If I had surrendered to my desires, I would have remained on the island to learn from this woman.
— Angela Davis
A rotating fan afixed through the trunk of a potted palm tree fails to move its fronds. The fan’s counterclockwise movement emulates that of hurricanes formed in the Atlantic Ocean fanning out throughout the Caribbean Basin and the Gulf of Mexico. It elicits reminiscences of a photo- graph that captured the striking sight of a coconut tree stung by a wooden rod when Hurricane San Felipe Segundo struck Puerto Rico on 13 September 1928.
As the domesticated plant stands still, its striated trunk a metaphorical evocation of the stratifications of history, the fan is a synecdochical figuration of the catastrophe itself, its rotation a physical and metaphorical revolution. As such, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Cyclonic Palm Tree (2004; see ig. 1) also alludes to and questions the coincidental occurrence or causal conjunction between natural catastrophe and sociopolitical phenomena.
Revolution — An Introduction
The hurricane San Felipe Segundo — named after the Catholic saint of the day on which it fell in Puerto Rico and numbered as the second such instance in the island’s history — became known a couple of days later in the United States as Okeechobee, after provoking a storm surge in the eponymous lake on 16 September 1928.
If the damage in Puerto Rico was primarily material and infrastructural, and human loss relatively low, at 312 dead, Okeechobee’s estimated 2,500 dead made it one of the worst hurricanes in Florida’s history.
The racial ecology of the catastrophe, characterized by a disproportionate death toll among the black migrant workers in the low-lying areas around the lake, compounded by improper burial under segregationist laws, is commemorated in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written from survivors’ memories and the author’s own hurricane experience in the Bahamas in 1929.
But before reaching the Greater Antilles and the South Florida peninsula, before bearing the names San Felipe Segundo and Okeechobee, the great hurricane of the 1928 Atlantic season had started its course farther down in the Leeward Islands, in the Guadeloupe archipelago, on 12 September. Nameless and nearly unannounced, it claimed the lives of over 1,200 inhabitants and, locally, is remembered simply as le grand cyclone or le cyclone [28].
For hundreds of years, Atlantic hurricanes either were not given names at all or were named after saints. Then, starting in the mid-1950s, they were given female names, and, by the late 1970s, and as is currently the case, were alternately given female and male names.The 1928 hurricane—nameless in the French colony of Guadeloupe, sanctified in the American territory of Puerto Rico, and steeped in local specificity in South Florida — reflects the changing taxonomy afforded the natural catastrophe. In Sister Citizen:
Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa Harris-Perry explores the relationship established between women and catastrophe. Harris-Perry first recovers Hurston’s fictional account of Okeechobee to put Hurricane Katrina into perspective, drawing parallels between the levee breaks in the South Florida lake and the New Orleans canals, and the subsequent loss off lives in predominantly black communities in both places.
She then turns her eyes to women specifically, positing that “just as Jeanie Mae Crawford is the focus of Hurston’s novel, black women were at the eye of the rhetorical storm Hurricane Katrina” and making the case that “post-Katrina New Orleans, as read through the lens of Hurston’s novel, is a place to begin taking seriously the idea that black women’s experiences act as a democratic litmus test for the nation.”
Having tallied the number of images of suffering, disenfranchised black women, daughters, and mothers that within a week of media coverage had replaced those of blackmen as looters and rapists, Harris-Perry goes on to say, “[Women’s] suffering became the conduit through which new conversations on race, class and vulnerability began.”[1]
If, as Harris-Perry suggests, women became a magnifying glass through which New Orleans’s catastrophic conditions could be scrutinized, then her purpose is to study “what it feels like to try and do the work of citizenship in a body that is racialized, gendered, in a way that produces fear, shame, distress”[2] or, in other words, to study what it means “to be a black woman andan American citizen.”[3]
The paradoxical position of the African American woman turns into a squared quandary for the French Antillean woman.
For her, negotiating what it means to be black and French under the universal ideal of a republican political regime is overshadowed by what being a citizen of her country — Guadeloupe, Martinique, or Guyane — might mean, a legally impossible proposal rendered probable only through her own independent imagining and resistant positioning can best be formulated as archipelagic. For not only is Guadeloupe an archipelago in the geographical sense of the term, it is also archipelagic in a Pan-Caribbean understanding of history as pushed forth by the tenets of antillanité.[7]
Guadeloupean women’s expanded geography, through their economic migration or ideological choices, came to encompass anew the foundational triangulation of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, thriving toward le tout monde.
Following these various shifts, as I analyze how women’s lives visualize and render visible catastrophic history, I move from a view of women as victims of catastrophes—natural, economical, and representational — to women as subjects of history, even as I ultimately see Guadeloupean subjectivity as a catastrophic conundrum within a larger historical context.
Nénaine
The foundation of my family line lies in a catastrophe whose reflection one might look for in my grandmother’s only photographic portrait. Born on Christmas Eve 1898, in the coastal city of Le Gosier in the then French colony of Guadeloupe, Augusta Constance Lamarre (dite Nénaine, Cécé, and Tata by her siblings and extended family) was thirty when she lost her husband during le grand cyclone [28].
She had had five children with him, all boys: Verné, Hérisson, Parfait, Urbain, and Hérasson.
None of them is my father. Her first husband is not my grandfather. My grandfather is whom she started to share her life with after losing her first husband to the hurricane. With Alexandre Emmanuel Tancons, born 18 March 1868 (dit Sansande and Papa Lou), she bore one son, my father, Gauthier Sabas Tancons (also known as Tall, Chambert, and Harry, at different times of his life and to different people), on 5 December 1930.
Sansande’s nickname is easily understood as an abbreviation of his firstname. His other nickname, Papa Lou, is a reference to his son Louis, who had fought in World War I and came home to Guadeloupe to die as a consequence of being gassed. Nénaine and Sansande didn’t marry until much later, in 1945.
A year later he died, at age seventy-eight, of undiagnosed causes. At that time, my father was traveling to Martinique for the first time, at Sansande’s request, to witness the electoral process as part of the Old Colonies’ transition into French departments.
My father surmises that the photograph of Nénaine (see ig. 2) was taken after his birth, in the studio Lanoir, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe’s economic capital and the most important city of the Grande-Terre region, a landmass of about 266 square miles and where Nénaine appears to have spent most of her life. Judging from the photograph, hers was a life of hardship that made the face hollow but the head strong and the bearing proud, the eyes sad but the gaze at once defiant and serene, the mouth severe but not unused to smiling, the chin upright and high, the neck supple.
The collar of her dress is that of a robe à corps. Her tête, or head tie, is a plombière, a characteristically Guadeloupean do that connotes a modest social background, a status confirmed by her wooden rather than gold earrings (although she did also have gold jewelry).
The dress was one for everyday wear rather than for a special occasion, however, which seems to indicate that she might have gone to the photographer as a matter of necessity rather than as an act of vanity — not knowing that the image would end up being a token for posterity.
Both facts — that despite her limited means she possessed gold, as most Creole women of any background would have at the time, for social standing (and still do, although I do not), and that she would have considered having her picture taken for functional purposes—are corroborated by the circumstances through which my father came to acquire the photograph.
An identity photo of 1.6 × 2 in. format, it was kept at the Banque de la Guadeloupe, where Nénaine had deposited her jewels, which my father recovered after she had passed of cancer in 1959. He was in France (en métropole) when her death occurred, pursuing engineering studies.
During my second year in New York, sometime in 2001 or 2002, I came across the photograph Three Women from Guadeloupe while working as curatorial research assistant to Coco Fusco at the International Center of Photography, for the exhibition “Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self.”[8]
Although I hadn’t come to the United States to migrate, a few years into my studies in New York it was tempting to establish an imaginary American lineage through these proud-standing and self-possessed, confident, and defiant Guadeloupean women, arriving at Ellis Island in 1911, on the S.S. Korona from the French West Indies (see ig. 3).
For Augustus Sherman, the Ellis Island chief registry clerk who photographed exotic-looking immigrants as a hobby, these three Guadeloupeans could have just as well been from Romania, India, or the Netherlands, some of the other places of provenance of the people he photographed.
How he convinced immigrants to pose is unclear, for these women were certainly on their guard, the tallest of the group evincing a gesture of impatience with her left hand, the one in the middle holding her hands tensely below her belt, and the one farthest to the right averting her eyes from the camera altogether. She wears a douillette(a long dress) with a loral print and a variation of the plombière head tie.
These two elements, along with her undershirt, commonly worn by women in the cane fields to protect their arms, is an indication of a low social class, lower than that of the other two women, who are also fairer-skinned, an indication of status, as is their attire of greater make: a combination of a grande robe and a douillette, cinched at the waist, and a tête ronde head tie.
A picture of the entire group of twenty-seven Guadeloupean women, which I later found as a postcard on a visit to Ellis Island — where I was surprised and proud to see a monumental reproduction of the three Guadeloupean women at the entrance — shows even greater variation in dress and posture. The women singled out for the trio portrait can be recognized, the one in the middle resting her bent right wrist on her right hip, her head turned to the left in that characteristic posture indicative of disdain and discontent.[9]
Ady
“What’s a little brown woman doing in Paris? And why does another little brown woman, 70 years later and half a world away[,] care?” Thus begins Ady: A Play for Two Women (2009), playwright Rhiana Yazzie’s inquiry into the life of Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin, an exploration prompted by a postcard that revealed Yazzie’s uncanny resemblance to Ady.[10]
The postcard, given to Yazzie in 2007 by a friend, was of Lee Miller’s photograph Picnic (1937), featuring Nusch and Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, and Ady Fidelin, at a déjeuner sur l’herbe in Mougins in the summer of 1937. Born in New Mexico and of Navajo ancestry, Yazzie took interest in Fidelin, Man Ray’s Guadeloupe-born Parisian lover, model, and muse from 1936 to 1940 — only to realize that Fidelin’s lifespan in the public record was only as long as her four-year love affair with Man Ray.
Initially surprised by the presence of “a little brown woman in Paris” in the mid-1930s, Yazzie proposes various scenarios for Ady’s migration to France, in Ady: A Play for Two Women, a multicharacter play performed by two women: “Adrienne,” based on Yazzie herself, a thirty-year-old Navajo woman, and her alter ego, “Ady,” Adrienne Fidelin, a Guadeloupean in her mid-twenties.
Adrienne: September 10 [sic], 1928, an enormous hurricane on its way to turning into a category five, uprooted and broke in two all the banana trees on the island of Guadeloupe; 1,200people died.
Maybe that’s when she moved to France with her family?[11]
Ady, who would have been born in the early 1910s — if she was indeed in her mid-twenties by the mid-1930s, as per her contemporaries’ estimate — would have been an adolescent at the time of le cyclone [28].
While it is not impossible to assume that the catastrophe of the 1928 hurricane in Guadeloupe would have prompted Guadeloupean families to migrate to metropolitan France, there is another explanation for Ady’s presence in Paris.
[“J’ai deux amours,” by Josephine Baker, plays.]
Adrienne: There were black women in France. One very famous. Society ate her up and demanded more like her. Josephine described herself as half black and half Apalache Indian. A small not–federally recognized tribe in Louisiana.
Revues across Europe toured black dancers to ill the demand Josephine Baker created for young colored women. One of these dancers was Ady from Guadeloupe.[12]
Ady’s public life begins and ends with references to her dance background. In Self-Portrait, memoirs penned by Man Ray in 1963, he recalls: “In spite of my resolution not to get involved again [after splitting up with Lee Miller], I had at the time made the acquaintance of a beautiful young mulatto dancer, Adrienne, from the French colony of Guadeloupe. We were in love, and were received by the others in the South with open arms.”[13] The “others” are the motley crew of surrealists portrayed in Lee Miller’s photographs, as well as Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, and Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington; “the South” is the South of France—from Antibes, where Man Ray met Fidelin on the La Garoupe beach, to Mougins, where they all spent their summer. In various other accounts, though none directly attributed to Man Ray, some contemporary and others posterior to the period, it is said that as a result of the German occupation of Paris, Man Ray moved back to the United States, while Ady stayed in France to tend to her family and returned to dancing in Negro cabarets on the Champs-Elysées [14]
The confluence of natural catastrophe, population migration, economic necessity, and racialized and gendered activity during the period that Ady was active as an exotic dancer and artist model is as a kind of double bind of representation of catastrophe and catastrophe of representation best encompassed in the “Grand gala exotique au secours des sinistrés de la Guadeloupe” (“Grand Exotic Gala for the Disaster Victims of Guadeloupe”). Originally scheduled for 22 December 1928, it occurred instead on 26 January 1929 (a little over three months after the hurricane), at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.
The gala was announced both by posters designed by Paul Colin, who had launched the career of Josephine Baker three years earlier, in “La revue nègre” at the same theater, and in magazines, such as the Dépêche Africaine, which announced both Antillean and African cabaret acts in the form of a “Carnaval antillais” and a “Mimodrame soudanais.”
The star of the West Indian carnival was Ya Ya Sapotille, highlighted as the “Vedette guadeloupéenne du palace.”[15] Guadeloupean performers such as Sapotille, later known in ilm as Rama Tahé, and other “colored French stage artists,” such as Martinicans Aïcha Goblet and Julie Luce, and Luce’s Parisian-born daughter Simone, aka D’al-Al, were part of the group of colored women who made a living as chorus girls and artists’ models and would have provided a precedent for Ady, who likely knew them.
Likewise, Man Ray knew these women and had taken photographs of Aïcha and D’al-Al, just as painters from the Ecole de Paris, such as Jules Pascin and Foujita, did their portraits [16]
Inherent in galas with entertainment to benefit victims of catastrophe, then as now, is the contrast between the colorful backdrop propping smiling singers and dancers onstage and the desolate landscape against which the homeless, the orphans and widows and widowers, the sick and the dead appear in photo-journalistic reports. Add to this representation of catastrophe the catastrophe of representation that the negrophile photographs, fantasies, and other visual artifacts created in the 1920s and 1930s by French and American surrealists artists and black American and Antilleans entertainers in Paris, and Ady’s catastrophic visual life takes on its full meaning.
Whether or not Ady migrated to Paris with her family following the catastrophe that wreaked havoc on her native country, she, alongside the other models, whom Pascin called les petites crevées, that is, “the little starving ones,” fell into “black people’s mimicry of whites result[ing] from economic necessity,” a survival mechanism made easier by the fluidity of ethnic association that her fair skin afforded her.[17] The process was both gradual and ambiguous and is documented in images of her.
A photograph by Roger Parry from the early 1930s, called Ady au masque, captured a visibly younger Ady, her hair fuller, eyebrows thicker, and skin darker than in subsequent photographs by Man Ray. Showing Ady with a white-colored African (Punu) mask hanging above her head, Parry’s photograph seems a reversal of Man Ray’s Noire et blanche (1926), in which a dark-colored African mask is juxtaposed with Kiki de Montparnasse’s white skin. Interesting, in assessing Ady’s identification, by herself and by others, as Guadeloupean rather than African or black, is that she wears the characteristically Antillean madras headtie and hoop hearings.
Among the photographs taken of Ady during the period of her association with the sur- realists, most by Man Ray but some by others as well, three categories emerge. There are, first, the vacation photographs, among which is the 1937 Picnic photograph series, from both Miller and Penrose. In these, Ady, with her hair thinner and her eyebrows plucked, and dressed every bit as fashionably as any Parisian — or, often, undressed to the waist, like most female surrealists — is not strikingly different from Lee, Leonora, Dora, or Nusch, whom she may have emulated or with whom she simply became part of the surrealists’ stable of willing lovers and models.
A second, larger ensemble of photographs offers a continuation both of exotic erotica and negrophiliac images, a genre Man Ray had reined in the 1920s with his portraits of Nancy Cunard in ivory bangles and the aforementioned Kiki with African masks.[18] Among the most iconic images of this ensemble are naked pictures of Nusch and Ady — adding sapphic eroticism to exotic appeal through the contrast between, as it were, noire et blanche —and fashion photographs of Ady with African headdresses, as part of the “La mode au Congo” photo series, thanks to which she landed on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in 1937.
A third, lesser-known and smaller series shows Ady in studio portraits, in a dramatically pared-down version of the Antillean costume of which only the headtie, collier chou
necklaces, and two scarves—one to cover the loins and the other to tie around her neck or play with on her shoulders—remain (see ig. 4). In these photographs of Ady in “Guadeloupean” costume, as in the ones with the African headdresses, it is not so much Ady’s blackness that is pitted against Antillean or African referents as it is Ady’s indeterminate ethnicity, which is used as a trump card in a constantly shufled deck where queens reign supreme under different shapes and colors.
The “bawdy body,” to quote Deborah Willis, that Ady created with the exotified and eroticized remnants of the customary Guadeloupean or, more generally, Antillean costume, might have been her greatest shot at success in post-Baker prewar Paris.[19] Be it because of the advent of World War II or the end of her relationship with Man Ray, Ady faded from the public eye, and her claim to fame remains La mode au Congo, the photograph that made her the first black model to appear in an American fashion magazine. However, she was never more than a Négresse incertaine,[20] or as Yazzie put it, “a little brown woman,” her identity vicariously determined through changing ethnic referents whose problematic use was not so much that they were not her own as much as that, until recently, they did not contribute to eliciting curiosity about her experience or even existence, for all the lights she was once under.
As an art history student in Paris in the late 1990s, I saw her without seeing her, not identifying her as Guadeloupean, Antillean, or even black, a testament to my own racially myopic gaze as much as to her chameleon guises that enabled her to be recovered as Navajo and facili- tated her being lost as Guadeloupean. This identification limbo affected her speciically as a Guadeloupean woman who was and still is at best mistaken as Martinican or, furthest from home, as Filipino, or simply relegated to the general “half-breed” category.[21] That she was recently recovered as Navajo is auspicious, however, since it eschews identificatory impulses meant not so much at essentializing as at pointing out the specific crisis of representation Guadeloupean women are under.
Ady’s story belongs in the general history of catastrophic times for people of color when, out of restricted choices and great necessity, whom you could be was not dependant so much on who you were as on who others wanted you to be—and made you believe that you wanted to be. That Jane and Paulette Nardal, contemporaries of Ady’s, were able to self-represent through their literary activities is not antinomic with the fact that there were many more Adys whose visual lives were dictated by stereotyping representational conventions of the times, and that as women, they all ran the risk of their achievements being diminished by men [22]
Gerty
There are few images of Gerty Archimède’s public life, at least few currently circulating: various portraits in young and old age, in civil dress or courthouse robe, and, more recently, a few of her statue on the maritime boulevard in Basse-Terre (erected in 2002) and of the street sign that bears her name and accomplishments in Paris’s Twelfth Arrondissement (placed in 2007):
Rue Gerty Archimède (1909–1980)
1ère Femme Avocate des Antilles (1939)
1ère Femme Députée de la Guadeloupe (1946)
Fondatrice de l’Union des Femmes Guadeloupéennes
Gerty Archimède Street (1909–1980)
First Female Lawyer of the French West Indies (1939)
First Female Deputy [to represent] Guadeloupe [in the French National Assembly] (1946)
Founder of the Union of Guadeloupean Women
In the hands of family members and relatives there are many more images of her in old age—as there would have been of my grandmother, had she lived longer, and of Ady, had we known her descendants. Some of those images are in my own family:
I can be seen as a toddler on Gerty’s lap, in one small color photograph. My father, a Morne-à-l’Eau resident like Gerty, had asked her—this woman who had been known throughout her career to defend the poor, the needy, and the wronged, and, also, women — to be my godmother, a role she played for three years, until her death in 1980.
One of the women whom Gerty famously defended in court is Angela Davis. In Pas de prison pour le vent (No Prison for the Wind) (2006), Gerty’s great-nephew, playwright Alain Foix, narrated a fictionalized version of her and Davis’s unexpected encounter in Guadeloupe in 1969.[23]
Before Davis enters the stage, the context of the play is set by a dialogue between Gerty and Souer Suzanne, Gerty’s sister and a Catholic nun:
Gerty: Pardon[,] ma soeur, pardon. C’est ce vent qui me tourne, me bouscule, me bouleverse, me fait perdre patience, me sort de ma réserve. Pardonne-moi.
Sœur Suzanne: Le vent, toujours le vent, n’est-ce pas ? Depuis le grand cyclone, c’est le vent qui t’emporte, rien que le vent.
Gerty: Nous n’avions pas vingt ans.
Soeur Suzanne: Le cyclone est passé et a tout renversé.
Gerty: La misère était là, sous nos yeux. Mais qui donc la voyait ? Elle était si pudique. Et nous autres, des nuages dans les yeux, nous effeuillions les marguerites.
Gerty: Forgive me[,] my sister, forgive me [for being upset]. The wind is turning me upside down, making me lose patience and ly off the handle. Forgive me.
Soeur Suzanne: The wind, always the wind, isn’t it? Since le grand cyclone, it’s the wind that’s been driving you, only the wind.
Gerty: We were not twenty yet.
Soeur Suzanne: The hurricane came and knocked everything down.
Gerty: Misery was there under our eyes. But who saw it? It was so modest. And we, with clouds in our eyes, were playing “he loves me, he loves me not. [24]
As in Yazzie’s Ady, Foix’s play about Gerty, Sœur Suzanne, and Angela Davis begins with an evocation of le grand cyclone [28], but takes it up a notch: the entire play unfolds behind closed doors, as the three women are locked inside Gerty’s Cocoyer home awaiting the pas- sage of a hurricane. As the communist lawyer, Black Panther activist, and Catholic nun con- front their worldviews about life and politics, the plot turns into a trial in camera, a rehearsal for Gerty’s plea at Angela’s upcoming trial (see ig. 5).
For as she was returning home from Cuba with a Puerto Rican delegation, after spending time cutting cane with Cuban compañe- ros and engaging in other revolutionary activities, Davis called at Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe’s administrative capital, where she and her travel companions fell prey to French custom oficers who coniscated their passports and threatened to hold them up for the communist beliefs they avowed, political literature they carried, and revolutionary activity they were suspected of planning.
In Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Davis recalls,
Using some of the captain’s connections with sympathetic Cubans living on the island, we made contact with a Black woman, a respected lawyer and a leading member of the Communist Party of Guadeloupe.
Maître Archimède was a big woman with very dark skin, penetrating eyes, and unassailable conidence. I will never forget the irst meeting we had with her. I felt as though I was in the presence of a very great woman. As for our predicament, there was never any doubt in my mind that she would rescue us.
But I was so impressed by her personality, by the respect that she clearly commanded as a communist, even from the colonialists, that for a while, our problem became a secondary concern for me. If I had surrendered to my desires, I would have remained on the island to learn from this woman [25]
In the play, Gerty, depicted by Davis as formidable, is likened by Souer Suzanne not to a ravaging hurricane but to an erupting volcano (“Aïe, j’ai irrité la Soufrière, elle est prête à exploser”; “Oh, I upset the Soufrière ; it’s ready to explode”),[26] casting Gerty as a force of nature and bringing a nuance to the catastrophic theme. And by using Gerty’s and her sister’s reminiscences of le grand cyclone [28] at the onset of the play, Foix affords us an immediate entry point into the sisters’ source and sense of commitment to their country through the catastrophe.
We understand that witnessing le grand cyclone [28] uncovering Guadeloupe’s entrenched misery and hurling further ills upon it played a paramount role in the then adolescent sisters’ rising social and political awareness, leading them to dedicate themselves to their people.[27]
By setting the play entirely under an imaginary, menacing hurricane during Davis’s passing stay in Guadeloupe, Foix draws on the dramatic tension and metaphorical meaning inherent in the catastrophic theme to place his characters into a joint historical perspective and offer a reading of history through the lens of women.
Although Césaire was the rapporteur of the law to the Assemblée nationale, and as such, its public figure, six congressmen — two for Martinique (among them Césaire), two for Réunion island, and two for Guadeloupe (among them Archimède) — carried the law to the hemicycle.
As members of the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party), both Archimède and Césaire were instrumental in shaping it. The belated outcome of assimilationist efforts begun by free people of color in the first half of the nineteenth century to grant equal rights to French citizens in the colonies, the demand for departmentalization was accepted and written into law by decree on 19 March 1946. Soon thereafter, however, both Archimède and Césaire would become bitter about it, the latter vocally so in his Discours sur le colonialisme of 1955.
Indeed, the departmentalization law was not effective in legal terms, only administrative, and had created a second-class category of French departments, the so-called départements d’outremer, or DOM.[29] Visiting Guadeloupe in 1969, just two years after a racist incident in Basse-Terre prompted serious riots that Archimède was called on to calm, and a little over three decades after the departmentalization law Archimède helped pass, Davis unapologetically refers to the French — meaning white — custom officials as “colonialists” and makes no mystery of her belief that the island is in need of a revolution.
A little over twenty years after her death, starting with the inauguration of the bronze statue and the street sign already mentioned, Gerty Archimède comes back into the fold of Guadeloupean consciousness and enters France’s. But how do these late tributes participate in a representational politics apt at registering the magnitude of Archimède’s accomplishments and securing her legacy?
Although she did not have children, Archimède did have political descendants. Lucette Michaux-Chevry (b. 1929), a lawyer by profession, was an active figure in both local and national politics, achieving the status of minister delegate to the minister of foreign affairs in charge of humanitarian action and human rights and of state secretary to the prime minister in charge of francophonie under President Jacques Chirac, and her daughter Marie-Luce Penchard (b. 1959) was the minister for overseas departments under the Nicolas Sarkozy government. But these public figures seem to both have been and still be pawns on the French political chessboard rather than representatives of an independent Guadeloupean agency.
Commenting on the appropriation of Angela Davis by the French in literature and ilm, from Jean Genet to Rachid Bouchareb, Alice Kaplan says, “When she was a child, Angela Davis found a way to be free by speaking French. Today, French speakers turn to her for their own myth of freedom.”[30] By framing both Gerty Archimède and Angela Davis as heroines in his play, Foix redresses the historical balance toward more historical equity for women and visibility for Guadeloupean women in their quest for civil rights alongside their African American counterparts in countries where being black, woman, and citizen still cannot be taken
for granted.
Maria
Where the path forks on the way to the Maison aux Esclaves on Gorée Island is a prominent dedication from Guadeloupe in memory of the slave trade and its abolition. Set on a large gray marble plaque in golden lettering, it reads,
Les frères guadeloupéens à leurs frères d’Afrique
Offert par Lucette Michaux-Chevry
Ancien Ministre Sénateur
Présidente du Conseil Régional de la Guadeloupe
Le 31 Juillet 2002
The Guadeloupean Brothers to Their Brothers from Africa
Offered by Lucette Michaux-Chevry
Former Minister
Former Senator
President of the Regional Council of Guadeloupe
July 31, 2002
It is surmounted by a smaller plaque in black marble that reads, also in gold letters:
La Statue de la Libération de l’Esclavage Sculpteurs : Mrs Jean et Christian Moïsa
Statue of the Liberation of Slavery
Sculptors: Mrs. Jean and Christian Moïsa
In the photograph I took during a research trip in the summer 2009, however, only the two plaques are featured, not the monument, of which I have no recollection, visual or otherwise.
At the entrance to the Maison des Esclaves, on the grainy salmon-colored walls on the left side of the corridor that leads to the courtyard, is another small, black marble plaque with gold lettering, from the association CO.RE.CA (Contact et Recherche Caraïbe), which offers a variation on the Regional Council’s dedication:
Mémorial
Honneur et Respect de la Guadeloupe à la terre ancestrale Gloire aux Héros de la lutte anti-esclavagiste de 1802 18/07/02
Memorial
Honor and Respect from Guadeloupe to the Land of the Ancestors Homage to the Heroes of the Anti-slavery Struggle of 1802
18 July 2002
Both dedications from Guadeloupe to Gorée were gifted with public and private initiatives to mark the bicentenary of an important period in Guadeloupean history: the struggle of Joseph Ignace and Louis Delgrès against the reinstatement of slavery, first abolished by the new French revolutionary government in 1794.[31] Although their struggle was ultimately unsuccessful, Ignace and Delgrès have since been celebrated as heroes of the resistance against slavery, and the brief nine-month period from 21 October 1801 to 6 May 1802 that saw the emergence of a political authority at the hands of free people of color and former slaves is considered the starting point of the Nasyon Gwadloup — the Guadeloupean nation. The breach of this emergent sovereignty on treason by Magloire Pelage, former ally to Ignace and Delgrès, and the reinstatement of slavery by Richepance at Napoléon’s order inflicted a deep wound on the Guadeloupean psyche, one that has still not healed and whose thin scar threatens to split into an open sore at each demonstration of separatist power against metropolitan France, as was the case in 2009 during the “Quarante-quatre jours” general strike.
Away from Guadeloupe’s belated ideological maneuvering to recover an autonomist idea of the nation from the 1802 épopée, distant from the dreams of independence dashed by the 1946 departmentalization law, far also from a fantasized relationship between Guadeloupeans and their African brothers, is the work of French-born Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror.
Maldoror, who adopted her surname after Les chants de Maldoror, by sur- realist forefather Lautréamont, was born in 1937, the same year that Guadeloupean-born Ady Fidelin was posing as a surrealist muse. But where Ady’s public life began and ended as an object of erotic-exotic representation, if not an entirely passive subject then a complacent and consenting one, Maldoror’s life’s work sprang from an intellectual and ideological engagement that went close to manifesting the darkest passages of Les chants in presenting the cruelty of the human condition, using the seedbed of surrealism for her own purposes rather than subjecting to the surrealists’ own.
It is fascinating to think about the synchronicity of the lives of Nénaine, raising her chil- dren and eking out a living in Morne-à-l’Eau, Ady, posing nude for Man Ray’s camera, and Gerty, finishing her law studies in Paris in the late 1930s, as Maldoror’s life begins. Born in the French province of Gers almost a decade after Guadeloupe’s grand cyclone, Maldoror has no family oral history or a posteriori theatrical construction to link her narrative to that catastrophe—the indirect cause of my father’s birth, possible reason for Ady’s migration to Paris, and source of Gerty’s dedication to public service. Maldoror’s representational agency, however, honed in ilm rather than literature, and therefore contributing to the circulation of visual images, reflects the newly found self-determinacy afforded French colonial subjects by their association with the worldwide anticolonial struggle, and indicates their participation in warning against and denouncing attending humane catastrophes, having risen from the state of victim of catastrophe to the status of agent of history.
The life companion of Mário Pinto de Andrade, one-time leader of the Movimento popular de libertação de Angola (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and lifetime oppo- nent to political oppression in Angola, Maldoror set her irst feature ilm, Sambizanga (1972), during the 1961–74 Angolan war for independence against Portuguese colonial rule.[32] The ilm centers around the journey of a woman named Maria, as she travels from her village to the capital, looking for her husband in the city’s prisons and, in the process, awakening to political consciousness and readying to take over his struggle after she inds him dead at the hands of the police. A screen shot of Maria in her black veils captures in her gaze this newly found resolve (see ig. 6). Maldoror’s Maria follows a path similar to that of Hurston’s Jeanie Mae, from catastrophe to self-discovery, only the catastrophe is of a different nature. Both characters are criticized for their lack of overt feminist or militant outlook, the nature of their feminine experience of the catastrophe discounted as emotional rather than political [33]
Beyond her feminine approach to political militancy, and pathbreaking practice of third- world cinema, it might be worth asking Maldoror, who is still alive, about the ideological rather than circumstantial or even epochal reason for her engagement. It is tempting to draw parallels with Frantz Fanon’s path — Maldoror’s without a firsthand Guadeloupean experience, how- ever, since Fanon was born and grew up in Martinique — from a French West Indian colonial experience, to the Algerian struggle for self-determination (Maldoror was assistant to Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers in 1966) and the African liberation movements. Like Fanon’s, Maldoror’s work set its sights on the horizon of liberation with the African independence movements at a time when liberation was mired in assimilationism in the French Antilles, if only to temporarily displace the struggle for identification.
Like Ady in the United States, and Gerty in Guadeloupe and France several years ago, Sarah Maldoror is currently being reappropriated and, maybe, recuperated in France. While her work was recently extolled within the context of Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray’s investigation of the militant image, at an event organized by Betonsalon at the Musée du Quai Branly to coincide with the release of an eponymous edition of the Third Text journal in 2011, it was also subject to controversy when artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc used lost footage of Maldoror’s Des fusils pour Banta, confiscated in 1971 by the Algerian government, in his 2011 video installation Notes pour Des fusils pour Banta (Forewords to Guns for Banta). Although Abonnenc facilitated obtainment of Maria’s photograph for this essay through the filmmaker’s daughter and her archivist Annouchka de Andrade, an earlier trip to Paris at Abonnenc’s invitation for a conference around his latest exhibition, Les orphelins de Fanon, first brought the controversy to my attention, clearly indicating that it had subsisted. Could it be that Abonnenc’s promotion of Maldoror’s work through his films is a postcolonial version of Man Ray’s pimping of Ady in his photographs? Can it be that, following the struggle for self-representation, a meta-crisis of representation is at play through appropriation?
Revolution — A Conclusion
French metropolitan appropriation in the wake of belated postcolonialism is matched by Guadeloupean nationalist revisionism under protracted anticolonialism — nowhere more visually prominent than in Guadeloupe’s public statuary. I mentioned already how I cropped out the Statue of the Liberation of Slavery in Gorée Island,[34] owing possibly to my typically careful visual circumvention of Guadeloupean public sculpture in Guadeloupe, erected at roundabouts throughout the island and offering cement versions of dated tourist postcards, pompous contemporary artistic projects, and romanticized depictions of Guadeloupe’s revolutionary history.
In the latter category belong the larger-than-life bronze statues of Ignace, the Mulâtresse Solitude, and Delgrès, sculpted by Jacky Poulier and erected in 1998, 1999, and 2001, respectively, on the Pointe-à-Pitre to Les Abymes Baimbridge Road, recast as boulevard des Héros de la Liberté. Having briely glossed over Ignace and Delgrès’s last-ditch antislavery struggle, which ended in their suicides and the reinstatement of slavery and yet is cast as the emergence of the Nasyon Gwadloup, I will turn to the Mulâtresse Solitude and return to Harris-Perry’s inquiry into black female citizenship [35]
The 1999 statue of the pregnant Solitude as heroine among and between Ignace and Delgrès on Les Abymes’s Boulevard of the Heroes is miles away from the aborted 1923 bid for the building of a statue to the Mammy of the South by the Daughters of the Confederacy on the Washington Mall, recalled by Harris-Perry. If indeed, as Harris-Perry expounded, citi- zenship is racialized and gendered through public statuary usually reserved for worthy male citizens governing the nation by law or defending it through wars, then the statue of Solitude offers just the kind of gratifying identification aspiring female Guadeloupean citizens might want.
Bypassing the lure of nationalist revisionism, and bridging the gap left by the absence of such contemporary female autonomist public igures, is Guadeloupean artist Jöelle Ferly’s irst public performance, in 2011 (see ig. 7). Previously, in 2009, Ferly created Still Band, Grand déboulé en quarante-quatre temps, a humorous video animation of multicolored abstract circular shapes, reminiscent of birthday party balloons, accumulating over forty-four seconds, to the soundtrack of the artist’s own a cappella rendition of the Quarante-quatre jours movement’s main song-slogan:
“La Gwadloup sé tan nou, la Gwadloup sé pa ta yo, yo pé pa fè sa yo vlé a dan pays an nou” (“Guadeloupe is ours, Guadeloupe is not theirs, they cannot do what they want in our country”). That same year, to the sound of drums beating and voices chant- ing, the movement — led by Liyannaj kont pwoitasyon (or LKP), a conglomerate of worker’s unions and community organizations, artists, and the general public, united in their protest against economic disparity between Guadeloupe and metropolitan France — had transformed into a general strike that immobilized the island for forty-four days. The protest rallied the other overseas territories of Martinique, Guyane, and Réunion in the process, and threatened to reach France itself, before the government intervened, granted a couple of financial concessions, and stymied the pseudo-autonomist uprising into status quo.
The ambivalence and contradictory aims of the movement, at the time supported by intellectuals such as Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Ernest Breleur, among others, but nowadays almost unanimously decried by the general population, can be summarized by the paradoxical sighting of a protester wearing a red T-shirt reading, “21 Oktob 1801 Nasyon Gwadloup vwè jou,” while requesting from the French government two hundred extra euros in his monthly paycheck.
In Ferly’s Still Band, Grand déboulé en quarante-quatre temps, whose title is a play on words of the economical stillness of the island during the strike and counterbalancing effusion of the participating population as if in a steel band, the clin d’oeil to the festive Carnival-like atmosphere of the demonstrations being denoted by the word déboulé, the contradiction between nationalist-independentist claims and demands for dependency-building compensations is played out with humor and, possibly, a tinge of irony.
While the Quarante-quatre jours movement can be seen as yet another reenactment of the 1802 failed rebellion and rehearsal for the revolution that never came, dreams thereof forever deferred by the departmentalization law Archimède regretted almost immediately after helping it pass, Jöelle Ferly’s irst performance work is inscribed within the tradition of Guadeloupean women’s self-refashioning that I have strived to visualize in this essay.
Although cast into the customary heroes’ bronze, Gerty Archimède’s statue wasn’t erected; she is represented seated, her eyes looking to the horizon, maybe waiting for Angela Davis’s return, a revolution from the sea, another catastrophe. By contrast, Ferly’s memorial was a living response to a catastrophe, united to Gerty’s through revolutionary daydreaming.
Titled Revolution: Motion of a Body on Its Axis or Around Another Body . . . , Ferly’s latest work took place on the Champs-de-Mars in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and consisted of the artist rotating herself by a quarter turn at every quarter of an hour for twenty-four hours, on 18 and 19 June 2011. Written in the aftermath of the 12 January 2010 earthquake and in anticipation of the prediction that the year 2012 would bring the end of the world (as the Earth’s axis is to begin shifting), Ferly’s performance was steeped in recent catastrophic history and eschatological projections.
Yet her live memorial to the victims of the Haitian catastrophe, as a living statue of blood, flesh, sweat, and tears, while casting herself between sister of Solitude in a landscape of representational crisis and sister citizen on the island of the irst successful slave rebellion and independent black republic, allowed her to transcend national recuperations and reclaim instead her and Guadeloupean women’s archipelagic history, in whirlwinds and on trembling grounds.
