Keywords

Fabienne Kanor’s and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s accounts of transatlantic enslavement in Humus (2006) and las Negras (2013 [2012]) are a form of epistemic marronnage whose intent is to excavate the acts of resistance by Africans and Afro-diasporic people, especially women, systematically expunged from official records.1 The Martiniquan and Puerto Rican authors’ gendered perspectives thus fill in a gap left by male predecessors such as E. Kamau Brathwaite, Alejo Carpentier, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott, whose iconic poem “The Sea Is History” actually figures as an epigraph to Humus. Aligned with what could be characterised as mangrove poetics (Ferly 2012), their narratives draw instead on immaterial fragments stored in the explicitly sexed body, a dynamic corporeal archive that unsettles the authority of the annals upholding dominant chronicles.2 Both authors seek to fulfil their devoir de mémoire (literally, “memory duty” or obligation to remember) by elaborating a tangible though fictional alternative archive that withstands erasure.

Moreover, the leitmotif of the slave ship in Humus and las Negras illustrates Paul Gilroy’s contention that for people of the black Atlantic, the slave ship is a chronotope—understood here as an artefact combining space and time that constitutes a landmark for a given community—and the bedrock of modernity (Gilroy 1993).3 Yet in the African diasporic discourse and imaginary, this trope is pervaded by a gender symbolism fraught with troubling implications for black women. A liminal site both catalyst and witness to the collision between distinct worlds, the slave ship became for the Africans a new point of origin marked by colonial attempts of ontological and epistemic annihilation. Nevertheless, this motif features in both narratives as a locus of regeneration through a reconfiguration of spacetime that forges unforeseen alliances and fuels sociopolitical struggle.

“The First Memory Could Be the Ship”: Chronotopes and Ship Sisters

At the inception of Fabienne Kanor’s Humus was a 1774 note from the French colonial archives in Nantes in which the attempted collective suicide of fourteen female captives was reported by a slave ship captain as partial “cargo” loss. From this business statement that relegates an unfolding human tragedy of unprecedented magnitude to a footnote, the novel sets out to reconstruct the history of the Middle Passage. Revisiting the official narrative around transatlantic enslavement, Humus, perhaps a misnomer, is set at sea, aboard the vessel Le Soleil, for the core of the action. The triangular trade likewise appears prominently in las Negras, whose opening words in the first story “Wanwe” set the tone for the entire collection: “El primer recuerdo pudiera ser el barco. Una barriga de maderos unidos y flotantes […] Tanta enormidad, tanto espacio” (19) [The first memory could be the ship. A belly made of timber tied together that floats […] Such enormity, so much space].4 The slave ship thus becomes the new point of origin. The metaphor of the belly recalls the Biblical sea monster that swallowed Jonah: it signifies an ending, implying that the peoples of Africa will never be the same.

Yet barriga (or ventre in French) also means womb, so that in both languages the term can designate the end of life, but also where life originates. In this second acceptation, dear to many Caribbean thinkers, just like the entrails of the fish for Jonah, so does the vessel stand for a new beginning, a matrix that will literally scatter the seeds of Africa across the New World.5 The outcome of extreme dispersion was not extinction, but rather, regeneration, hence the evocative title of Kanor’s novel, Humus.6 Nevertheless, as Kanor and Arroyo Pizarro suggest, the children of the black Atlantic did not emerge from the process unscathed. This harsh reality prompts Edouard Glissant to state in his Traité du Tout-Monde that for Creole societies, the mythical night of origin has been substituted with an austere darkness of historical making, the ship hold, designated as “[le] ventre du bateau négrier,” or the belly of the slave ship (Glissant 1997, 36). Glissant calls this inauspicious origin “une digenèse” or digenesis.

This particular gendering of the trope of the slave ship, literally envisioned as a matrix, is not unique to Glissant (see also 2007, 107–108); rather, it permeates the black Atlantic discourse. Saidiya Hartman points to W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of the slave ship as a “matrix of black death and dispossession” that was succeeded by the plantation, the ghetto, and then the prison (Hartman 2016, 169). European traffickers, Hartman notes elsewhere, extended this metaphor to the cells holding Africans captive prior to the journey. To them, “the dungeon was a womb in which the slave was born,” it was a place where alchemy took place, where what they held as waste—other human beings—was “transformed into capital” (Hartman 2007, 111). For her part, contesting Glissant, Hanétha Vété-Congolo argues that Kanor’s work is evidence to the importance of “telling one’s word, activating and enacting one’s memory” in order to “pre-empt digenesis and enable genesis”: “Ainsi, dire sa pawòl, faire exister et agir sa mémoire, c’est contre-dire la digenèse et permettre la genèse” (Vété-Congolo 2014, 14). In this sense, Kanor’s fiction, just like Arroyo Pizarro’s, may be understood as foundational.7 Arguably, the ubiquity of the ship-matrix metaphor has run the risk of eclipsing the ship’s concomitant role as the primary tool that begot the African diaspora, a term understood here in its etymological meaning. This duality and the inherent gender bias of the trope prompt me to postulate instead the slave ship as an indomitable hermaphrodite machine capable of at once scattering the seed and nurturing it in its matrix.

Fundamentally, the slave ship figures in las Negras and Humus as a spacetime machine that literally dis-locates the captives on board, displacing their myths of origins and eroding their collective memory to become “the first memory” (to cite Arroyo Pizarro), thereby shattering their sense of self.8 Compressing space, the ship is what Foucault calls a heterotopia, in that it becomes a microcosm of pre-colonial Africa, bringing together nations that previously scarcely interacted. It further transmutes space through simultaneous concentration and expansion, subjecting its shackled passengers, entrapped but in motion, to a double process of extreme confinement and antipodal displacement, two treatments that are seemingly incompatible. The vessel also distorts time, stretching it, fragmenting it, and loo** it through the physical and psychological effects of captivity, trauma, and post traumatic memory, all the while transporting the enslaved towards an uncertain future that will soon catapult them into the unfamiliar, accelerated pace of early capitalism, also commonly known as “modernity.” Astonishingly, Foucault (1984 [1967], 49) pictures the ships of the era of European colonialism as “the heterotopia par excellence”: a parallel world with the appeal of freedom (from Europe’s authoritarianism, land scarcity, or limited opportunities) that offers aspiring settlers a conduit for self-reinvention through expatriation. Yet to those who fell prey to the triangular trade, ships on the contrary are tantamount to dyschronotopias. At a more symbolic level, the slave ship enables the two authors to reconfigure Caribbean spacetime. As a site that foments (or nurtures) spontaneous or organised resistance, it holds the promise of renewal.

Indeed, Gilroy remarks that, beyond their economic role, slave ships functioned as “cultural and political units” that provided “a means to conduct political dissent and possibly a distinct mode of cultural production” (Gilroy 1993, 17). Thus, the pattern of alliances and rivalries among the captives in Humus reflects the continent’s diversity while conveying the “divisions in the imagined community of the race” (24). Still, the women’s pact aboard Le Soleil also suggests “the means to comprehend or overcome” these divisions (24), even though their radical, fatal gesture signals the inherent difficulty of the task. The novel, Renée Larrier notes, details “their coalescing into a group, the emergence of a leader, the planning of the escape” (Larrier 2011, 107). Jamaican scholar and writer Erna Brodber further underscores the binding potential of transoceanic crossings when she refers to members of the black diaspora as “shipmates” (Brodber 1990, 168; Josephs 2013, 134). The Trinidadian-Canadian writer David Chariandy likewise glosses on the corresponding phenomenon among the Indo-Caribbean population, jahaji bhai, or “ship brothers,” as “new types of kinship and identification among indentured South Asian migrants that broke down previously existing divisions between ethnic groups and castes” (Josephs and Chariandy 2014, 123). Facilitated by the Kala Pani, the gender-based alliances jahaji bhai and jahaji bahin (or “ship sisterhood,” Mehta 2020) therefore supersede formerly inescapable social divides. las Negras too recounts the emergence of a people for which kinship no longer relies on bloodlines. In a scene from the opening story, women hitherto strangers to each other spontaneously unite in a chant of lamentation to accompany the last moments of a rebellious “ship sister” during her public execution (Arroyo Pizarro 2013, 36). The “army of midwives” (42) who risk their own lives by taking those of newborns they wish to spare from enslavement likewise constitutes a mighty support network in the second story “Matronas.” Finally, in “Saeta,” enslaved women display sorority and kinship in daily reciprocal gestures intended to restore dignity.

Solidarity is symbolised in “Wanwe” by the rhizome. In an unspecified region evocative of today’s Namibia, women rely on whistling signals for hunting. When they are preyed upon by enslavers, the alarm raised by one of them is compared to a rhizomic plant: “El pitido se alarga como una liana de árbol gigante, interminable. Como un helecho adornado de musgos rizomatosos, sin principio ni fin” (26) [The whistle stretches on like a gigantic, endless liana. Like fern adorned with rhizomic moss, with no beginning or end]. The striking metaphor of lianas and rhizomes to refer to the women’s form of communication underlines the ties that bind them. It points to the larger web of the mangrove, a flexible, inclusive network endowed with the capacity to expand in all directions. This ecosystem is an apt paradigm to theorise the black Atlantic and Caribbean diasporas, in that it encapsulates the ability to forge new alliances to compensate for the loss of kinship that the Middle Passage, Kala Pani, and other forms of coercive crossings entailed. Furthermore, I posit the mangrove, a “webbed network” of rhizomic roots that aligns with Gilroy’s black Atlantic, as a useful frame to examine the literary expressions of a more explicitly gendered African and South or East Asian diasporic experience. As Arroyo Pizarro illustrates, it provides a powerful metaphor for the solidarity network among Caribbean women.9 Thus the mangrove mindset already at work among the female hunters described in “Wanwe” can be detected in the midwives’ rebellious spirit in “Matronas,” the avenging spectre in “Saeta,” or in the wind of sedition onboard Le Soleil that urges the fourteen women to jump together in Kanor. Female solidarity and the woman-centred praxis portrayed in these texts can therefore be regarded as a kind of proto womanism, or in its French Caribbean version, femmisme (Vété-Congolo 2017, 135) or fanmisme (Francis 2016).10

Certainly, Arroyo Pizarro’s and Kanor’s emphasis on female solidarity, fortitude, and resistance is a source of inspiration for contemporary women of the black Atlantic. Yet their most radical proposition lies in the archival disruption and in the engagement with collective memory carried out in their works. From the outset, Arroyo Pizarro’s and Kanor’s narratives openly challenge hegemonic historiographic and documenting practices. las Negras is defiantly dedicated “To the historians/for leaving us out” (Arroyo Pizarro 2013 [2012], 7). Animated by a similar desire to amend the records and eager to “barter technical jargon for speech” and “[t]he sailors’ elusive utterances for the captives’ screams,” Kanor asks in Humus: “Comment dire, comment redire, cette histoire-là des hommes?” (Kanor 2006, 13) [How to tell, again and again, this story of mankind?]. In addition to recuperating and revising the chronotopal slave ship, Kanor and Arroyo Pizarro undermine the cornerstone of Eurocentric historiography when they posit the black Atlantic body (the body of those subjected to the triangular trade and its multiple incarnations in Afrodescendants of the past and present), as a chronotope in its own right; more still, an archive.

Corporeal Archives and Devoir de Mémoire

Mikhail Bakhtin, who is most often credited for popularising the term “chronotope,” defines it as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981 [1937], 84). Elaborating on Bakhtin’s concept, linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso remarks in relation to Western Apaches: “Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves” (Basso 1984, 44–45).11 While Europe, and the West more broadly, is fond of memorials and commemorations, such materiality is sorely lacking to the black Atlantic experience. Unlike holding barracks spread along the West African coast or the more problematic plantation ruins, slave ships did not remain as tangible lieux de mémoire (sites of memory, Nora 1984). Derek Walcott regards the absence of vestiges in the Americas, this “world without monuments and ruins” (Walcott 1998 [1974], 38), as an invitation to shed burdensome elements of tradition; he urges writers and artists of the region to look ahead and not back. “The Sea Is History” likewise underscores the lack of material records on the African diasporic experience: “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?/Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, / in that gray vault. The sea. The sea/has locked them up. The sea is History” (Walcott 1980, 25). This oft-cited opening of the poem finds echo in Glissant’s conviction in Le Discours antillais that the landscape is its own monument, as well as the sole witness of Caribbean history (Glissant 1981, 11). Indeed, forced displacement turned Africans into what Glissant (2007, 108–109) aptly describes as “migrants nus” (naked migrants). Coupled with centuries of ethnocentric archival practices, this has resulted in most black Atlantic chronotopes being immaterial. And yet this collective memory loss can be liberating, as it grants people of the black Atlantic the freedom to fashion their future by digging in their own archives. Furthermore, as Kanor argues, the fragmentary nature of the records and memory presents an opportunity for reinvention: “Ne pas tout savoir permet aux héritiers que nous sommes de réinventer l’histoire, de combler les trous à la mesure de nos moyens (artistiques, politiques). […] Si nous nous souvenions de tout, sans doute cette mémoire finirait-elle par nous asphyxier, sa douleur nous maintiendrait dans un éternel ressentiment” (Herbeck 2013, 975) [Not knowing everything allows us, the heirs, to reinvent history, to fill in the holes according to our artistic or political talents. If we remembered everything, this memory would no doubt eventually stifle us, its pain would maintain us in a state of eternal resentment]. Kanor signals the potential of creative writing to palliate the gaps in history in the Prologue of Humus, where she stresses the interplay between history and story (both histoire in French): “Cette histoire n’est pas une histoire. Mais un poème. […] une tentative de glissement, là où il n’est plus de témoins pour dire, là où l’homme […] affronte la pire épreuve qui soit: la mort de la parole, l’aporie” (14) [This story is not a story. It is a poem. […] an attempt to dive where nobody is left to bear witness, where man […] faces the greatest ordeal of all: the death of speech, aporia.]

The opening “The first memory could be the ship” in las Negras likewise highlights the connection between memory, history, and the Middle Passage (Arroyo Pizarro 2013, 19). Insofar as they figure in the collective consciousness as immaterial “monuments to the community itself” (Basso), slave ships are indeed quintessential chronotopes of the black Atlantic (Gilroy). The primary focus in Arroyo Pizarro’s and Kanor’s poetics, however, is the black Atlantic body, which functions as an archive. Rather than seeing in the “amnesia [of the slave] the true history of the New World” (Walcott 1998 [1974], 39), the two authors point to the traumatic memory transmitted along generations, what could be called postmemory (van Alphen 2006; Hirsch 2008).

Sociologist Roger Bastide (1970) details the processes of bricolage that operate in African diasporic cultures following the partial loss of collective memory due to enforced dispersion. He also shows in relation to religious rites how this collective memory originally reliant on topography has largely been inscribed in rhythms that are now tied to what he calls a corporeal geography (such as ritualised moves and dances).12 Consequently, much of the broader collective memory of the African diaspora is recorded in oral stories, songs, ceremonies, or even body language in addition to dances, rites, and rituals. For this reason, Kanor calls the black Atlantic body a corps-fossile, a fossil-body where memory is stored and history is engraved: “il est le lieu qui dit l’histoire. […] Il est, ce corps-fossile où sont déposés chagrins, victoires, deuils, où sont stockés les grands chapitres de notre histoire” (Francis 2016, 280) [it is the locus that tells history. […] It is the fossil-body where pains, victories, mourning are deposited, where the great chapters of our history are archived]. Departing from the common understanding of fossils as body remains used in science to reconstruct the history of the natural world, Kanor’s notion of fossil-body actually refers to the body of flesh and blood as a living fossil, an archive that can “tell history.” Whereas fossils are artefacts that illuminate foregone origins, the fossil-body relates (in its Glissantian double acceptation of “linking” and “telling”) past, present, and future; it highlights the continuity, thereby enabling the genesis that counters digenesis, according to Vété-Congolo. Thus, the fossil-body of the present still feels or reacts to the suffering and emotions experienced generations ago; in many ways, the oppression is ongoing. The layered memory deposited in the corporeal archive is at once individual—a compilation of personal pains, victories, and mourning—and collective—a transgenerational record of the trauma of the transatlantic trade and its impact on black women’s bodies that have been uniquely (though not exclusively) subject to sexual violence.

Yet in Humus, the ultimate violation of the black Atlantic body appears to be confinement. The insistence on the captives’ immobility in the novel underlines the physical restraint they endure on the journey: they cross the Atlantic in shackles, crowded in the ship hold, and unable to stand onboard, let alone move around, for weeks or months. Running against the grain of the traditional slave narrative packed with action, movement, and excitement, the Prologue calls attention to the affective charge of the novel and warns that this account of history will compel the reader to vicariously experience enslavement: “Vous serez pris. Enchaînés bien malgré vous aux mots. Enfermés dans cette histoire qui comme chant se répète, préfère au point final les suites, aux conclusions radicales le plus sûr des bégaiements” (Kanor 2006, 14, emphasis mine) [You will be trapped. Unwillingly chained to the words. Locked up in this story that, like a chant repeating itself, prefers sequels to a final period, the most certain stammering to radical conclusions]. The “stammers” triggered by the denial of physical freedom announce the loss of speech, the “aporia” quoted earlier, which figures as the obliteration of the self. It is therefore no accident that the opening chapter of the novel should focus on “La muette,” or the silent one. las Negras too focuses on physical restraint: the rebellious captive in “Wanwe” is tied by the neck, her hands immobilised behind her back (Arroyo Pizarro 2013, 19); in “Matronas,” the ship hold is substituted by the prison cell—one of Foucault’s negative heterotopias—where Ndizi is held and where the entirety of the action is set. Yet here again, recollecting, or in Vete-Congolo’s words, “activating and enacting one’s memory,” is a tool to resist incarceration: as Ndizi muses over her six escapes and numerous acts of sedition (35), she evades once more, breaking out of the narrow confines of her cell by travelling through spacetime via memory.13

The fossil-bodies of the peoples of the black Atlantic archive intangibles like memory and habitus (culture, language, personal and collective history, genealogy); as such, they were invested with liberatory power for those faced with enslavers set on obliterating their past, civilisation, and episteme in addition to their personhood. Today, the potential of the corporeal archive remains critical in the face of continued oppression, debasement, and erasure of Afrodescendants and everything that pertains to them. With its opening “The first memory could be the ship” (19), a phrase later modified as “the first memory could also be the village” (23) that then morphs into “It is also possible that the first memory could be the day of the rapt” (25), the story “Wanwe” signals that, however malleable, memory is a powerful tool to counter digenesis. In “Matronas,” the characterisation of Ndizi as a true polyglot further illustrates the archival function of the body, mind, and spirit that is used as a form of resistance. In fact, in the enslavement era, Arroyo Pizarro (2016) reminds us, the body, specifically female hair, literally served as a geographical archive, albeit temporary, as braiding was used to map the topographical terrain to assist fugitives. Similarly, Ndizi’s multilingualism traces back her personal history, as each tongue is acquired at a given stage of her life: her childhood in an unspecified African region, her service under enslavers from distinct European countries, her successive episodes of marronnage accompanying different ethnic groups (35). Like a fossil, Ndizi’s personal reminiscences and language acquisition figure as a register of the era, an imprint bearing testimony to the wide gamut of ethnicities across Africa that were targeted by transatlantic enslavement, the various European colonial powers that profited from it, and the competing imperial interests of the period. The various cultural practices archived in Ndizi’s body thus constitute an immaterial historical record in and of themselves.14 In particular, Ndizi’s polyglossia is revealed as a linguistic fossil that parallels Kanor’s fossil-body. When Ndizi, shielding herself with the enslavers’ prejudice by faking ignorance, pretends not to understand the priest who visits her daily in her cell, or when she refuses to confess to the crimes she is accused of, she uses silence as an act of dissidence. In “Matronas,” aporia takes on another meaning than in Humus: it becomes protection. Arroyo Pizarro therefore transforms fictional personal memory into archival material.

The preoccupation with the records is certainly palpable throughout the collection, as apparent from the epigraph, a provocative short poem dedicated to historians:Verse

Verse A los historiadores, por habernos dejado fuera. Aquí estamos de nuevo … cuerpo presente, color vigente, declinándonos a ser invisibles … rehusándonos a ser borradas. [To the historians, for leaving us out. Here we are again … present, fully fleshed and coloured, declining to be made invisible … refusing to be erased.]

Here content matches form, as the poetic cadence of the lines “declinándonos a ser invisibles… /rehusándonos a ser borradas,” with the atypical stress on the antepenultimate syllable, conveys the restive spirit and combative nature of black Atlantic women, whose stories are about to be told in the collection. For the author, then, writing these stories was an act of epistemic marronnage.

“Matronas” most directly addresses the question of archives and historiography through the character of Petro, the northern European priest who befriends Ndizi and whose ulterior motive is to seditiously chronicle the era of transatlantic enslavement to denounce its atrocities and inhumanity. Moreover, that Ndizi gradually forgets her native tongue and especially the word for “freedom” in some of the languages she knows (37) underscores the process of erasure and dehumanisation instituted by enslavement as well as the substantial loss in collective memory resulting from the dispersion, what Bastide calls trous de mémoire or “memory holes.” To some extent, syncretism is a mechanism that emerged to palliate for this collective memory loss: forgetting, therefore, is intrinsic to creolisation. Thus, Ndizi is an archetypally syncretic Afrodescendant. Stolen as a child, she is left with a fading recollection of her origin and mother tongue. She fulfills her devoir de mémoire by actively summoning up scenes of her childhood to trigger her remembrance. Yet despite hints that she may be from Congo, in adulthood her ethnicity has become barely identifiable, to the extent that Ndizi can stand for the entire African diaspora. Her strategy to conceal her extensive linguistic knowledge as a mode of survival has further eroded her memory. Ndizi’s syncretism or loss of ethnic markers represents black Atlantic cultures, which emerged out of partial forgetting.

Like Ndizi, the protagonists in Humus counter the dehumanising effects of confinement, uprooting, dis-location, and eventual collective amnesia induced by uprooting and enslavement with a range of stratagems drawn from the immaterial corporeal archive that allows them to cross back the Atlantic: reminiscence, imagination, and the supernatural. Thus la volante, or “the flying one,” the Vodun priestess from Ouidah (in today’s Benin) aboard the Saint Domingue-bound Le Soleil, enjoys remarkable freedom of movement: she can fly to Nantes (France) and later Badagry (Nigeria). La volante also travels across time, living through the turbulent period between 1750 and 1804 in Saint-Domingue, to reappear in the twenty-first century. Moving across spacetime, both la volante and l’héritière, or “the heiress,” retrace the contours of the black Atlantic and over two centuries of its history. L’héritière, the author’s alter ego, considers la volante to be “the sole survivor, really” (Kanor 2006, 241). The ability to survive the trauma of the Middle Passage is thus intimately linked to the agency exerted by la volante through movement, a strategy replicated by l’héritière, who “walks the world,” to use Kanor’s own self-description (Kanor 2015). The phrase “la seule survivante, en vérité,” however, could suggest that the contemporary narrator does not view herself as a survivor, but rather as someone who remains scarred by trauma and has yet to overcome the history of the black Atlantic.

Such an interpretation is further supported by the structure of the novel, which reproduces the effect of “a song repeating itself” (14). Nearly each of the fourteen defiant captives has her own chapter, and their mutinous jump overboard is repeated every time. Despite the different perspectives, there eventually arises a feeling of déjà lu in the reader, like a scratched vinyl record or a song loo** on replay. An impactful tribute to each of the tens of millions of deported, these repetitions also point to the socioeconomic legacy of the triangular trade and enslavement, and its psychological imprint on the African diaspora to this day. While the author asserts that for sure, “[she] was not there” (“je n’y étais pas”), the artistry with which she manages to convey the forced exodus hints at a collective postmemory handed down from one generation to the next.

Set in contemporary times, the final chapter features “the heiress” grappling with her black Atlantic past, which she tries to overcome through writing. Haunted by this harrowing legacy, l’héritière travels to Badagry and Ouidah. There she retraces the Slave Route, attempts to remember by turning seven times around the Tree of Forgetting in reverse, and suffers hallucinations of the slave ship Le Soleil. The affect generated by the weight of this transgenerational trauma is palpable. Unlike most people around her in Nigeria and Benin, l’héritière wishes to dwell on her history, to piece it together, like “a seamstress of pain assembles, piece by piece, a history to be recomposed” (243: “je songeai avec effroi aux couturières de la douleur … L’histoire à assembler pièce par pièce, à passer-recomposer”). This sentence and the final words of the novel “Je me levai. Face au livre à venir. A ces murs où nichaient les fantômes et qui bientôt s’effaceraient” (247) [I stood up. Facing the book to come. These walls nestling ghosts that would soon fade away], make explicit the author’s project to not only recover the past, but to recompose it and imagine a different present and future through creative writing.15 Whereas the spectral figure of la volante exhorts l’héritière to continue her search for meaning as a form of healing, the phantoms of history that assail the narrator-protagonist in the final chapter are overwhelming and paralysing.16 On the individual level, writing becomes the best way to dispel these phantoms; on the collective level, creative works such as Humus and las Negras also represent a way out of the lingering effects of this haunting history, an escape from digenesis, in short, a foundation, or perhaps modest sketches, to build a new future.

Kanor and Arroyo Pizarro fulfil their devoir de mémoire by drawing on the intangible corporeal archives of the black Atlantic to redress the monolithic, partial narratives propped up by the materiality of colonial records. If in fact the archive is a “discursive system” invested with the power to validate or invalidate particular accounts of the past (Foucault 1969), then the dynamic record that is the collective memory stored in fossil-bodies, however fragmented, still provides essential protection against colonial ontological and epistemic erasure. Made of “multiple layers sedimenting together like a palimpsest” from which resistance and new societies can arise (Douglas 2022, 18), this collective memory is primarily activated in Humus and las Negras via the chronotope of the slave ship, whose problematic gender symbolism is deconstructed through a focus on female-centred solidarity networks metaphorically represented by the mangrove; the two texts thus succeed in inscribing contemporary Afro-diasporic women into a genealogy of combatants. The authors themselves, having embarked on the task of unearthing and re/writing the past, can be conceived as epistemic maroons whose work parallels what René Depestre (1980) calls marronnage intellectuel. Moreover, the reconfiguration of spacetime in both works facilitates the emergence of versions of the past that counter the digenesis of the Middle Passage and empowers people throughout the African diaspora to imagine alternative futures, be they sovereign or nonsovereign. Therefore, these are chronotropic narratives in which past, present, and future are in continuous dialogue, attesting to Kanor’s belief that “the dialogue between Africa and the Americas must be reinvented; the voices of yesteryear are still speaking to us” (Herbeck 2013, 967).

Notes

  1.  1.

    Arroyo Pizarro’s atypical lower and upper case in the title of the original edition is respected.

  2.  2.

    Initially referring in the 1970s to the demand to memorialise the Shoah and for official recognition by the French State of its own responsibility in the deportation of French Jews during World War II, the expression devoir de mémoire surfaced in the field of French Caribbean Studies in the years leading up to 1998, when the 150 years commemoration of the second abolition in French colonies gave impetus for a number of specific initiatives and scholarly research on the history and memory of French transatlantic enslavement. See, for instance, Cottias 1997, 1998, and 2000, and Chivallon 2012.

  3.  3.

    Gilroy, a disciple of Stuart Hall, is indebted to his non-essentialist conception of identity as dynamic and cultural identities as “the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (Hall 2003 [1990], 236).

    See note 11 for Basso’s adaptation of Bakhtin’s 1937 literary concept of the chronotope to linguistic anthropology.

  4.  4.

    Translations of all works cited are mine, unless otherwise stated.

  5.  5.

    See numerous writings by Glissant, including Mémoires des esclavages, where he states that the deported African was stripped of culture, knowledge, and measurement and appreciation of spacetime, “all of which was engulfed and digested in the belly of the slave ship” (“tout cela s’est englouti et a été digéré dans le ventre du bateau négrier”). Glissant’s phrase casts the slave ship as simultaneously the ocean and a sea monster that ingests all elements of African cultures and epistemologies through ship wrecks, collective drownings, and the amnesia induced by enslavement. Thus stripped naked, Glissant continues, the African is now tasked with “recomposing the traces of their cultures of origin” (“recomposer, avec la toute-puissance de la mémoire désolée, les traces de ses cultures d’origine”) to combine them with the enslavers’ cultural impositions, thus creating “considerable creole cultures” (Glissant 2007: 108–109, italics his; gender inclusive pronouns in the English translation are mine).

    Saidiya Hartman too recurs to the ambiguous symbolic womb/belly, picturing the Middle Passage as the “birth canal that spawned the tribe” of a generic black people that supplanted all ethnic distinctions (Hartman 2007, 103), while likening the trail of dungeons along the West African coast to “a large intestine” and imagining the captives as “inching [their] way along the entrails of power.” Hartman sees in ingestion and cannibalism “vivid” metaphors for “the relation between the haves and the have-nots, the rulers and the ruled, the parasite and the host” at play in the African and transatlantic enslavement systems (112).

  6.  6.

    Conversation with the author, March 2016. Herbeck (2013) also notes that the considerable interval required for organic debris to become fertile soil or humus mirrors the time lag before deported Africans can adapt to their new environment and cohere into a social body.

  7.  7.

    Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, 1991.

  8.  8.

    Jacinth Howard (2019) notes the recurrence of space ships represented as slave ships in Caribbean speculative fiction. Moreover, Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo (1989) understands the slave ship as one piece in the system of machines (in Deleuze and Guattari’s acceptation) that comprises the triangular trade and the plantation economy.

  9.  9.

    A unique, underappreciated biotope that is essentially a diffuse Third Space, the mangrove, an extension of Edouard Glissant’s paradigmatic rhizome and his Relation (Glissant 1990, 44–47), stands as a creative matrix or incubator for the poetics and aesthetics of many regional writers and artists, especially women. Thus, while Guadeloupean Maryse Condé parodies the trope of the mangrove-matrix through her protagonist Mira in Traversée de la mangrove (1989), she nonetheless endows the ecosystem with rich symbolism throughout her acclaimed novel. Resonances with the trope of the slave ship in the black Atlantic imaginary notwithstanding, this network of rhizomic roots is attuned to Gilroy’s black Atlantic, a “webbed network, between the local and the global” simultaneously constituted by roots (or the impulsive fascination for ethnic origins) and routes (the impetus to incorporate multiple diasporic cultural strands) that challenges “all narrow nationalist perspectives” (Gilroy 1993, 29).

  10. 10.

    Vété-Congolo coins the term “femmisme” to designate “une éthique de la transcendance” (ethics of transcendence) that women enslaved on plantations throughout the Americas elaborated to counter the denial of their humanity and femininity and overcome the multiples traumas inflicted (Vété-Congolo 2017, 135).

  11. 11.

    Basso’s adaption of Bakhtin’s definition of the chronotope reads in full: “[Chronotopes are] points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse. Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time and history and the enduring character of a people. Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves” (Basso 1984, 44–45).

  12. 12.

    See Roger Bastide 1970, p. 88: “Or, pour bien comprendre la survie des religions africaines dans le Nouveau Monde, il faut passer […] de l’espace topique […] à un espace moteur – de la géographie des ‘pierres de la cité’ à une autre géographie, corporelle.” [To understand the survival of African religions in the New World […] we must go from topical space […] to a motor space – from the geography of “city stones” to another, a corporeal one].

    See also Jan Assmann 1995 on the link between rituals and collective memory.

  13. 13.

    Significantly, Johan Galtung (1969, 174–175) lists the deprivation of both movement and speech as forms of “personal somatic violence.” Galtung identifies two forms of personal somatic violence: “denial of input (sources of energy in general, air, water, and food in the case of the body), and denial of output (movement),” including “movements of vocal chords” (175). He notes the imprecise borderline between somatic and psychological violence, and the “mental implications” of physical constraints. Furthermore, Galtung’s pioneering notion of structural violence is a useful lens through which to look at Caribbean societies of the past and present. These societies have emerged from a brutality historically enshrined in a succession of institutions aiming to support the plantation economy (and its subsequent avatars) such as codified enslavement and indentured servitude; the Church; the colonial school system; and, increasingly so after World War II, the more discreet violence of state-sponsored mass labour migration schemes, notably the French Caribbean BUMIDOM or its Puerto Rican equivalent Operation Boot Straps, that amount to contemporary, albeit less brutal, iterations of the Middle Passage. Today this characteristic violence persists, for instance through the perpetuation of a carefully crafted economic dependency and underdevelopment, a school system that sustains an adherence to the untenable sociopolitical status quo, starker social injustices than in the metropole, and laxed regional enforcement of, if not patent disregard for, national or federal laws intended to protect civilians.

  14. 14.

    Rachel Douglas makes a very similar argument in relation to Haiti, arguing that: “Resistance and a new society … [rest on] decolonial histories, like the Kreyòl language and popular Vodou practices, [which] should be seen as contributing to the communal alternative archives that continue to be woven together” (Douglas 2022, 18).

  15. 15.

    Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François (2017, 87) likewise notes how in Humus Kanor gathers the fragments of black Atlantic history. The term “recompose” echoes Glissant’s description of the cultural syncretism that occurred in the Americas (Glissant 2007, 108–109, see note 5); it seems to hold strong positive evocations of creolisation for the two Martiniquans. Recomposing is central to Glissant’s pensée archipélique (archipelagic thinking), which is, in John Drabinski’s words, an “embrace of fragmentation” that, unlike French or U.S. poststructuralism, is rooted “in the specificity of the Caribbean experience of the Americas” (Drabinski 2019, xv).

  16. 16.

    Here I draw on the distinction made by Colin Davis (2005, 373) between Nicolas Abraham’s phantom, or the internalisation of somebody else’s crime or trauma that can eventually be exteriorised, and Jacques Derrida’s spectre, who represents what can never be fully apprehended and therefore cannot totally disappear.