Antoine Innocent's Mimola

Antoine Innocent's innovative novel, Mimola, offers a sympathetic portrait of Haitian Vodou and popular religion in a Haiti that appears to take place during the second half of the 19th century. Julie Georges, daughter of Rosalie, an African woman from Dahomey or the Gold Coast, loses her husband and six of her seven children. Her last child, Mimola, nicknamed Lala, also becomes sick and nearly dies, but speaking with another old African woman cognizant of things Creoles (those born in Saint-Domingue or Haiti, not Africa) do not know, tells her that she and Mimola must pay their respects to the ancestral spirits of Rosalie in order to cure Mimola. 

Assigned several tasks that require her and her daughter to embrace Vodou rituals and services, Madame Georges and Mimola eventually make the pilgrimage to Saut d'Eau, near Mirebalais, and while doing so, meet the "mulatto" cousin of Madame Georges, Francine Dajobert. Dajobert's mother, the enslaved African-born twin sister of Rosalie, was raped by a French colon. Her daughter's son, Leon, was the product of Francine and a wealthy man, which made it possible for him to be educated in France. Most of the novel is an overview of the promesse made by Madame Georges to appease the ancestral spirits in order to save the life of her daughter, who eventually becomes a manbo, or Vodou priestess herself.

However, as a realist novel that foreshadows Haitian indigénisme through its intimately detailed Vodou ceremonies, customs in the countryside, and social world of its characters, it, like the work of Lhérisson, creatively uses Haitian Creole and playful names, puns, as well as Port-au-Prince and the rural landscape to bring to life a not so distant past. As someone who has also made the trek to Saut d'Eau, (in an automobile, of course), one cannot help but be moved by Innocent's prose and the calm beauty of the waterfalls at the holy site. Innocent goes to great length to describe the trek to Saut d'Eau, the candles, vigils, prayers, music, dancing, and other customs of pilgrims seeking the miraculous from the Virgin Mary and/or the spirits. 

What's fascinating here is how Innocent manages to find the beauty and respectful elements of Vodou while using it as a metaphor for a united Haiti. Wealthy "mulattoes" and their "pure" black relations find each other through this religion, and through it a respect for their African forebears and its social value for the lower classes. Thus, through Vodou ceremonies, a respect for charity and others is maintained, as well as veneration of filial ties, which cost Madame Georges and Madame Dajobert their social standing among the elite who look down on Vodou or anything reminding them of Africa. Unfortunately, Leon, the son of Madame Dajobert, continues to reject Vodou and suffers the consequences, all the while dreaming of his cherished France. 

Meanwhile, his friend Albert, who was also educated in France and a firm believer in progress, saw the value of Vodou and related its origins to the lares of the Roman world and classical antiquity, to the religions of "primitive races" and ancestral cults. While Albert is almost certainly wrong about the influence of ancient Mediterranean religions on Vodou, it brings to mind a point raised by an academic who told me that many Haitian authors who broached the subject of Vodou were influenced by Fustel de Coulanges's study of classical antiquity, perhaps explaining in part why Innocent falsely presents the origin of the word lwa (or, loua) as lares. Perhaps positivism's three stages and Firmin's legacy also influenced Innocent, who refers to Vodou as a religious stage found all over the world, from the Celts, the ancient East, Africa, and beyond. 

Nonetheless, despite his defense of the religion from the extreme disdain of Leon, he also hopes that education, schools, theaters, and gradual change will lead to the religion's decline, although such a development will take a very long time. Moreover, as Albert wisely tells Leon, attempting by force to eradicate Vodou will cause the masses to cling to it more tightly. This brings to mind Roumain's critique of the anti-superstition campaign of the 1940s, which cruelly attempted to uproot the faith while ignoring the conditions in which it is cultivated. And despite his Marxism, Roumain, like Innocent, urged respect and honor for Vodou, even as the latter designates it as primitive and from a previous stage of religious thought.

Thus, Innocent, like the successive generation of indigénistes, saw the value of Vodou in terms of its link to the African past, respect for the origins of Haiti, and as a social glue, even if they personally disagreed with its tenets from a theological point of view. In consideration of the unstable conditions of Haiti at the time of its original publication, and the context of the Generation de la Ronde's nationalism, Mimola offers the reader a penetrating literary exercise in the importance of the religion of the masses for rehabilitating the nation's identity. If the argument of Fustel de Coulanges is relevant at all here, this disdain and rejection of the popular class's religion constitutes a key factor in the implacable social divide and lack of solidarity plaguing the country during the later half of the 19th century. 

Patrick Chamoiseau's School Days

“In those days, the blue-eyed Gaul with hair as yellow as wheat was everyone’s ancestor. In those days, Europeans were the founders of History. The world, once shrouded in darkness, began with them. Our islands had been veiled in a fog of nonexistence, crossed by phantom Caribs or Arawaks themselves lost in the obscurity of a cannibal nonhistory. And then, when the colonists arrived, there was light. Civilization. History. The humanization of the teeming Earth. They shouldered the heavy burden of this world they were raising to the lofty heights of consciousness. We had to strive stoutly so as not to abandon them to the solitude of this responsibility. The teacher wanted to carry the world on his shoulders, too” (121-22)

Chamoiseau’s account of his schoolboy days, School Days, translated by Linda Coverdale, is a touching narrative filled with adorable moments of youthful innocence, curiosity, adventure, and struggle. Like his other writings, his playful, unique style of writing that fuses humor  French, Creole, and inventive rhetoric to encapsulate another world succeeds brilliantly in School Days. As a child growing up in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Chamoiseau recounts his younger, preliterate days as a “little black boy” who irritated his mother and older siblings incessantly to have the chance to go to school. Once in school, however, his Creole worldview and self-identity is challenged by the institution’s Francophile nature and the Teacher’s attempts to make Frenchmen out of black, Creole-speaking students. Nevertheless, the sweet novel, though often heavily focused the destructive impact of the Francophilic tendencies of school on the language and identity of Martinique, exemplified by Big Bellybutton, a poor Creole-speaking child who ultimately concedes to the Teacher his inferiority as a poor, black Creole child coming out of the sugar cane shacks of colonial Martinique, can be seen as ending on a positive note through what may be termed as nascent créolité in that Chamoiseau articulates a fusion of the Creole language, mythology, and worldview of Big Bellybutton and his wannabe French Teacher. This fusion consists of not only the African and European elements of culture and language in Martinique, but also the Indian, Syrian, and indigenous Carib and Arawak presence in the history, cuisine and society of the Antilles.

Besides describing the important moment in his early school days when he would become a proponent of créolité, School Days is an artful example of storytelling that captures the world through a child’s eyes. He incorporates Creole phrases, mythology and magic into the story, evident in their belief in magic and quimboiseurs:

To tie up a Teacher (you’re not hearing this from me), you had to cross your fingers and hold them like that, thrust deep in your pockets; stand on your left food in front of the school; murmur over and over again before he appeared: Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the teacher…(You didn't hear this from me…) (125).

This aforementioned adorable quote marks the belief by a young Chamoiseau, Big Bellybutton (whose ‘real’ French name is never mentioned, only the Creole Big Bellybutton) and other schoolboys in their ability to cause illness toward their Teacher, a Frenchman with black skin and a white mask to whom France was a magic word (108). The little Chamoiseau also had his adorable moments prior to school, scribbling on the walls of his home, persistently demanding of his mother, Mam Ninotte, to take him to school like the Big Kids, his older siblings, and strolling through the city streets as Syrian merchants, workers, and other adults carried on with the busy activities of the day. The student bullies, who persecute Big Bellybutton especially, also provide moments of comic relief when the latter pulls out a snake’s head to scare them away or when the poetic rejoinders of Les Respondeurs or Chamoiseau occasionally breaking his third-person narrative provide further commentary on the little black boy’s life.

Clearly, for Chamoiseau, learning to read and write was not just survival, or learning to live despite going to school to “shed bad manners: rowdy manners, nigger manners, Creole manner—all the same thing” (120). Survival entailed learning to thrive through new discourse, one partly indebted to the negritude past but inclusive of all of Martinique’s heterogeneous origins. Chamoiseau, while criticizing the schools’ attempts to make Gauls out of Martinique’s children, teaching them to see the world and read literature from French eyes, when winter snow and rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed days of blond childhood were never part of life for the overwhelming majority of Martinicans, nonetheless found value in the ability to transport oneself to new terrains, new worlds, beyond the island shores of his home. This necessitates a synthesis of Creole and French, the Caribbean and its diverse origins, to represent the world of his youth in this formative period of his schooling. Overall, this is a fascinating account worth reading by anyone even remotely interested in Martinique, French colonialism, Caribbean literature, or the magical realism of the lens of a bright child. To read it in English was utter delight, since Coverdale’s translation retains the artful blend of Martinican/Creole vocabulary with the collective voice of the narrator and Les Respondeurs in addition to Chamoiseau’s characteristic humor.

L'exil selon Julia

"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.