Archipels littéraires

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Les archipels et les îles ‘lointaines’ ont souvent servi de support pour les fantasmes des conquérants européens qui les ont transformés en Edens utopiques ou en cauchemars selon les époques. Il a fallu attendre l’émergence des littératures post-coloniales pour que des visions différentes apparaissent venant souvent contredire les récits de voyage qui ont bercé la jeunesse de nombreux occidentaux. Pour certains poètes-philosophes tels que les Antillais Wilson Harris et Edouard Glissant, les archipels ne sont plus des structures isolées, fermées sur elles-mêmes. Ils deviennent des lieux de rencontre, des prototypes de la créolitude généralisée que certains prédisent pour le monde de demain. Ainsi, loin des désirs hégémoniques qui ont parfois terni les comportements des visionnaires d’hier, la littérature venue de territoires minuscules, poussières posées sur les vastes océans, retrouve-t-elle le rôle d’activateur de consciences si souvent décrié depuis quelques décennies.

The mention of archipelagoes evokes widely differing images which range from tropical paradises to colonial and neo-colonial infernos.

Literature about distant islands was often written by travellers who reflected the ideological contradictions of their own milieux. Exotic clichés have peopled the literature of Europe, especially since the Elizabethan period. Christopher Columbus came back from the ‘Indies’ with tales of fabulous lands across the sea overflowing with endless resources of gold and precious ores. In the eighteenth century, Robinson Crusoe set the model for utopian dreams of starting new civilizations away from the ossified social conventions which supposedly plagued the Old Continent. Crusoe’s island became a paradigm for the utopia European conquerors attempted to bring into existence with little concern for the reactions of the Men Fridays who could only become their masters’ extension. No wonder then if islands were inhabited by speechless individuals or animal-like creatures treated as less than human by the newcomers. Even as recently as the 1 980s, some Venezuelans brought to court for murder pretended they did not know that it was morally wrong to go hunting for Indians as one would shoot wild game. This type of reaction is part of a context in which islands ‘overseas’ and territories peopled by ‘savages’ were considered void of ‘civilisation’ and could consequently be validly occupied and owned by colonists who would not leave them to waste. What appeared as tabulae rasae to the conquerors could be inscribed with the colonisers’ logos and laws.

Images of islands followed the evolution of mentalities: the Noble Savage of the eighteenth century was believed to offer an alternative social model to a supposedly corrupt Europe. During the nineteenth century, this image was progressively replaced by that of savages who were obstacles to progress and civilisation and who consequently deserved to be punished for their unreasonable resistance. Justification for this was often found in the pretext that these inferior beings were supposedly cannibals and needed to be chastized for their barbarity. In New Zealand, the Maori who still appeared as relatively friendly ‘savages’ in the 1830s were classified into two categories after the 1 860s and 70s when the local inhabitants took up arms to resist the confiscation of their land by the Pakehas:’ those who had sided with the government during the Land Wars were assimilated whereas those who still assumed a rebellious stance were brought closer to extinction. Between mimicry and rejection, the possibilities open to those colonized remained extremely limited.

The last century and a half has seen an acceleration in the process of European expansion abroad. Visions of insularity have undergone rapid transformation during this period. Some Europeans — the British in particular — came from archipelagoes which they tended to consider as impregnable fortresses, as models of superior civilization which could be transposed with hardly any modification onto other ‘vacant’ territories. To some eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literary observers, the rest of the world, the ‘continent’ in particular, was fascinating and exotic but also terribly uncivilized. Islands too are in the eyes of the onlookers. And this insular perception became more obvious at the end of the nineteenth century, in an age when voyages were multiplied and one could have expected more exchanges of ideas. Yet the last two decades of that century saw the exacerbation of chauvinism and nationalism as the major colonising powers (Britain and France in particular) tried to acquire what spoils were left after the frantic imperialistic surge encouraged by Germany’s new colonial policy under Bismarck.

The late nineteenth century revived the interest of the West in faraway archipelagoes. The reputation of tropical islands had been somewhat tarnished by the bitter memories left after the prolonged struggle between abolitionists and the lobby of West Indian planters. Europe had woken up from a dream of sunny islands where new and better societies could be founded to a realization that those Edens had become models of fierce exploitation and cruelty. In the wake of the Enlightenment, a number of European intellectuals realized that fortunes had been made on the sweat and blood of African slaves and the post abolition Caribbean could no longer be regarded as a model of good governance. After the 1850s, the West Indian islands were rife with fresh antagonism between the recently liberated slaves and the ‘indentured labourers’ newly imported from South Asia.

Despite this, dreams of island Edens continued to people the imaginations of European writers and painters. In the 1890s, a number of artists thought they had found yet another paradise on earth in the South Pacific archipelagoes. Pushing even further the frontiers of European settlement, beachcombers and as adventurers turned to Australasia, the last region of the globe left id comparatively untouched by white people.

Trying to escape what appeared as the stifling and austere morality of at Presbytenan Scotland, hoping that the sun would cure his tuberculosis, Robert or Louis Stevenson travelled to the South Pacific and in effect succeeded in becoming accepted locally as the first Samoan tusitala (writer) in English. Before he embarked for the archipelago where he was to end his life, Stevenson had published one of his best-known works, Treasure Island (1883), a novel structured on the motif of a quest. In this work, the island remains largely an archetypal representation of a personal and psychological search for meaning and harmony, a particularly pressing urge for the author of Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde. However it was with The Beach at Falesa (1892) that the Scottish writer, who, by then, had settled in Vailima, his Samoan house, developed his vision of a Pacific archipelago where he appears to have found some measure of peace with himself. In these stories, Stevenson, more than any other writer of his age, managed to convey an image of islands which could no longer be likened to a paradise on earth, threatened as they were by the lust and rapaciousness of European adventurers.

Samoa became Stevenson’s permanent home in 1890. A year later, Paul Gauguin sailed for French Polynesia where he was to spend the rest of his life apart from the two years’ interlude in France between June 1893 and September 1895. Fleeing Europe, Gauguin was obviously seeking a tropical paradise of savage innocence where he could simply live and paint. Beyond the experimental technique that he developed after his break with impressionism and pointillism, one can detect a profoundly paradoxical vision of the Polynesian archipelagoes in his paintings. In what appeared to him as a more spontaneous way of giving vent to simple feelings and urges, he transposed nineteenth-century European visions of sensual exotic women onto the local vahines who became his mistresses and whom he used as models posing in attitudes often reminiscent of Ingres and Delacroix, two of Gauguin’s favourite sources of inspiration. In the South Seas, Gauguin was looking for this

harmony with nature which urban existence in the century of the industrial revolution had made even more desirable. But he could not help arriving in Tahiti as a dominant male, even though he frequently fought against what he saw as the authoritarianism of the colonial administration. Bringing his imaginary Polynesia along with him, fed by J.A. Moerenhout’s Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan (1837), Gauguin tried to rebuild for himself a world in which the old Polynesian gods seen through the eyes of European travellers were restored into place in the painter’s imaginary Eden.

Hardly a decade later, Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim told of the attempted redemption of a naval officer who thought he could start afresh in an archetypal island in the East Indies after spoiling his reputation for ever when he jumped from what he thought was his sinking ship, abandoning the passengers to their fate. During his second stay in Tahiti Gauguin was able to convince a Tahitian chief to hand over to him his fourteen-year-old-daughter whom he took on as his vahine. In keeping with Conrad’s relatively asexualized fictional world, Jim did flot require such favours, though he did take a local girl appropriately named Jewel as his companion. However he rapidly lorded it over ah the local rulers and built his own kingdom in an Eden soon threatened by the intrusion of ‘Gentleman Brown’, a faithless European fiend who brought disaster into this earthly paradise. Conrad’s other island refuge, the outcrop on which the eponymous hero of Nostromo hides his booty, is another example of this archetypal island Eden so avidly sought by generations of nineteenth-century artists.

Orientalism by Edward Said stigmatizes the limitations and highlights the contradictions inherent in such conceptions. Yet Said is very careful not to condemn individual writers for simplistic ideological reasons. His sympathetic reading of the much decried Kipling testifies to his intellectual honesty. However Orientalism seeks to redress biasses and introduce the point of view of the colonized. This was a task which Aimé Césaire also undertook in his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). There the Martinican poet paid homage to his African ancestors ‘who had invented neither gunpowder nor the compass’. The movement for the repossession of the local heritage spread to most parts of the colonized world. In the South Pacific, Polynesians began to take pride in their forebears’ special abilities — their navigational skills in particular, which they put to good use when they explored the vast oceanic expanses of the Pacific and settled the different archipelagoes.

According to common prejudices in the West, the islands of the Caribbean and of the South Pacific are timeless places with no history of their own. It took until the 1950s for Caribbean writers to prove that history was there but one needed to trace it in the land and in the sea rather than in written archives which were only a reflection of the colonizer’s prejudices. In ‘Coral’, the poet E.K. Brathwaite recreates the whole history of the Caribbean starting from a grain of sand on a coral reef.

Despite their diversity, the different islands composing archipelagoes have seen the emergence of powerful cultural movements: in the I 950s and 60s, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and E.K. Brathwaite showed that Caribbean writing could go beyond the limits of purely local interest. The common experience of a violent history, of conquest and slavery, was enough to validate a search for a regional identity that could federate the archipelago. In the 1 960s and 70s, Albert Wendt and other Polynesian and Melanesian artists set up organisations which led to the development of a purely ‘Pacific’ sense of cultural identity.

So, in recent years, post-colonial writers have tried to show that small and economically unimportant islands could paradoxically serve as a trope for a new world order where subtle networks and cross-cultural elements matter more than large continental nations with their apparent mastery of world economics.

However post-colonial views were not always as optimistic as this presentation may suggest. In his early fiction, the Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul depicted his native island in a very dark light. His novel The Mimic Men (1967) illustrates this pessimistic vision according to which the Caribbean islands are too small to produce anything of merit. Trinidad, a place where, for him, colonials were radically deprived of greatness and reduced to behaving as eccentrics, appears in his works as a mediocre prison, a pale imitation of the ‘real’ culture represented by British civilisation. Naipaul eventually managed to ‘break free’ thanks to his winning a scholarship to Oxford. Unlike Naipaul, the Samoan writer Albert Wendt did not rush to the metropolis in search of redemption. Yet, although Wendt firmly believes in the possibility of building up a Pacific renaissance in the arts, he does not overidealize his native region. For him, there are no paradisiacal islands in the sun just places where corrupt rulers and politicians take the pretext of respecting traditional ways in order to take advantage of their compatriots. Wendt denounces so-called apostles of post-colonial identity who, under the guise of authenticity, use the same methods as the colonizers, without even resorting to the pretext of civilising people and improving their material conditions.

In The Tempest, a play written at a time when Britain’s first organized colonial enterprises extended Queen Elizabeth’ s territorial power far and wide, Shakespeare created an archetype of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. When Octave Mannoni published his Psychologie de la colonisation in 1950 his depiction of the situation at a time when most dependent territories were trying to shake off the yoke of colonization found an echo among revolutionary intellectuals both in France and in the Anglo-Saxon world. Mannonni denounced the tendency to assimilate ‘primitive’ humanity and instincts, the Id in Freud’s theory. According to such regressive urges perceptible in Gauguin’s search for a savage haven, ‘primitive’ people were closer to the original harmony, to the childlike purity we ail dream of. Mannoni was prompt to show the falsity of received ideas concerning a strict application in reality of templates for literary Edens. In his opinion, no prototype of Robinson Crusoe ever resisted the pressure of solitude: ‘Selkirk, the best known example, had entirely lost the use of speech. As for the one in Mauritius, he had gone mad.’ Mannoni defended the thesis that Prospero was modelled on Shakespeare himself in the same way as Crusoe ‘s adventures acted out Defoe’s fantasies. Yet, to him, Prospero was less sophisticated than Crusoe in that, in order to overcome the obstacles inherent in his quest, he resorted to magic means whereas the eighteenth-century hero used his resourcefulness. Mannoni suggests that the taste for the exotic in literature stems from a tendency to misanthropy and resuits from a desire to evade society in search of an  other who appears either as a frightening cannibal or as a gracious, ethereal being. According to the psychoanalyst, this duality corresponds to Shakespeare’s division between Caliban on one side and Ariel on the other. A feature which the colonialist has in common with Shakespeare’s Prospero is this inability to conceive of another world where the others are respected. The colonialist has fled from an environment where he found it impossible to accept people as they were. This flight is, according to Mannoni, linked with a childish compulsion for domination which social adaptation has failed to discipline. Mannoni calls this tendency the ‘Prospero complex’. This representation of Caliban as the archetypal colonized person and of Prospero as the colonizer was popularized in the 1960s by such Caribbean intellectuals as George Lamming and contributed to raising doubts about the innocence of many literary depictions of distant archipelagoes.

Taking up Mannoni’s psychoanalytical interpretation, one may suggest that, for Europeans, exotic islands have often been regressive imaginary places outside time and history, enclosed environments that individuals seek to conquer and dominate in order to build their private gardens of Eden where the local inhabitants become the instruments of the masters’ inexhaustible search for delights. They are associated with the fulfilment of repressed sexual desires: the natives serve as objects embodying fantasies too shameful to be openly acknowledged in the ‘normal’ world. Life in these imaginary islands is the opposite of a social existence in which individuals must learn to limit their urges while acknowledging the reality of other people’s desires. In such a psychoanalytical view, islands appear as regressive figures of an all-protecting maternal womb. The pastoral view bas been replaced by the dangerous maze of origins, a source of fascination and terror.

Looking at the violent history of tropical archipelagoes, one might despair of ever associating them with positive images. Examined from a cold scientific standpoint, the history of the Caribbean is a long litany of violent conquest and oppression. Yet, despite the imposition of the slave system, the archipelago later on became a fertile ground for the meeting of different cultures, a situation which probably prefigures the evolution of the contemporary world. Perhaps these archipelagoes may be the sociological prototype of twenty-first century humanity. This is at least what Edouard Glissant suggests when he writes that their ‘diversality’ gives an idea of the generalized ‘Creolitude’ of the future. For Glissant, Creolization does not lead to the loss of identity. Instead, and despite the risks incurred by cultures which have been assimilated to the verge of disappearance, this phenomenon bas led to the development of relations between several cultural zones which are made to meet in a particular place in the same way as a Creole language is built on the interplay of several linguistic areas. Glissant opposes ‘continental’ thinking, which he views as characterized by self-contained and closed systems and ‘archipelagic’ thinking. The latter favours the cultivation of the ambiguous and the frail. It thrives on the search for ‘traces’ and relies on ‘détour’, an attitude which, for Glissant, excludes escapism. Archipelagic thinking becomes a metaphoric representation of this fertile diversity of the world whose components are made to communicate despite — or perhaps because of — its fragmentation.

Glissant’s vision of archipelagoes provides a salutary antidote to the apparent deadlock of history illustrated by the last five centuries in the Caribbean: far from being paradisiacal for their inhabitants, these tropical islands have provided paradigms for what we now call ethnic cleansing and concentration camps: the Amerindians were almost exterminated with the help of diseases vehicled by Europeans. This first genocide then gave way to the horrors of the slave trade which was justified by Las Casas as a means of protecting those Indians that had survived. After the abolition of slavery, conditions in the barracks where East Indian labourers were housed were not a major improvement on the huts where the slaves were accommodated at night.

So, if islands meant exile for the slaves and ‘indentured labourers’,’ they were also places where cultures met and could cross-fertilize, provided one endeavoured to overcome the polarization of races so often denounced by the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris. As Gilles Macarie writes, commenting on Derek Walcott, islands are always in-between (one thinks of the title of Louis James’s pioneering book The Islands in Between). Because of their very fragmentation, archipelagoes suggest the opposite of totalitarian systems; one can only comprehend them in terms of relations and exchanges.

At present artists are still isolated in their desire to move beyond the strict boundaries of their regions. So far history has shown that the meeting of different cultures was often an occasion for clashes and wars over the possession of land. However voices such as that of Wilson Harris are beginning to argue that polarities are the result of reductionist conceptions of reality which harm winner and loser alike, since they blind them to the creative potential of genuine mutual collaboration.

Because of their small size, the islands composing many archipelagoes are an antidote to the unfortunate fascination that the modem world has for large land masses and superpowers. In their quiet ways, archipelagoes provide a fertile milieu for Creolization and contact between cultures. A poetic meditation on what their reality implies may lead to the development of a genuinely creative use of the literary imagination.

Tables des matières :

Jean-Pierre Durix : There are no Archipelagoes in the Sun (pp.5-12)
Louis James : The Island as Mother: Matriarchy and Identity in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite and Jamaica    Kincaid (pp. 13-18)
Eric Tabuteau : Multicultural-Isthmus: A Comparative Study of George Lamming and Aimé Césaire (pp.19-28)
Dominique Dubois : Space and the Quest for Identity in Olive Senior’s Work: an Imaginative Insularity (pp. 29-42)
Gilles Macarie : Derek Walcott et la « réalité archipélique » (pp. 43-54)
Olivier Adèle : Edouard Glissant : Les Indes et les autres ou la voix du monde (pp.55-62)
Aline Janquart : Alejo Carpentier : écrire les Caraïbes (pp. 63-72)
Dorita Nouhaud : Des îles, des îles, des îles, beaucoup d’îles, toujours plus (pp. 73-86)
Priska Degras : L’écriture de l’Histoire (pp. 87-94)
Paul Sharrad : Pathways in the Sea: A Pelagic Postcolonialism? (pp. 95-108)
Bernard Chevignard : From Nantucket to Bermuda: Saint-John de Crèvecœur’s Isles and Illusions (pp.109-118)
Annie-Paule De Prinsac : Tar Baby: The Femininity of the Island and the Return to the Origins (pp. 119-128)
Sylvie Crinquand : What Strange Foreigners! Otherness in Ann Radcliffe’s novels (pp. 129-142)