Research in African Literatures

Research in African Literatures 34.1 (2003) 187-188

La trilogie caribéenne de Daniel Maximin. Christiane Chaulet-Achour. Paris: Karthala, 2000. 230 pp. ISBN: 2-86537-956-6 paper.

This book constitutes the most ambitious—and the most successful—attempt thus far to engage and explain the complex discursive patterns and interlocking figures that permeate Guadeloupean author Daniel Maximin's groundbreaking trilogy, L'isolé soleil (1981), Soufrières (1987), and L'ile et une nuit (1995). Through a complex, self-reflexive narrative technique that includes letters, notebooks, proverbs, poems, anagrams, and numerology, as well as a large network of intertextual references and symbols, Maximin overtly (re)writes Guadeloupe's colonial history from the point of view of the colonized, refracting their discontinuous historical experience in the non-linear form of his narrative. His volumes tend to join many of his characters to themes of resistance, in such contexts as the revolt against Richepanse in 1802, the threatened eruption of Guadeloupe's Soufrière volcano in 1976, and the anxiety and tension created by an approaching hurricane in 1989. Ultimately, his goal of valorizing the historical experience(s) of the French (and wider) Caribbean by invoking and re-citing its pervasive cultural pluralities remains unequalled in terms both of its breadth of vision and its dense but innovative narrative technique.

Christiane Chaulet-Achour's book tackles these complexities head-on, and succeeds remarkably well not only in locating Maximin's oeuvre in its historical and cultural Caribbean context, but, even more importantly, in explaining the how and the why of the author's ludic, carnivalesque sense of wordplay. The book's eight chapters approach the continuities and interconnections of Maximin's trilogy thematically, elucidating in turn his use of character, narrative construction, intertextuality, creole folktales, history, myth, feminism, and geography, and unmasking both his deliberate complexities of realism, focalization and doubling and their construction of a multivalent, creolized framework for expressing Caribbean identity.

From the beginning, Maximin's work has made extended use of numbers, puns, proverbs, and Caribbean historical and intertextual references in its discursive (re)construction of a communal history for the region. Far from engaging in a purely self-indulgent praxis of Derridean wordplay, however, as some critics have claimed, Maximin's discourse not only takes Caribbean history as its primary referent, his goal is clearly both the contestation of prior colonial narratives and the creation of a pan-Caribbean genealogy through the articulation of a complex creole poetics of identity. Chaulet-Achour examines these narratives through the prism of the indissoluble symbolic and thematic links that bind them, explaining their inner workings and larger strategies for the uninitiated reader. In her analysis of L'isolé soleil, for example, the influence of such authors as Aimé and Ina Césaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Frantz Fanon on Caribbean writing is traced, the symbolic importance to Guadeloupeans of the heroic resistance of Louis Delgrès to Napoleon's invading forces is highlighted, the revolutionary link between the twins that die with him, Georges and Jonathan, and America's Soledad Brothers of the 1970s is made explicit, and the multiple discursive resonances of the twelve creole proverbs that punctuate the [End Page 187] Delgrès episode are explored in depth. The author clearly demonstrates that the latter are meant to "ponctuer, illustrer ou contredire la narration historique officielle. Epique ou bouffons, ils interviennent comme la voix irrégulière de la clandestinité" 'punctuate, illustrate or contradict the official historical narrative. Epic or comic, their intervention parallels the irregular voice of concealment' (64). Similarly, she stresses the importance in Maximin's texts of repetition, numerological doubling, and the particular symbolic resonances for the author of the number 7. As the key link in Maximin's complex genealogical chain of characters and events, it (re)surfaces again and again, marking, inter alia, births, deaths, and natural disasters; Chaulet-Achour shows that Maximin considers this to be "son chiffre d'élection" 'number of choice,' located as it is "à l'intersection de l'accompli et d'une possibilité de renouveau" 'at the intersection of...