Reimagining Liberation

How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire

Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051791
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging.

1.Suzanne Césaire

Liberation beyond the Great Camouflage

Once again in Haiti, during the summer mornings of ’44, the presence of the Antilles, more than perceptible, from places which, like Kenscoff, the view over the mountains is unbearably beautiful. And now total insight.

—Suzanne Césaire, “The Great Camouflage”

When Suzanne and Aimé Césaire arrived in Port-au-Prince in May 1944, they were greeted with much enthusiasm and fanfare. In the coming months, they would find themselves immersed in the world of the Haitian intelligentsia as they both taught French literature at the Université d’État d’Haïti, each one’s course offerings complementing the other’s. Perhaps more surprisingly, they were also immersed in Haiti’s political milieu. In their official capacities as cultural ambassadors of the French government to Haiti, the Césaires were guests of honor at receptions held at elegantly appointed venues such as the Palais National, where, with some degree of discomfort, they rubbed shoulders with Haitian ministers of state and foreign ambassadors. Their participation in the now historic International Congress of Philosophy, held in Port-au-Prince in 1944 and attended by philosophers and government officials from Haiti, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, testifies to the intermingling of intellectual exchange and political hobnobbing that characterized the Césaires’ government-contracted work on the island.

Although often relegated to a passing reference in the story of Aimé’s intellectual engagement with Haiti, Suzanne was also an official member of the delegation that traveled from Fort-de-France to Port-au-Prince. Telegrams and memos between French intellectuals, such as Henri Seyrig, and government representatives, including Georges Louis Ponton, governor of Martinique, and Milon de Peillon, ambassador of the French provisional government to Haiti, testify to the flurry of administrative activity that would provide Suzanne with time away from her job as a teacher in Martinique and allow her to work on a temporary government contract as part of the French cultural mission to Haiti.1 The Césaires’ mandate, as Seyrig envisioned it, was to strengthen the Haitian intelligentsia’s cultural ties to France.2 Ponton expressed the hope that Suzanne could be assigned to teach courses at women’s institutions.3 Suzanne was therefore understood to be integral to this project of reasserting France’s presence in Haiti, a project that Seyrig framed in the ostensibly benign language of cultural connections and that included Haitian women students as a specific target audience. Yet, while the travel expenses of both Césaires were financed by Martinique’s colonial budget, Aimé was remunerated for his work but Suzanne was not. She noted in her report to Ponton that despite her working in an official capacity as an envoy of the French provisional government, only Aimé received a stipend, one calculated to cover the expenses of a single man. The couple was obliged to borrow money from friends to sustain themselves.4

Suzanne’s and Aimé’s accounts of their collaboration in Haiti differ in crucial ways. In July 1944, when Aimé wrote to the governor of Martinique to update him on his work in Haiti, he noted that he was giving weekly public talks and teaching modern French literature at the university.5 He then modified his statement by inserting between the opening lines of his letter the addendum that he was doing so with his wife. In this account, Suzanne, identified not by name but by her relation to Aimé, is scripted after the fact. She is suspended quite literally between the lines, held in parentheses, and inserted into the narrative with the aid of a long, curved arrow drawn in Aimé’s hand to indicate her place at his side. In contrast, in her rendering Suzanne informed the governor of the collaborative nature of her work with Aimé, particularly as she was also teaching French courses at the university.6 Given the circumstances and material conditions of their time in Haiti, what is most striking about Aimé’s and Suzanne’s respective accounting of their work is the terms on which Suzanne is written into and eventually out of this narrative on intellectual and cultural exchange in the French-speaking Caribbean. In juxtaposing the Césaires’ respective reports on their activities in Haiti, the omissions and insertions in the archive illustrate how Suzanne is at once present, an integral part of France’s reach into Haiti, and absent, noted as a parenthetical afterthought or erased through a refusal of compensation despite the terms of her government-issued contract and her repeated reminders to Martinique’s governor for fair remuneration.

Similarly, in contemporary Caribbean literary and political history, Suzanne is at once present in a growing number of scholarly works that examine her intellectual contributions to Negritude, surrealism, and modernism and absent through the systematic erasure and sidelining of her thought in the decades preceding the more recent attention to her work.7 Her report to Ponton, unpublished and thus far not analyzed in any scholarship about Suzanne, does more than establish her as Aimé’s collaborator. It also attests to a body of writing that is far more extensive than her seven published essays in Tropiques that have been the subject of contemporary scholarly engagements with her work. Suzanne’s unpublished writings, primarily correspondence, are a crucial part of her corpus of texts. Her letters were a combination of literary analyses, political commentary, and personal news about her health or her children’s grades, signed Suzanne Césaire, Suzy Césaire, or, to her closest friends, simply Suzy. Their rich and revelatory contents are a reminder of the importance of engaging with the totality of a thinker’s work, not just the genres that are privileged by academic discourse. What would it mean, then, to take into account Suzanne Césaire’s report to Ponton about American standardized testing in Haiti, and how does reading such a text alongside the more recognizable genres of poetry and essays allow us to rethink our intellectual genealogy of writers engaging with imperialism in the Caribbean?

Although Césaire has become increasingly prominent in scholarship on the Caribbean and the African diaspora, she remains an elusive figure, as evidenced by the inconsistencies in the biographical information found in scholarship about her. Notably, renderings of her maiden name as Roussy and Roussi, birth dates that range from 1913 to 1915, birth locations in Trois-Ilets and Rivière Salée, and workplaces that oscillate between the prestigious Lycée Schœlcher and the markedly different vocational Lycée Bellevue, all paint a hazy picture of Césaire’s life. The Césaires’ marriage certificate allows us to clarify these inconsistencies and serves as the basis for the biographical information presented here.8 Jeanne Aimée Marie Suzanne Roussi was born in Trois-Ilets, Martinique, on August 11, 1915. According to Michel Leiris, she spent her childhood in Rivière Salée, in a household where the differences between her chores and the more demeaning tasks assigned to the child of a poorer relative living with her family highlighted for the young Suzanne the demarcations in the island’s socioeconomic hierarchy.9

In the 1930s Suzanne studied philosophy in France, where she met and married Aimé Césaire in the summer of 1937. Like her contemporaries, Suzanne had to navigate the racial tensions that marked everyday life in the metropole as a woman from a colony. White acquaintances who were otherwise perfectly pleasant drew her irritation when they invariably marveled that she spoke French with “the purest accent from Île-de-France!”10 A vendor she knew inscribed her in his client records as “la mulâtre.”11 This odd combination of the feminine article and the masculine form of the noun at once misgendered her and fixed her to a racialized category. In 1939, with war looming on the horizon, the Césaires returned to Martinique, where they cofounded the journal Tropiques with René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, and Aristide Maugée. After Tropiques, Césaire moved to Paris, where she taught French literature at the Collège technique Estienne. She worked with her students to contribute to the school’s renowned annual journal, Les Cahiers d’Estienne, in 1949.12

Throughout her life, Césaire remained a visionary and, in her writing, articulated an awareness of the complexity of Caribbean identity that was far ahead of her time. Sharpley-Whiting describes Césaire’s “liberatory poetics” as the poet’s ability to represent not just the beauty of the Martinican landscape but also “the island’s history, pain, and exploitation.”13 Maryse Condé has shown that Césaire was more interested in the Antilles as a space for the convergence of complex, multicultural influences and less in a return to an idealized African past as proposed by other Negritude writers.14 This Caribbean focus situates her as an important precursor to other Antillean theorists such as Edouard Glissant and the creolists Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant.

Until her death in 1966, Césaire suffered from decades of ill health, a situation that often limited her and Aimé’s possibilities for travel and employment. Notably, Aimé turned down Seyrig’s offer to take a position as a cultural attaché in Algeria and informed him that Suzanne was suffering from a malfunctioning pneumothorax.15 A pneumothorax is a collapsed lung, a condition that one suffers rather than a part of the body that can malfunction. Aimé’s confounding description is therefore in fact revealing of the overwhelming nature of Suzanne’s illness, captured here in his muddled articulation of a diagnosis. The Césaires’ financial situation was further complicated by the tenuous nature of Suzanne’s employment, which did not offer the same benefits and protections as those accorded to civil servants on a permanent contract.16 These details of Suzanne’s life underline the great risk she took in producing work that was as politically charged as it was poetically engaged. Her vocal essays in Tropiques and her bold letter to the chief of information services in Martinique, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Bayle, on his censorship of the journal, were dangerous acts whose consequences could quickly become a matter of life and death when taken in light of her ill health.

In writing Suzanne Césaire not as a parenthetical insertion whose story is contained between the lines of her more illustrious husband’s narrative but rather as a political protagonist whose work challenges colonial discourses of racial discrimination and political subjugation, I focus here on her politics and poetics of liberation. These terms describe her desire to dismantle the foundations of colonial thinking and her imaginative construction of a new Caribbean civilization beyond colonial domination. I define her politics of liberation in the context of World War II as her focus on freedom from the oppressive policies of Vichy occupation and her dissident thinking and scathing attacks on fascism and racism, camouflaged as reviews of literary and ethnological studies to escape censorship. Her poetics emphasizes Caribbean art forms free from restrictive stylistic rules and, consequently, able to articulate and represent the realities of the Antilles beyond the stereotypical images of an idyllic tropical paradise. Reflections on cultural belonging, intellectual affiliations, and political attachments run through her writings and illuminate her vision of decolonial citizenship and Antillean belonging that recognizes the Caribbean archipelago as a confluence of epistemologies.

My examination of Césaire’s political engagement goes beyond her published essays in the Martinican journal Tropiques to include the untapped archive of her private letters.17 Césaire’s rich, personal correspondence with French intellectuals, including Seyrig, André Breton, and Yassu Gauclère, served as a more secure space in which to articulate her desire for a Caribbean cultural renaissance than the highly scrutinized pages of Tropiques would allow in the years of Vichy censorship. Césaire’s writing before, during, and after her time in Haiti reveals the island’s tremendous influence in shifting her focus from the colonial relationship between Martinique and France to the Caribbean archipelago as a generative space within which an Antillean cultural and political renaissance could take place.

Before Haiti: Literary and Political Liberation in Martinique

The Vichy regime brought significant political changes to Martinique. The collaborationist government that ruled France from 1940 to 1943 appointed colonial officials who were sympathetic to the draconian laws of Philippe Pétain’s National Revolution. As vieilles colonies, Martinique and Guadeloupe had a long history of political engagement and representation in France, dating back to the 1848 abolition of slavery. Under Admiral Georges Robert, Vichy’s high commissioner to the French Antilles, these limited freedoms disappeared. Robert revoked universal male suffrage and replaced black mayors with white Creole businessmen. He also implemented new measures increasing surveillance and curtailing movement. Arbitrary detention and deportation awaited dissenters. For many, the new political climate, with its attendant racial, social, and cultural oppression, bore a startling resemblance to slavery.18 Any form of dissenting public expression was therefore a subversive political act.

It was into this setting of political repression that Tropiques was born, and it was in this context of truncated freedoms that Suzanne Césaire would hone her skills of literary evasion—that is, the publication of subversive essays camouflaged as ethnographic studies. Much has been said about Césaire’s fiery open letter to Lieutenant Bayle in response to his censorship and ultimate ban of the journal. Yet open condemnation of political and artistic repression was not Césaire’s only strategy of resistance. During her stay in Haiti in 1944, she wrote to Léonie Henriette (Yassu) Gauclère in Algiers.19 Recalling the unbearable atmosphere of repression in wartime Martinique, she described the period as one that necessitated various forms of flight and escape.20 “Le grand camouflage” is therefore apt both as the title of her final essay and as a description of her entire body of work. At a time when political evasion meant a steady stream of Martinican dissidents to Dominica and then on to New York to join de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Césaire employed literary evasion—that is, the skillful deployment of images that allowed her to publicly express her politics and poetics of liberation.21

For Césaire, liberating Martinique required addressing cultural assimilation, the result of centuries-old racist colonial policies. In her essay “Malaise d’une civilisation” she cites eighteenth-cen...