Part II - Shifty/Shifting Characters
Summary
One of the failings of our intellectuals is that we have always utilized the tools or the methodologies of others—of those who have never really understood us. It's a faulty, illogical approach—to use the instruments, the tools of someone who looks at me askance and says to himself: “I'm going to understand the Haitian people.” That explains the gap that has always existed between the intelligentsia—the Haitian intellectuals—and the Haitian masses. They don't understand us, they have never understood us. They look at us as “abnormal,” as sick people of the Caribbean, as schizophrenics, as crazy people. They look at us as people who enjoy living in misery.
—FrankétienneOne of the central concerns that has consistently marked the literature of the French-speaking Caribbean is, of course, that of accurately conveying the physical and emotional reality of the postcolonial individual. Gayatri Spivak, in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” reflects on the problematic disparity between the necessarily elitist—albeit sympathetic—discourse of the postcolonial writing subject and the supposed mutism of the object of this discourse. Addressing more specifically the Caribbean situation, Maryse Condé questions the troublingly narrow configurations of the individual and collective in the works of “canonical” male writers of the French-speaking Americas in “Order, Disorder, Freedom.” Similarly regionally focused, Edouard Glissant considers the possibilities offered by opacity in representing postcolonial communities, and evokes in particular his own fraught efforts to write “the novel of the We” (Discours 267).
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- Haiti UnboundA Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, pp. 31 - 35Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010