The Hybridity of Francophone Voices from Below

Many people on both sides of the Atlantic are unaware of the glaring facts of the massive French involvement in the slave trade: that more slaves were brought to the tiny island of Martinique than to all the United States; that in 1789, Saint-Domingue supplied over half of France’s overseas trade and had a slave population of half a million, more than all the other French and British West Indies combined. 1 The magnitude of the French slave trade then cannot account for its current invisibility. A more likely source lies in the fact that the French historical record contains no instances of the personal documents which in other countries have put a human face on slavery, no equivalent of such works as The History of Mary Prince (1831) from Britain, Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiography of a Slave (1840) from Cuba, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1862) from the United States. 2 However, as I shall attempt to show in this paper, the gap in the French record is not as absolute as it seems. Decades before Prince, Manzano, or Jacobs garnered the support necessary to bring forth slave narratives, writers from the French colonial and postcolonial world had already produced written texts by blacks that, although not necessarily written by slaves or about their personal experiences as slaves, reveal a black perspective on slavery. Those texts reveal the particular circumstances under which Francophone writing about slavery began. They also serve to problematize the notion of “authentic” slave narratives. Anthony Appiah has rightly observed that everything we know about the colonial and postcolonial eras is “always already contaminated” and that no absolute line can be drawn between the oppressing “us” and the oppressed “them.” 3 His observation has special relevance for the French situation. The first texts about slavery by black authors were written in the context of political and military engagement with the French. Thus, whether written by former slaves or, more commonly, by anciens libres having received a French education, those texts are profoundly hybrid, that is to say, characterized by an uneasy cohabitation of different and incongruous elements—both acceptance and rejection of French models of authority and hegemonic institutions; both complicity and resistance. In the principal text to be considered in this paper—the play L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, en janvier 1818 [The King’s Entry in his Capital in January 1818], by the early nineteenth-century Haitian writer, Juste Chanlatte—an oscillation between the contradictory impulses of complicity and resistance is evident at the political, linguistic, and dramatic levels. A similar process occurs as well in the other works that will be considered in the remarks that follow. 4