Kathleen Gyssels is a specialist of Francophone Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research concerns various literatures, including Caribbean literature and culture; African-American literature and arts; and the Jewish Diaspora, working with
texts in French, English, Dutch, Spanish or German. Her research is focused on three main components: debalkanisation (Glissant), disenfranchising (the gendered subaltern) (Spivak), and recanonisation. Her recent publications include: Passes et impasses dans le
comparatisme postcolonial caribéen: cinq traverses, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010; «Criticité: Édouard Glissant au mitan du système littéraire et critique antillais» in: Anthony Mangeo (Ed.), Postures postcoloniales.Domaines africains et antillais, Paris:Karthala, 2012; Marrane et marronne: la co-écriture réversible d’André et de Simone Schwarz-Bart, Amsterdam: Brill-Rodopi, 2014; «Introduction» in:Monique Blérald, Marc Lony and Kathleen Gyssels (Eds.) Léon-Gontran Damas: poète, écrivain patrimonial et postcolonial, Cayenne, Ibis Rouge Éditions, 2014.
Beheaded! From Joséphine de Beauharnais to Solitude: slave statues
and the slave monuments and museums in the French Antilles
The paper contributes to debates around slavery and slave museums taking as inspiration historical novels and archives from the Schwarz-Bart Library in Goyave (Guadeloupe). Suggesting that silences in the Memorial Act.e (new museum in Port-au-Prince), I question the
passing over of black or mulatto female heroins, in sharp contrast with béké figures who, even if they have been temporarily (!) beheaded, remain the most famous icons in the collective mind of the French Caribbean and Caribbean population at large.
In the course of a poll-carried out survey investigation, I could indeed measure that Martinicans, in particular, are proud to have «given Napoléon’s wife» and to have erected her beautiful body into white marble «posture» at the Savane de Fort-de-France. My survey touched
on the counter-example of «La mulâtresse Solitude», a statue erected in Guadeloupe, but without any indication of its source: the best selling novel La mulâtresse Solitude by André Schwarz-Bart. I study the strange «exotism» put in place in this local «statufication», while sculptor Nicolas Alquin (son of Pierre Alechinsky) erected his «Solitude» in Paris as a symbol of fierce resistance to this somewhat simplistic representation of the black Maroon, giving it a much more global and universalizing anticapitalist posture.
While new sculptures increasingly challenge the «silencing of the (slave) past» (Michel Ralph Trouillot), I would like to reconceptualize archival practices: what if the sculptor represented Solitude not pregnant, staring in the far distance but as a beheaded victim of slavery,
rape and torture ? Why Édouard Glissant’s project for a ‘Centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions’ at no occasion mentions Solitude as the only female heroin such a Centre national or Memorial Act.e should have staged ? What does this tell us about
the gender bias which continues to ravage the Antilles in all domains?
If Joséphine de Beauharnais did not leave an imprint on literary writings (Pauline Bonaparte, on the other hand, does appear in El Siglo de las luces by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, as well as in works of art), Solitude remains a central, pivotal poteau mitan in Caribbean
iconography. In spite of successful innovations (Atelier de généalogie et d’histoires de familles antillaises – AGHFA, or the activist group CM98 and finally the inauguration, in 2012, of the Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage in Nantes by a Jewish artist), there is still much to
sort out before leaving the dominant tendency to «statufier sur son sort» and promote male heroes instead of, for instance, Lumina (another heroic Martinican maroon who ended in the Transportation Camp of Guyane, in 1840).
Key words: slavery, slave museums, statues, representations
