Adriana Umaña Hossman, PhD

Death, Afterlife and Nomadic Wanderings in French Caribbean Literature

The real philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to obtain the greatest good in the other world. … For I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?[1]

Plato, Phaedo

Death, sometimes referred to as “the great equalizer of men,” has found its way into religious, artistic and literary expressions since the beginning of recorded time in what can be understood as an attempt to demystify the inescapable end that awaits all men.  In the words of Robert Favre: “Every age finds its own language to face, welcome or confront death; it is in that language, with their own accent, that important works offer an answer to death’s challenge.”[2]  For all its diverse expressions, a literature that deals with the question of death is ultimately grappling with our most profound existential preoccupations, that is, with the very seeds of any philosophical enterprise.

Death appears as a very important topos in the literature of the Caribbean, in some cases representing the need to break away from a painful past, the hope for new beginnings, and the dream of conceiving non-linear origins.  While sometimes these representations of death constitute a direct challenge to the authority of tradition, that is, they seek to go beyond the old patterns of belief, they also inaugurate new traditions.  Writers, as both keepers and reformers of the literary tradition, are responsible for questioning the old and for formulating new spaces of possibility.  I am interested in seeing how Caribbean writers negotiate their complex histories:  born out of the French literary canon, facing the challenges of historical racial conflict and in a constant struggle for political self-determination, they find in the crisscrossing of nomadic wanderings a solution, the possibility for a constant re-construction and re-writing of their identities.

I plan to examine how Maryse Condé and René Depestre, two French Caribbean writers, construct, through their death-filled narratives, distinct yet similar spaces of freedom.  For the Guadeloupian writer, death appears to be what guarantees moments of encounter: it serves as the backdrop upon which the characters face their own diversity without fear or judgment.  Death allows for the crossing of borders and leads the protagonists into endless, but extremely fruitful, wanderings.  In the case of the Haitian writer, death usually appears mixed in with the life-giving force of the erotic.  His writings play upon encounters between the dead and the living, liminal moments infused with passion, sexual energy and unbridled imaginative freedom.  In both cases, death opens a space for ambiguous, unstable and dynamic lines to be drawn.  Instead of an experience of loss, these Caribbean writers portray death as a productive and fertile ground for (un)making received traditions and their identities.

As a preliminary step to understanding the role of death in the context of Caribbean literature, it is necessary to trace the developments of this question across centuries of tradition in the French literary canon.  How is death represented across genres and across time?  In what ways do these two writers react to the traditional canonical works and how do they forge new traditions?  What new constraints are put into place by their contribution to a new literary tradition?

In addition to my own literary perspective, the Mapping Death seminar will allow for creative interdisciplinary dialogue bringing sociology, psychology, history, anthropology and religious studies to bear upon death and the traditions surrounding it.  Death may be the key to understanding the roadmaps drawn by French Caribbean writers in what can be seen as the elaboration of a hybrid identity, and the (re)creation of an innovative, autochthonous thought.  Given the intimate relationship between philosophy and literature, following Socrates’s assessment of philosophy, perhaps literature represents an alternative tradition in the preparation for death.