"Who desires respect must earn it! A black woman must atone for the sins of her race. A black woman must show the whiteness of her soul and do good. A black woman, who is ugly with nappy hair, must merit, more than any other, her place in heaven. Do not disrespect yourself," her manman used to like to say.
Exile According to Julia by Gisele Pineau is the immigrant story from the Antillean perspective in France. Semi-autobiographical, Pineau tells the story of a Guadeloupean family that moves to France in the early 1960s. The novel's protagonist, the granddaughter, recounts her search for an identity and home in a xenophobic and racist France where she endures insults and racial epithets such as 'bamboula' as well as abusive and racist teachers and students. She finds comfort and identity with her Guadeloupean paternal grandmother, Julia, aka Man Ya, an illiterate dark-skinned black woman with nappy hair. Her father insists she comes to France because her abusive WWI veteran husband, Asdrubal, beats and torments her, even though Julia does not wish to leave her home. So the novel essentially consists of Julia's trials and tribulations, trying to get used to a hostile, cold European Paris that does not want her and she doesn't want herself.
Julia's grandchildren endeavor to teach her French and literacy, but the old woman has no real interest or desire, only longing for her tropical homeland where everyone speaks Creole, she has her own spices, garden, and trees, and can return to her marriage with the abusive Asdrubal she feels is her rock. Unfortunately, the novel's prose was hard to follow at times and reading the entire novel became quite the ordeal...However, the most powerful story of Julia's time in Paris is her several miles long walk to some Cathedral with one of her grandchildren, who kept insisting they turn around and ask someone for help to get back to their ugly apartment for public employees. Julia eventually perseveres when her depression and declining health convince her son to allow her to return home, the only place she could ever be happy.
Julia's grandchildren also return home, to the Antilles, after DeGaulle resigns in 1969. Her son, an Antillean Negro who, like many other French Caribbean Francophiles, identified so strongly with DeGaulle and the progress assumed to be inherent with Frenchness, thought of themselves as French to the point they forgot their origins and blackness. Julia's son is so convinced of France's failure because he believed the students and white radicals who protested against DeGaulle were ungrateful and unappreciative of their white nation and its great military hero. Once back in Martinique and Guadeloupe, however, Julia's granddaughter, narrator of the story, finds comfort and solace with her identity as an Antillean woman rather than the cold, unreceptive years in France. In the Caribbean, the world of her Man Ya becomes potent and obvious, with its climate, flora, Creole, and multiracial black population more tolerant and accepting of a Negropolitan returning home.
Although I did not enjoy Pineau's style, the novel's themes of searching for an identity and the immigrant experience are universal and interesting. This is the first novel I've read by a French black author living in France and describing the Antillean experience in France. Moreover, her constant references to her grandmother reminds me of my great-aunt and her way of describing her life before coming to the United States. An interesting, though difficult to read novel for those interested in one example of the black experience in France.
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