful attempt to translate grief:
There is no surrendering you are chosen to fail to be martyred to shed blood to be set an example one who has defied one who has chosen to defy and was to be set an example to be martyred an animal useless betrayer to the cause to the welfare to peace to harmony to progress. (83)
You, my brother, you protest your cause, you say you are willing to die. Dying is part of it … My brother. You are all the rest all the others are you. You fell you died you gave your life. That day it rained, it rained for several days. It rained more and more times … I heard that the rain does not erase the blood fallen on the ground. (84–85)
Returning after eighteen years to the moment and place of separation and division, the narrator explains that “the war is not ended”: “We are inside the same struggle seeking the same destination. We are severed in Two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently named the severance Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate” (81).
The geography of Korea has become one with “Imaginary borders. Un imaginable boundaries” (87), split in two and thus mirroring the narrator’s own sense of internal division, her psychic split as colonial subject for whom there can never be just one (Un in French) country, one nation. In the landscape of the demilitarized zone, it is brother against brother, “SHE against her,” North against South, as a nation at war with itself becomes increasingly swallowed up in betrayals that arrest the process of grieving, and interrupt the work of mourning. The impossibility of grief is associated with the absurdity of having to imagine one’s identity as constituted through an act of belonging to one nation and one language, as has been the norm in the Western nations addressed by her narrative. This norm, in the United States, includes the ideology of e pluribus unum and in France, the constitutional language that states that the nation is “une et indivisible” [one and indivisible].18 The narrator, who calls herself the diseuse (3, 123, 133: an ambiguous French word that can mean the one who foretells the future, the one who tattles, or simply the one who knows how to speak, how to make speeches), raises questions about her epistemological and ontological status as a subject of multiple histories in which grief, mourning, and grievance have acquired such weighty connotations that she must end, paradoxically, in “immobile silence” (179). Faced with the impossibility of choosing just “one” language, and thus of saying anything, the “diseuse” is the split immigrant subject who has journeyed from a divided nation to an arbitrarily “unified” land, and finds herself, like Conde’s Veronica, at an impasse. The past becomes veiled: “Hidden. Forbidden…. Veil. Voile. Voile de mariée. Voile de religieuse. Shade. Shelter … screen … behind the veil … of secrecy … veiled voice under breath murmuration render mute strike dumb voiceless tongueless” (127). The rupture of the border, like the stutter of the immigrant and the punctuation of poetic speech, inflect the English language with a stammer that communicates the poignancy of her situation and the instability of rules—be they grammatical, political, or cultural. Cha makes the loss of origin and language the thematic and structural equivalents of the loss of coherence and reality that serve to destabilize normative narratives of identity. The tragedy of Korea’s partition, this complete and total severance is an “incision” (79) in the map of the present. It is a form of finality in which “The submission is complete” and all protest becomes futile. Only grief remains, with its procession of un articulable grievances.
Condé’s and Cha’s works illuminate a central paradox of identity politics in the context of traumatic events, one that might be formulated in this way: How do we listen to expressions of grievance and to expressions of grief? And to expressions of grievance that are primarily displaced expressions of grief? How do we respond without immediately transforming the conversation into a ground for immediate or future social, legal, or political action? Can we bear witness even in the face of our inability to understand and perhaps our refusal to judge? When a personal or collective history of trauma is still in the shadow of shock and amnesia, how can it be named? Finally how do we do so without pointing the finger, since as Trinh Minh-ha eloquently writes, “every discourse that breeds fault and guilt is a discourse of authority and arrogance.”19 Ultimately, it may well be that Maryse Condé’s eloquent defense of dis-order is the most appropriate response in our own troubled and troubling political times.
I want to conclude with these thoughts about pain or trauma and its aftermath because both Condé and Cha give us the means to think differently about some of the binary distinctions that I have just outlined: that is, the ones between theory and practice, between excruciating affect and dogmatic speeches, between calls for compassionate recognition and calls for justice and retribution, in other words, between the private domain of grief and the more public arena of collective grievance. Their shared experience of war and loss, and the silences of their texts are the sites of “unclaimed experiences” that highlight the affective geographies of narrative subjects who seem caught between the private inability to mourn the past and the public refusal to feel self-pity or be treated as victim.20 Their narrative registers take their readers to a level of poetic understanding where language and meaning can “vibrate and stutter,”21 a vantage point from which the petty lines of criticial jousting with which I began this essay begin to fade into the realm of wooden speech. The troubling question of what to do with one’s unresolved grief in the face of un-articulable grievances will however continue to haunt our understanding of the conflicted sites of personal and cultural trauma, and the emotional force that can ultimately translate our grief into rage.22
1. Maryse Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” eds. Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, Yale French Studies 83, 1993, pp. 121–35; Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
2. Ronnie Scharfman, text of program copy for the Conference on “Order, Disorder, Freedom” at Columbia Univeristy, November 16, 2002.
3. Maryse Condé, La Parole des femmes: essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1979).
4. Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon (Paris: UGE 10/18, 1976); Heremakhonon, trans. Richard Philcox (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press,1982).
5. Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, eds., Penser la créolité (Paris: Khartala, 1995).
6. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant in Conversation with Lucien Taylor, “Créolité Bites,” Transition 74 (1998), pp. 124–61.
7. Teresa Kak Kyung Cha, Dictée (New York: Tanam Press, 1982).
8. Lisa Lowe, “Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictée,” in Writing Self, Writing Nation, eds., Elaine Kim and Norma Alarcón (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1994), p. 43.
9. Ibid., p. 42.
10. Interview of Maryse Condé by Ina Césaire in Condé, Parole des femmes, p. 125.
11. Since independence, it has been common practice for the French government to send professionals to work as “coopérants” or “collaborators” in various “developing” francophone nations, including Louisiana. Here, the narrator is sent to work as “a teacher of philosophy” (22) in a local high school that follows the general curriculum of the French lycée, in which the discipline of philosophy has a prominent place during the senior year. Richard Philcox translates “coopérante” as “expatriate” (28), which conveys the right idea about the professionals working abroad during the postindependence years; but the word also carries an ambiguous meaning as “collaborator” with the regime in place.
12. Lorraine Piroux, Le Livre en trompe-l’oeil ou le jeu de la dédicace: Montaigne, Scarron, Diderot (Paris: Kimé, 1998).
13. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition, gen. ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 14, pp. 239–60 (248).
14. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York and London: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2001).
15. For a discussion of Heremakhonon in terms of the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, see Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 172ff.
16. See Autobiographical Voices, ibid. In chapter 4 (182–90), I discuss Condé’s extensive use of free direct and indirect discourse using Dorrit Cohn’s formulation of psychological realism as the representation of “transparent minds.” See Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
17. Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Gilles Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical, ed. and trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 107–14. See also the editors’ introduction for a succinct and clear exposition of the process of “becoming-minor” in literary language as Deleuze undertands it.
18. Article 1 of Title II of the French Constitution of 1791 states that “le Royaume est un et indivisible” (the Kingdom is one and indivisible); the Constitution of 1793 went on to state in its Article 1 that “la République est une et indivisible.” The question of diversity (whether linguistic, racial, or cultural) is thus a constitutional one that supercedes the nature of the regime (kingdom or republic). The ideal of unification animates the collectivity and guarantees the possibility of (sovereign, unitary) identity for each and every citizen.
For an important feminist reading of some of these questions see Shu-mei Shih, “Nationalism and Korean American Women’s Writing,” in Speaking The Other Self: American Women Writers, ed., Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 144–62.
19. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1989), p. 11.
20. I borrow the phrase from Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1996).
21. Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” p. 108.
22. See for example Renato Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 1–21; or William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968).