I

This essay examines contrasting but complementary narrative and filmic representations of the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon's attempt to reimpose a slavery regime in the French colonies. Taking a closer look at this underrepresented and under-analyzed event, one of landmark importance in the Caribbean tradition of rebellion and self-liberation, allows us to focus our attention more closely on the extended arc of liberatory acts – inscribed in a variety of locations but always espousing the same goal – that mark the identitarian activities of Caribbean slaves almost from the inception of the colonial moment to the act of emancipation. This extraordinary resistance movement, military in its shape and substance, was led by Colonel Louis Delgrès of Martinique and Commandant Joseph Ignace, born in Guadeloupe. On 4 February 1794, France abolished slavery and the slave trade in all its colonies. But on 20 May 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished slavery and the slave trade in the same territories. Between these two dates the historical trajectory of the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique – and particularly that of the former of these – would undergo extensive and exponential change. In a large sense, the resistance to Napoleon's invading forces, although ultimately doomed to failure in Guadeloupe, emerged from and was shaped by the specificities of social, economic, and political structures that transformed Guadeloupe during this critical period. These events can be termed an act of definitive self-emancipation, conceived in contrast to an act of empowerment, as Tom Inglis points out: “empowerment involves people developing capacities to act successfully within the existing system and structures of power, while emancipation concerns critically analyzing, resisting and challenging structures of power.”Footnote ¹ In a word, then, the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon was to a large extent driven by principles of liberation and self-emancipation aimed at challenging and subverting existing systems of power, and emerging from the path adopted by Guadeloupe's governor, Victor Hugues, and the various communities over which he presided. This meant that the resistance in Guadeloupe was fighting, at bottom, to preserve an alternative way of life. Indeed, if this Guadeloupean paradigm is read as inscribing and validating continuities of black struggle inaugurated with the Haitian Revolution of 1793, then ascribing a black transnational framework to these acts of emancipation is a logical position, as West and Martin point out: “black movements have been a leading force in the search for emancipation since at least the second half of the eighteenth century … successive waves of black international struggles have countered, shaped, and at times destroyed central pillars of capital and empire, racial as well as political.”Footnote ² Analyzing this resistance compels us to acknowledge individual and collective expressions of the idea and practice of freedom that were originally erased by those charged with constructing the colonial script, and draws attention to the still-marginal inscription of these events in contemporary culture.

The outbreak of the French Revolution proved to be the harbinger here. History generally accepts that its key events occurred between July and August of 1789. However, in an age of horse-drawn transport, when ships took on average about six weeks to cross the Atlantic – and such a voyage could in fact take up to four months – the news of this political upheaval did not reach Guadeloupe until late September. By this time, the island had been an established and profitable French colony for over a century and a half, having been colonized by the Compagnie des îles de l'Amérique in 1635. The subsequent cultivation of tobacco and sugarcane proved to be enormously profitable, leading to economic investment and infrastructural development across most of the territory. By 1789, then, as Germain Saint-Ruf points out, “on comptait 598 sucreries; 26,970 pieds carrés étaient cultivés en cannes, 7,023 en café, 8,200 en coton, 190 en cacao; on comptait 12,256 bêtes à cornes, 4,092 chevaux, 3,723 mulets, 17,600 moutons, porcs et caprins.”Footnote ³ The population broke down into approximately the same ratio that was characteristic of other Caribbean islands, where slaves outnumbered whites by a factor of about ten to one; as Saint-Ruf continues, “à la veille de la Revolution française, il y avait à la Guadeloupe 89,823 esclaves. La population comptait en outre, 13,712 blancs et 3,058 hommes libres (hommes de couleur et noirs affranchis). La couleur était le critérium de l'aristocratie.”Footnote ⁴ In the event, the news of the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen encountered a population split between supporters and detractors, as was the case throughout the French mainland, and indeed beyond. Ultimately, if this revolutionary logic was to be pursued to its logical end, what was at stake was the very existence of slavery itself, for the terms of the declaration brooked no argument; it was a document “qui se voulait universelle et partout applicable – tout au moins dans l'esprit – à tous les homes quelles que fussent la couleur de leur peau ou leurs origins … dans un pays où les classes en présence représentaient des intérêt ainsi opposés, aussi antagonistes, le choc était inevitable.”Footnote ⁵ And the slaves – understandably, the most interested of parties – would insist not only on taking these principles at face value, but on putting them into practice to the furthest extent possible.

Within the context of the European history of slavery and the slave trade, France had long occupied a dominant position, ever since it began its participation in the slave trade in 1624. During the 1730s alone, the French shipped probably more than 100,000 slaves from Africa. Christopher Miller highlights what he aptly terms

What happened, in point of fact, was the enormous, almost obscene, enrichment of the slave-traders, especially in France and in England.

This unimaginable profitability of the slave trade gave rise to the so-called French triangle (France–Africa–Caribbean colonies) with Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle and Le Havre as primary slave-trading posts, as well as Saint-Malo, Harfleur, and Rouen. By the 1760s, fifty-six slaver ships a year on average left French ports, with the profits that poured in being turned into visible evidence of the traders' material wealth and opulence; Miller points out that “the slave traders of Nantes were collectively worth about fifty million livres on the eve of the Revolution; they had by that point built their city into a gem with wide streets, white façades, and splendid mascarons.”Footnote ⁷ At the same time, with the rise and increasing profitability of the French slave trade, it was still “a risky proposition to bring a slave to France,” as Miller puts it;

Much was at stake, then, in the actions that followed, particularly in light of the long-standing practice that allowed one set of laws to be followed in the metropole and another in the colonies, conveniently located, as they were, on the periphery. When the Constituent Assembly voted on the laws and practices that would obtain in the colonies on 8 March 1790, it ambiguously accorded autonomy to the colonies even as it vouchsafed the continuity and safety of the colonists' property to the nation taken more broadly. The inevitable – and, indeed, predictable – result was that tacit approval was granted to allowing the system of slavery to continue.

The ongoing French and Haitian Revolutions, republican idea(l)s of freedom forced to confront policies of coercion and racial exclusion, led to an insistence on the part of the former slaves that vaunted principles of citizenship and universal rights be honored less in the breach and more in the observance. It would be the long arc of events that were eventuated in the wake of the two key developments of 1794 with direct consequences for Guadeloupe – the abolition of slavery in all French territories by the Directory on 4 February 1794, and the arrival of Victor Hugues as colonial governor of Guadeloupe on 21 May of that same year, followed by his entry into Pointe-à-Pitre on 7 June – that would engender the most profound and unforeseeable transformations in the constitutive subjectivity of the black Guadeloupean population. In this transnational conjunction of black interests, it becomes clear that at certain moments “racial struggles and identities cohered across vast masses of land and bodies of water, challenging and changing dominant modes of white supremacy,” as West and Martin suggest.Footnote ⁹ And so while on the one hand such coherence imbued the implications of abolition with new urgency, on the other the effects of the installation of Hugues on the self-recognition of the black Guadeloupean subject were immediate, as Germain Saint-Ruf points out,

It is this remarkable paradox that, in a word, characterizes the totality of Hugues's presence in Guadeloupe. Between 1794 and 1798, Hugues's deliberately Janus-faced administration maintained the freedom of Guadeloupe's slaves even as he routed the royalists, made the ex-slave community of sans-culottes noirs the majority of his army, and governed the rest through a system of unpaid labor. As Laurent Dubois deftly sums up the patent contradictions of this period, Hugues “sought both to apply policies of racial equality and to contain their effects.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet as fleeting and superficial as it was, it was this period of relative autonomy and self-determination for Guadeloupean blacks that would lead to that brief but memorable moment of anti-Napoleonic resistance whose performance – led by Delgrès and Ignace – would come to define their subjectivity and self-sufficiency. Saint-Ruf effectively sums up the uniqueness of what characterized this period:

The most telling development here is that, from defending the republic (or its Antillean avatar) to fulfilling their chosen pursuits as free subjects, the ex-slaves of Guadeloupe took the principles undergirding abolition at face value, pace Saint-Ruf:

This burgeoning egalitarianism – of interests if not of subjects – was about to meet its most sanguine mediator and catalyst in the person of Victor Hugues. Having already proved himself to be an adroit and effective administrator, Hugues would now take up the Guadeloupean challenge. Faced with the debilitating results of internecine warfare and English occupation, his task was enormous and, indeed, dauntingly multifaceted, “Il fallait donc tout reprendre à zero, réorganiser le pays tant du point de vue politique et administrative que du point de vue économique et social … C’était une tâche immense.”Footnote ¹⁴ In all of these areas, Hugues's success was both telling and definitive. Indeed, the scale and substance of his accomplishments becomes immediately apparent; as Saint-Ruf makes clear, despite the ineluctably assimilationist strictures of the Constitution of 23 August 1794, Hugues struck out confidently on his own path:

It is in these sociopolitical developments that we can most effectively locate the seeds of what was arguably a first iteration of Guadeloupean postcolonial subjectivity. Given the novelty of a work regime organized around the commensurability of salaries and skills, and thus both implicitly and explicitly inscribed as slavery's opposite, principles of human worth were being applied to the population as a whole for the first time. With the newly instituted system of tenant farming enhancing the social visibility and value of l'esclave devenu paysan, the self-worth of this new citizenry was being continuously and repeatedly valorized. Put another way, what Hugues's regime inscribed, albeit inadvertently, was the subjectivity of the ex-slave turned citizen in terms that were in stark opposition to those by which s/he had previously been defined. Orlando Patterson aptly describes this latter condition as “social death,” and puts it thus:

The depths of the social degradation and exclusion described here cannot be overemphasized. And when the disappearance of this system affords the subject the social inscription that had so long eluded it, one of its most telling results is to share in that sense of honor that comes from the social recognition that had long been the exclusive domain of the master; as Patterson continues,

With citizenship established, then, and honor regained, Guadeloupe's black population was effectively reinscribing and redefining itself as a cohort of French Caribbean subjects whose tacit equality with and independence from the metropole preceded even its material juridical iteration, soon to be instantiated in Haiti.

Within a relatively short span of time the effects of the Haitian Revolution (1793–1804) proved groundbreaking, its reverberations echoing in the military, political, and psychological domains. For our purposes here, the effects of the military defeat of the French in the first instance were as far-reaching as the ignominious failure of the French invasion forces under General Leclerc in the second. In a very real sense, both events were due in large part to contemporary perspectives on the secure authoritarianism of white-dominated slavery regimes and the concomitant presumption of docility, incompetence, and general inferiority on the part of the slaves, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out: “No-one in Saint-Domingue or elsewhere worked out a plan of response to a general insurrection … The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened.”Footnote ¹⁸ It was the upending of these presumptions of slave peaceability, coupled with the “unthinkable” military prowess and desire for liberty and equality of the slave community, that lay at the heart not only of Leclerc's defeats but, also, as we shall see, of the scorched-earth policy that put paid to even the thought of a negotiated settlement on the part of the revolutionary slave community.

Put another way, then, this transformation in the status of the slaves reflected the imbrication of subjectivity and emancipation with a new and nascent power dynamic, as Inglis explains: “there is a need to take an understanding of human emancipation away from notions of liberating a pre-existing, essential self toward a more realist or structuralist understanding of power.”Footnote ¹⁹ Saint-Ruf makes clear the extent to which these new subjects set great store by their new status even as their actions challenged the reach and legitimacy of the metropolitan power structure:

It would be no exaggeration to claim that the consequences that Napoleon Bonaparte's coup of 18 Brumaire 1799 held in store for them meant the overturning and destruction of this world that they had built, and the effective negation of any implicit or explicit intimations of equality, and any means of resistance would certainly be predicated on a considered articulation of power.

This end was not long in coming. Napoleon, whom Saint-Ruf describes in no uncertain terms as being “avant tout un impérialiste au pur sens du terme et, par-dessus le marché, profondément raciste,”Footnote ²¹ had already begun to show his colors as early as the Treaty of Amiens (7 October 1801), when he assured the colonists of the Mascarene islands that they did not have to fear abolition.Footnote ²² This was followed by a law specifically proposing the reestablishment of slavery and of the slave trade in all French colonies, specifically mandating a juridical return to the status quo ante of the pre-1789 period. In Saint-Ruf's inimitable language, “la loi scélérate fut votée le 20 mai 1802 par le Corps legislative.”Footnote ²³ The meat on the bones of the law took military and maritime shape in fairly short order; two expeditionary forces were fitted out, the first, commanded by Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Leclerc, headed for Saint-Domingue, where it was to encounter ignominious defeat, and the second, under General Richepance, headed for Guadeloupe. The significance of this event is summed up in Saint-Ruf's peerless formulation, “Après avoir imposé ses lois aux monarques d'Europe, colonisé l'Egypte, la France lançait sa plus grande expédition maritime pour aller rétablir l'esclavage et la ‘civilisation’ aux Antilles.”Footnote ²⁴ The consequences of this act would encompass a range of categories, from the military and political to the literary and cultural.

II

As I have written at length elsewhere,Footnote ²⁵ Daniel Maximin's 1981 novel L'isolé soleil is a remarkably inventive tour de force, inscribing in the complexities of its structure and form the very plurality, multivalency, and creative fragmentation that it seeks to explore through content and theme. A deliberately, indeed strategically, disjointed writing project that crosses, conflates, and doubles borders and boundaries of time, character, and event, Maximin's work is a deliberately revisionist rehistoricizing of key Guadeloupean, Caribbean, and New World lieux de mémoire. It engenders a collaborative constitution of cultural identity through its continuous discursive oscillation between areas of time and space that the narration strategically conjoins through doubled discourses of temporality and subjectivity. In Maximin's view, his text aimed to uncover, or to re-cover, not only key moments of Guadeloupean history long erased, or occulted, from the majority of French historical texts, but to (re)inscribe these events and subjectivities into a larger geopolitical and geocultural framework that sought to re-place Guadeloupe as an integral element in a Caribbean and New World history and geography. In an interview that followed the publication of the novel, he made this point clear: “Thus one is Guadeloupean, and beyond that, West Indian … I wanted to affirm this Guadeloupean, Caribbean identity as a fact, not to interrogate it.”Footnote ²⁶ This task of textual reinvention and reinscription seeks to fulfill Maximin's dictum that there are “too many scars to permit oneself the luxuries of hopelessness, of disengagement, of disinterest.”Footnote ²⁷ In a word, then, Maximin's task is the revivification of subjectivity from the deliberate inscription of its absence, to produce an engaged literature whose goals are located in both the aesthetic and the political worlds.

Excavating the discursive, structural, and symbolic depths of Maximin's work, then, calls to mind the theories of both Stuart Hall and Judith Butler. On the one hand, Hall's well-known and oft-quoted formulation of the scope and substance of cultural identity seems all but prescient here; as he puts it, “Cultural identity … is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past … Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.”Footnote ²⁸ Thus Maximin's task of constructing a new context and framework for Guadeloupean and Caribbean cultural identity by reinscribing unheralded key moments of a Guadeloupean past grounded in rebellion seeks to extend the very idea of that past, and to show how this act of dis-covery effectively moves identity forward. By selecting these events from the historical record, and making them part of the event arc of his own narrative such that his own fictional characters participate in them, Maximin engages in a complex renegotiation of national identity that seeks out new boundaries and frameworks through the re-presentation of this identity in literature. The several resonances of such acts of memorialization will be explored in greater depth shortly.

There are additional identitarian contexts and discourses that Maximin's narrative strategy opens up. An important one is the concept of category of the performative, as explained and explored by Judith Butler. Critical here will be the way in which the performative articulates twin tropes of difference and doubleness even as it turns on a critical conflation of sign and act. As Butler herself puts it,

One way of reading Butler's thesis here is to extrapolate it to the notion that expressions of cultural identity within a postcolonial framework need to be read as the performative product of the colonial discourse(s) that have long shaped and subtended them. If, in this sense, the interior essence on which they are purportedly based is discursively constructed and so, as a result, changeable, then any transformations in the discourse itself should have concomitant and perceptible effects on the interior essence, which in turn will critically inflect the performativity of that identity itself. In other words, as Susan Stanford Friedman puts it in an important gloss on Butler, “Identity is an effect of discourse, not the precursor or creator of it.” Indeed, from the perspective of performativity as a form of “citationality,” as Friedman writes, the concept of the “oppositional performative” begins to assume added resonance within this context of identitarian inscription. As she explains, “Such imitation in the borders between difference … constitutes a performance with a difference,” one whose scriptive character, theme, and intent have always already been subversive, as she continues:

The very discursive premise of L'isolé soleil – the exchange of letters between Marie-Gabriel and her cousin Adrien on the structure and content of the former's impending novel – introduces a series of discursive and temporal slippages that are integral to the field of signification that emerges from the novel. The parameters of the complex task that is outlined for both characters and plot, the excavation, reinscription, and revivification of unwritten regional histories and the unrecognized roles therein of Guadeloupean forebears, are aptly summed up early on in a missive from Marie-Gabriel to herself,

From these tenets, conjoining and drawing on what Ronnie Scharfman calls “the past violated … recuperated textually as a future written … an authentic, disalienated, Caribbean ‘écriture féminine’,”Footnote ³² and established in contestatory relation to the “confiscated history” of the past, the missive goes on in short order to valorize the coming reinscription of Louis Delgrès, “incinerated in our memory” as the writing project announces its goal of conjoining the discursive and the imaginary to meld fact and fiction.Footnote ³³ Put another way, the relative lack of precise information surrounding many of the important events deemed marginal by official colonial history allows Marie-Gabriel broad scope in her fictional (re)writing of the Guadeloupean past. Louis Delgrès, a Martinican-born military officer, along with his military companion, Joseph Ignace, would become the leaders of the heroic but doomed resistance to the invasion of Guadeloupe by Napoleon's troops, led by General Richepance, whose goal was the reimposition of slavery. Ultimately, the goal of this rewriting is “to recast past events into a new configuration, a new history of the Antilles,” as John Erickson explains.Footnote ³⁴ The twins Georges and Jonathan, fictional characters in Maximin's novel who are the eighteenth-century ancestors of Marie-Gabriel, become key members of Ignace's and Delgrès's forces and their roles give depth to the reinscription and re-presentation of the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon in the narrative.

Jonathan and Georges first make their appearance in the eponymous second section of the novel. Its very title, “Jonathan's Notebook,” sets up the nonlinear, multivocal approach, grounded in pastiche, amalgam, and admixture, that gives shape to this fragment. When we first encounter him, Jonathan is sitting in the library of the Les Flamboyants estate reading a long extract from The Civil Rights of Slaves, which is reproduced in the text in italics. This text thus already constitutes an embedded narrative, set off as it is from the primary text, its difference signaled by italics. At the same time, it is important to note the discursive implications of the notebook form itself, both for the novel we are reading, and for the one under construction within the novel – ”The notebook implies a writing praxis, a self-conscious, critical faculty as well as an open-ended quality of a work in progress, in search of itself,” as Ronnie Scharfman explains.Footnote ³⁵ This fragmentation of form and point of view is intrinsic to the text's critical conflation of history and fiction; and the elaboration of its primary theme, the need to limit severely the circumstances under which a slave might qualify for liberation in order to ensure the safety of whites, conforms to the definition of the function of an embedded narrative as a technique that posits “a relation of causal explanation [or] a relation of thematic juxtaposition,” as Todorov claims, providing a symbolic and thematic harbinger to the events that are about to unfold.Footnote ³⁶ This analysis is immediately furthered when Jonathan tears the page from the book he is reading;

Even at this early juncture, then, one can trace Inglis's claim that “social change takes place through a form of voluntary critical self-reflection,”Footnote ³⁸ as the non-linear reinscription of the major tenets of Guadeloupe's occulted history of resistance, drawing on patterns of history and fiction conjoined through creolized techniques of re-presentation, (re)construction and rewriting, begins to take shape.

What is at work here is the way in which chosen literary texts reconstruct particular historical discourses, thereby creating the possibility of new interpretations. Given the ineluctable inscription of this event in the communal Guadeloupean memory in terms of heroic resistance and self-sacrifice, and its assertion of black values and black self-liberation, it is also linked to key questions of how traumatic historical events should be remembered and valorized, drawing on key aspects of what can be termed second-generation memory, positioned at the critical intersection between collective and individually experienced memory. If the transmutation of such an event into a lieu de mémoire can be said to be maintained by various discourses emerging from the national community, the resulting burgeoning intertextuality can conceivably produce a new framework for national identities to be constantly rewritten and renegotiated, leading to the reconception and reformulation of these identities and their reinsertion into, and representation in, literature.

The interaction between trauma and representation presents us with a multilayered construct, with a field of signification full of complex challenges. James Berger provides us with an account worth quoting at length:

Several additional aspects of the Delgrès–Ignace resistance can thus be folded into this rubric, given the doubled nature of the traumatic framework – encompassing the event itself and its subsequent repression. Temporal displacement and discursive reinscription are central factors here, as E. Ann Kaplan points out: “The original traumatic experience is so horrifying that it cannot be grasped cognitively, and assigned meaning. Rather, it remains unprocessed – not ‘knowledge’ in the usual sense.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This searing recognition of trauma's role in the re-presentation of silenced histories compels us to come to terms with the idea of trauma as a paradoxical model in which horrific events are simultaneously suppressed and ever-present. Here, literature takes its place as an effective mediator between the identity quest and these revelations and repetitions of repressed memory, since, as Erika Johnson points out, “literary circulation of traumatic knowledge is paramount to representation.”Footnote ⁴¹ This principle will have a major impact on our reading of the Delgrès–Ignace resistance and its discursive inscription in this novel.

The fates of Georges and Jonathan are indissolubly entwined with the epic resistance against Napoleon's troops. Importantly, the resistance itself is given both moment and momentum by the unspeakable acts of ethnic cleansing being engaged in by the defeated French forces, as David Brion Davis and Peter P. Hinks point out:

Effectively contextualizing the importance of this event involves taking cognizance of the fact that, as was pointed out earlier, while news of portentous contemporary events took time, it did eventually reach its destination, as Thomas Bender confirms: “People on the different continents – Africa, the Americas, and Europe – had knowledge of and interest in the other continents, and the emerging culture of print provided a substantial diet of information.”Footnote ⁴³ Vincent Brown, in his turn, elaborates on the indescribably brutal actions and attitudes of the French troops in Haiti as their defeats compounded themselves:

Subsumed in this single citation are the myriad principles and perspectives that fueled and maintained the racial hierarchies and Manichaean dualities that lay at the heart of the system of slavery itself; patterns of alterity, objectification, dehumanization, and difference, and the maintenance of a racialized system of governance whose implicit foundational principle was the wielding of absolute terror.

In the event, the materiality of this murderous system of exploitation was well known to the Guadeloupean slave community, and so the acts of self-emancipation to which it gave rise undergird the discursive developments of Maximin's novel. Following a murderous attack on Les Flamboyants by a group of drunken white men that causes the twins to flee, Jonathan chooses to become a maroon while Georges joins the Guadeloupean armed troops led by Ignace. The deliberately fragmented discursive construction of the novel is extended at this key juncture through a letter from Georges to his distant twin brother Jonathan, a mini-text once again set off from the main text by its subheading and its encoding in italics. As such, it constitutes another of the novel's embedded narratives, one whose function may be defined as explanatory, demonstrating, as Gérard Genette states, “direct causality between the events of the metadiegesis and those of the diegesis, conferring on the second narrative an explanatory function.”Footnote ⁴⁵ From this perspective, a number of Georges's observations to Jonathan can be said to sum up the thematic substance of Maximin's insistently multivalent narrative. Read in this way, the identitarian resonances of the declaration “We are people who have neither patrimony nor paternity. How can we know where we're going if we don't know where we come from?”Footnote ⁴⁶ clearly spans the temporal divide between the year of the resistance and the present. By the same token, the following passage both frames and mediates the overarching issue of ethnocultural self-determination that frames the French Antilles to this day:

Here, readers as well as the community at large are clearly interpellated by the “we,” which introduces the framing of the passage in symbolism and metaphor. Aimed directly at the ambiguities of the departmental moment, the clearest inference to be drawn from this passage seems to be that the French Caribbean community will not be saved by acts and overtures from the metropole. Power, then as now, does not relinquish its advantages easily, as Inglis notes: “There is no end to power. The only freedom or emancipation comes from resistance and turning power back in on itself.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While such contestation may be political and/or cultural in nature and form, it remains a truism that the artificial fissures and differences that are the heritage of the divisions intrinsic to the colonial encounter must be set aside if neocolonialism, in any of its various guises, is to be effectively thwarted. These discursive observations and declarations that ostensibly link past and present introduce perhaps the letter's most remarkable sentence, which recognizes and interrogates key aspects of the complex intersection of colonialism, identity, and alienation: “So thirsty to show that we know how to live and how to die, we go forward wearing a mask because the eyes of others have smashed the mirror of our brothers.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The multilayered discourses of culture, history, and psychoanalysis all intersect here, and engage with the complexities of writing, postcolonialism and identity in terms that forge an ineluctable acknowledgement of the scale of the present stakes. On the one hand, and as I have written elsewhere,

But given the arc of temporality that reaches from the rebellion by Delgrès to Guadeloupe's contemporary state of neocolonial thrall framed by its departmentalization, there is much more at stake here; while the scenario of self-betrayal outlined by Georges was arguably negated by the actions of Delgrès and Ignace in the short – indeed the immediate – term, from the viewpoint of the temporal arc traced by historico-cultural events on the ground since that time, it becomes increasingly and inexorably clear that “the eyes of others” engage with the ever-present metropolitan other, whose actions have in turn smashed the mirror (and the possibility) of self-recognition and self-validation by the fraternal, indigenous other so necessary to French Caribbean subjective survival. The resonances of the resulting misrecognition effectively subvert any attempt at self-assertion, since recognition and affirmation by the counterpart (another who is me) have been foreclosed through subjective displacement. Kaja Silverman sums up the implications of the alienation and alterity that, as Georges cannily (fore)saw despite his blindness, leave the French Caribbean subject trapped in this imaginary order:

Seen in this way, the imaginary coherence and inscription in alterity that are now the mark/mask of this subject reflect and embody the ambivalences of a departmental moment that has forgotten the lessons of Delgrès and Ignace. The scale of the need for discursive and cultural (re)construction that undergirds L'isolé soleil is effectively re-cited in this fragment that, viewed retrospectively, encapsulates perhaps the most critical historical moment of Guadeloupean identitarian resistance.

But even more intricate layers of intertextuality await. Following the surrender, arrest, and imprisonment of the governor, Magloire Pélage, as well as the Provisional Council and their armed guards by Napoleon's envoy Richepance, the resistance unfolds in a remarkable subsection of the novel entitled “Eleven Proverbs,” in which Georges, Jonathan, Ignace, and Delgrès play key roles. Functioning as a dramaturgical embedded narrative, one that both influences the path of the external narrative and provides thematic insight into the frame story, this section is nothing less than a tour de force, remarkable for the complexity of its multiple discourses and shifting points of view. Taking up over eighteen manuscript pages, the primary contextual frame is a factual account of the attempted military invasion by Richepance and the Napoleonic forces that he commanded, beginning with Napoleon's declaration, faced with the accession to power by the blacks of Haiti and Guadeloupe, that he would never allow military epaulets to remain on the shoulders of a Negro, and ending with the massive explosion at the Anglemont plantation at Matouba, by which means over five hundred soldiers, women, and children committed suicide with Delgrès rather than surrender to the French troops; the site was mined by Delgrès himself. Interspersed with this main (mini) narrative are secondary and tertiary ones; one the one hand, reproduced in this section, again in italics, is the entirety of Delgrès's resistance proclamation of 9 May, “A l'univers entier/To the Whole Universe,” in the writing of which, we are told, he was aided by Ignace and Georges, who had become his secretary. Jonathan, meanwhile, engages in guerrilla warfare with the maroons against the invading forces. Ultimately, Georges perishes immediately following Ignace's suicide and the massacre of over 250 captives, including one of Ignace's sons, on the Place de la Victoire on 26 May; he is one of a group of wounded who is thrown into the hold of a ship which is then blown up in the harbor on 28 May. Jonathan dies with Delgrès in the Matouba explosion. In the turmoil that follows, Delgrès's wife, Rose, is among those slaughtered, and the Adjutant General Monnereau, who had worked on the resistance proclamation with Delgrès, is hanged after he refuses to renounce it. The placement of Georges and Jonathan at the center of these revolutionary moments joins the embedded narratives to the main narrative on several levels, and brings the various temporalities and perspectives of the novel together through this complex and challenging act of focalization.

But interspersed within this section is also a compelling act of counterpoint, punctuation, and commentary embodied in the set of eleven Creole proverbs inserted periodically into the narrative of the resistance. These are distinguished from the main narrative by being written in capitals and enclosed in parentheses. On a purely diegetic level, then, it would be difficult to place a singular interpretation on their placement and function; through this studied nonlinearity, as I have written elsewhere, Maximin accomplishes “a modernist decentering of narrative discourse and colonial history” through a “deliberate conflation and subversion of history and fiction.”Footnote ⁵² At the same time, through their content, theme, and origin, he encodes these proverbs as Creole – ”WHERE THERE ARE BONES, WHERE THERE ARE DOGS … COAL IS NOT FLOUR, FLOUR IS NOT COAL … DOG DOES NOT EAT DOG”Footnote ⁵³ – so that even as they provide an indigenous, ongoing (con)textual commentary on the invasion, the local resistance to it, and the massacres that followed the eventual defeat and suicide of the resistance forces, their presence inscribes clear Caribbean tropes of pluralism, combination, and transformation into an already polymorphous textual framework.

However, the full range of resonances is reserved for the unheralded twelfth proverb, one that itself is set off from the preceding ones in the series through its inscription in the following subsection, which in its turn takes Jonathan's name as its title and recounts the final act of the Matouba resistance. As the end approaches, and Jonathan and Delgrès discuss the past and the future, we learn from Jonathan himself that he has carved not eleven bracelets of proverbs, but twelve, and he now offers the last of them to Delgrès as he whispers the proverb into his ear; its meaning, we are told, “was hidden in the carved figure on the bracelet.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Once revealed, however, the proverb assumes a role and an importance beyond the immediacy of the impending suicidal act, dis-placing and re-placing Delgrès as subject and cultural icon across both the past and the present: “THE TWELFTH PROVERB SAYS: GO TO THE VILLAGE WHERE YOU DON'T HAVE A HOUSE, BUT TAKE YOUR ROOF WITH YOU.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Here, the English translation proves inadequate to the subtleties of the wordplay between toit and toi that are the telling, homophonic hallmark of the original French and which allow an alternative version of the phrase to be (re)inscribed at a later, telling juncture of the novel; as such, the phrase embodies the need for identity to bear the symbolic weight of both the subject and her/his temporal framework, thus linking the individual to the communal, and Delgrès and his act of resistive affirmation of 1802 to the contemporary ambivalences and creolizations of the departmental French Caribbean. If the principles undergirding the definition and articulation of the Creole are predicated on the praxis that Kobena Mercer has defined as one which “critically appropriates elements from the master-codes of the dominant culture and ‘creolises’ them, disarticulating given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning,”Footnote ⁵⁶ within a broader context that Madeleine Cottenet-Hage describes as a “space of cross-breeding or plural mixture,”Footnote ⁵⁷ then Maximin's instantiation of this praxis, in and through the very act of writing and the shaping of the narrative line, affirms the plural character of this doubled act of writing and identity.

Put another way, the writing collage that Maximin instantiates here may be characterized as an extraordinary paradigm of the inscription of polyphonic discourse in the novel; the broad and often overlapping range of textual origins and points of view, with a metanarrative punctuated by the insertion of letters, clippings, journals, and notebooks, has been effectively described by Ronnie Scharfman as “the multiple endotexts – histories, fictions, biographies and autobiographies, poems, songs, and political treatises” – that, “being discursively constituted,” reframe “the novel as handbook for its own reading.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The collage of voices, narratives, and points of view is culled from multiple sources, “pieced together, literally, with tales, dialogues, creole songs, poems, poems, voodoo chants, clippings from documents going back to the 17th century and the mysterious, incomplete story of Delgrès‘ revolt and death,”Footnote ⁵⁹ as Scharfman explains. The reinscription and revalorization of a lost history clearly takes pride of place here, and from this perspective, the polyvocalic fragment “Jonathan's Notebook” serves multiple discursive purposes, ranging from the inscription of an ethnohistorical framework for select historical and fictional figures to the contemporary characters at work on constructing the novel, giving rise to what Scharfman calls “inscribing the past as a future writing project,” a palimpsestic vision that “stages the writing issue as one of generation and engendering.”Footnote ⁶⁰ And so the palimpsestic excavation of Guadeloupean acts and discourses of liberation in fact enables Marie-Gabriel's project, one that is – indeed must be – intrinsically multivalent and intertextual, inscribed in and through a complex structure that reflects and embodies the complexities and transformations, the contradictions and pluralities, of the Caribbean identitarian encounter itself. This act of writing takes place literally within the shadow of other, earlier writing acts,

From such beginnings, Maximin's project is clearly “permeated by and with other voices, constituted by them, so that the authority of authorial voices is multiplied and therefore relational rather than hierarchical,” as Ronnie Scharfman explains.Footnote ⁶² Maximin makes use of this “fictive discursive practice” to “writing history and fiction together,”Footnote ⁶³ a complex strategy that gives voice to the hidden heroes of Guadeloupean history even as it validates their rebellious acts.

III

Guadeloupean director Christian Lara's filmic representation of these events is remarkable in a number of ways, not least among them the extent to which pride of place is given, through focalization and point of view, to the key organizational and leadership roles of Delgrès and Ignace, their valorization of true equality beyond the boundaries of race and of the Guadeloupean experience as its vanguard, and the inscription of their symbolic equality with French military leaders through the strategic framing of filmic images.Footnote ⁶⁴ By conjoining the visual arts and performance, Lara convincingly demonstrates the centrality of both slavery and resistance to it to inscriptions of black subjectivity in the post-emancipation Caribbean. In contesting the true intentions of Richepance once he had set foot on Guadeloupean soil, these iconic figures’ ultimate goal in staving off the encroaching French presence was to prevent the reimposition of slavery on a population that had known freedom and extended its democratic rights of citoyenneté to all citizens regardless of color. In so doing, they showed themselves to be more than aware of the link between their blackness and their implicit, or latent, status as slaves in the eyes of much of the outside world; as they repeat their battle cry, “vivre libre ou mourir,” it is clear that, above all, pride in this conjunction of blackness and liberty subtends their intention not to give it up lightly.

Now if, as James Monaco argues, “film, unlike written or spoken language … is … a continuum of meaning,”Footnote ⁶⁵ then the analysis of a particular shot, or succession of shots, will be limited only by what, or by how much, we want to read into it. Similarly, as “a product of culture,” film often incorporates a complex set of “culturally determined connotations,” as Monaco continues.Footnote ⁶⁶ If we may generalize, then, as viewers we have the capacity to invest the screen with a multitude of meanings from a multiplicity of sources, from the historical context, to the physical presentation of the subject, the objects that s/he is surrounded by and their position in the frame, to matters of cinematic technique such as the use of the close-up and the timing of the cut.

The film opens with a conversation in medium close-up of Napoleon assuring Joséphine – long blamed by French Antilleans for encouraging the reimposition of slavery; viz. her perennially headless statue in the La Savane park in Fort-de-France – of his intention to retake the Caribbean islands with “tous ses biens,” a perspective critically confirmed by Robin Blackburn: “The rise of Napoleon, with his personal ties (via Josephine) to colonial planters, merchants, and bankers boded ill for the emancipationist policy,” and “Toussaint himself had no difficulty in seeing that the Leclerc expedition was Napoleon's bid to crush black power in the Caribbean.”Footnote ⁶⁷ However, the focus quickly shifts to an organizational meeting of the leadership ranks of Guadeloupe's military forces of color. Here, Delgrès and Ignace lead those gathered – all dressed in full military garb – in a quick discussion of the implications for Guadeloupe of the sighting of Richpance's flotilla off the coast of Grande-Terre on 3 May; in other words, they were more than aware of what the arrival of French forces signified, even ahead of the law of 20 May 1802 mandating slavery's reimposition. The camera valorizes their subjectivity through full-frame headshots, implicitly according them the same imagic and symbolic value as Napoleon himself. They debate the potential value of surrender, followed by the firm declaration of its impossibility. The detailed composition of the mise en scène, from the strategic glow of the light sources to its illumination of the black skins of the protagonists, to the finery of uniforms which are the equivalent of the French, clearly encapsulates the solemnity of this historic moment that marks the full expression of their liberty as black subjects, highlighting the significance of the drama that is about to unfold. Delgrès, in extreme close-up, speaks of “la Guadeloupe en danger,” and swears the following oath: “Moi, Louis Delgrès, vous jure de défendre notre liberté, même si je dois pour ça sacrifier ma vie.” A quick cut then takes us to Ignace, also shown in extreme close-up, who declares himself willing to defend the liberty of Guadeloupean freemen “jusqu'au sacrifice de ma vie, s'il faut.” By framing the Guadeloupean characters through these close-ups, Lara insists on the equality of stature and intent between the French monarch and these black ex-slaves, creating an intimacy verging on discomfiture through “a physical proximity usually reserved for those allowed within a character's intimate space,” as Jennifer Van Sijll explains.Footnote ⁶⁸ Together, they then proceed to draft Delgrès's historic declaration of 9 May, “A l'univers entier,” in which, following Maximin's narrative, Georges is reputed to have participated.

In the following scene, the camera's focus moves the black population at large from the margins to the center, as medium-shot framing shows many of them enthusiastically signing up for the armed forces to defend their homeland. Importantly, the framing here valorizes the gender equality of free Guadeloupe; both men and women – neatly dressed in civilian clothing rather than the tattered rags associated with slavery – appear individually in this scene – among them the historic female icon mulatresse Solitude – but what attracts our attention above all is the fact that many of them speak Creole, a verbal valorization of this independently minded indigenous culture. This historical context also highlights the extent of their self-awareness as free black subjects, expressed as they explain their motives for volunteering: ‘je suis un être humain, et je suis noir,” says one, while another insists that she is “fière d’être libre.” As the battle is joined immediately afterwards, “Vivre libre ou mourir” becomes the rallying cry, as a succession of cuts, shifting continuously between long shot and close-up, convey the intensity of the battle as Delgrès fights Richepance's forces to a stalemate, forcing him to seek help from the British commandant on the neighboring island of Dominica. Such key phrases as “la survie de notre liberté” and “mourir, mais mourir libre,” demonstrate both the effectiveness of Delgrès’ inspirational leadership, and the depth of the people's commitment to the principles by which they have lived since 1794. As Ignace sets off toward Pointe-à-Pitre with half the military forces, the solemn, extended handshake that marks their leave-taking presents us with two men of color in military dress shot in face-to-face profile, with the fort that they have been defending set between them as a backdrop, its lack of depth of field making its outlines blurred. This setting gives weight and pride of place to the historical moment, as both subjects within the frame are acutely aware that despite their temporary victory symbolized by the image of the fort, the battle has shifted and splitting their forces may well signal the beginning of the end. There is an ineffable awareness of history hanging in the balance in this simple shot, and their parting words bear out this impression; Delgrès says, “Je compte sur toi, Ignace,” and the latter's recognition of all that is at stake frames the simple reply, “Vivre la liberté.”

Subjective differences between the two forces emerge from the subsequent phases of the battle; in bloody close-ups of metal meeting flesh meant to emphasize the indescribable violence of the military encounters as well as the contempt that the French forces have for the Guadeloupean blacks, the former are shown massacring prisoners mercilessly, shooting women and children without compunction. These shots alternate with long shots of the two contending forces, constructing images that “emphasizes context over drama and dialectic over personality,” as Monaco explains,Footnote ⁶⁹ and extreme close-ups of Richepance are meant “to evoke fear or revulsion,” as Van Sijll notes.Footnote ⁷⁰ On the other hand, the camera uses Ignace's strategic breakout towards Baimbridge to emphasize the determined subjectivity of the group by highlighting the individual faces of the soldiers marching by in single file, often in extreme close-ups that “calls attention to the subjects, making them more memorable visually [and] underscoring the importance of the scene dramatically,” as Van Sijll explains.Footnote ⁷¹ In the face of overwhelming metropolitan forces led by the governor, Magloire Pélage, defeat now appears certain, but résiste remains the order of the day, uttered enthusiastically and symbolically by one of Ignace's young sons, shown embodying the spirit of transgenerational resistance by wearing his father's official military headgear. Shortly thereafter, Ignace meets his death in battle, a moment whose historical significance is conveyed through the image of Pélage shown leaning over his corpse, in a low-angle composition that, as Van Sjill explains, “causes the subject to appear larger than life. It transfers power to the subject, making it appear to dominate objects beneath it.”Footnote ⁷² In this close-up, shot from below as though to mimic the point of view of the late Ignace, Pélage acknowledges the proleptic significance of this heroic Guadeloupean resistance, as he comments, “Il est encore plus grand mort que vivant.”

The close-up view of the look of horror on Delgrès's face when he learns of the disposition (indeed, the defilement) of Ignace's corpse pulls the audience in by conveying his indescribable torment – ”Sa tête … exposée sur la Place de la Victoire?” – and it acts as a harbinger of the fate of his band of survivors. The panorama of reactions when he announces this news to his group allows fast cutting between facial close-ups, according each individual – and, metonymically, the group – subjective validation and representational recognition at this key moment of life and death. And yet their spirit remains indomitable; when Delgrès lets them choose whether or not to remain, explaining the inevitability of what awaits – ”Nous avons perdu … ceux qui décident de rester avec moi, c'est inéluctable; nous mourrons” – the communal response “Vive la mort!”, led by Solitude, encapsulates their inextinguishable spirit of resistance. Delgrès's final words to his troops, just before the explosives are placed, are a temporal projection of his awareness of the stakes of the struggle and its importance for generations to come: “Nous léguerons nos exemples à suivre à ceux qui viendront après nous et qui, plus heureux, conquerront eux, cette liberté que nous n'avons fait qu'entrevoir.” The film's final image is of the suicidal explosion itself, followed by a partial list of the insurgents and of the reprisals levied against them over more than a year; many were shot or hanged, including the mulatresse Solitude. The forces of Napoleonic repression had won, but the law of unintended consequences would turn this episode into a transformative site of political and ethnocultural validation for successive generations of Guadeloupeans.

Revisiting these sites of liberation, and given the alternate perspectives that are revealed as a result, we are led to take new stock of history's assumed acquiescence of slaves in their subjection, leading us to interrogate the broader question of “emancipation,” and its resonances and implications, within the overall framework of Caribbean and black Atlantic history. In the wake of an ongoing reevaluation set in motion by these facts and discourses, it becomes increasingly clear that emancipation was not only a concept, but a political and a performative act, undergirding then as now the re-formation of long-established political, individual, and collective expressions of the idea and practice of freedom. In the Guadeloupean instance, the community led first by Hugues, and then by Delgrès and Ignace, both imagined and inscribed itself as constituted of and by free subjects, ready to cement their vision of the universality implicit in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the 1794 Abolition Act in principle and in practice. Benedict Anderson frames the context for this prodigious undertaking clearly when he writes, “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion … Communities are to be distinguished … by the style in which they are imagined.”Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, here, style and substance are coterminous; if liberty was the basis of late eighteenth-century Guadeloupean subjectivity, it was clear to this free black community that surrendering their principles would mean the ineluctable surrender of their lives as well. And it is here that Anderson's vision is perhaps most tellingly reinforced; as he continues, “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In their dying, then, freely chosen as it was, the defenders of Matouba sought to validate and valorize their recognition of a vision of subjectivity that went beyond race. The monument to their sacrifice on that spot today is reflected in the individual statues “erected in memory of each one of these emblematic figures on the Boulevard des Héros in Pointe-à-Pitre … in 1998, 1999, and 2001.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In her important analysis of the extent to which “they are contrapuntal to the overpowering narrative of the French abolitionist movement led by Victor Schoelcher,” Catherine Reinhardt emphasizes that they “symbolize the slaves’ desire and capacity to resist European domination. Two hundred years later, these memorials are erected in the name of resistance.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Taken together, they work to contest what Yarimar Bonilla calls “a systemic forgetting,”Footnote ⁷⁷ affirming through their very existence that “by reshaping visions of the past one can reshape the possibilities of the future, and make an alternative future imaginable.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Ultimately, these figures stand in mute but eloquent testimony to that performative act that continues to inspire the identitarian acts of the people of Guadeloupe, and of the wider Caribbean.