Publications [#254988] of Laurent Dubois

Articles in a Collection

1. Dubois, L, Maroons in the archives: The uses of the past in the French Caribbean, in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, edited by Blouin Jr., FX; Roseberg, WG (December, 2006), pp. 291-300, University of Michigan Press, ISBN 9780472032709
   (last updated on 2023/08/08)

   Abstract:
   In the heart of Basse-Terre, the administrative capital of the island of Guadeloupe, sits a prison. It is notorious for its overcrowding and antiquated facilities and also because over the years a number of local activists who have fought for independence from France have been imprisoned there. The concrete walls of the prison, topped by barbed wire, run along one of the main boulevards of the town. Underneath the barbed wire is a mural, painted in the 1980s with the support of local cultural ofacials. It represents the slave trade: a line of slaves in chains and the famous Maison des Esclaves, of the slave port of Gorée, from where slaves were embarked on ships for the Middle Passage. And it presents symbols of bondage and resistance in the Caribbean: a maroon in a spiked iron collar, a machete and a stalk of sugar cane, a drum, and a conch shell-the latter of which was used on plantations to call slaves to work and by maroons as a call to attack. Nearby, in 2001, was a small poster sporting a representation of a "document"-a piece of yellow parchment, curved at the ends. On it was an excerpt from a historical document, a list of maroons "held in the prison of Basse-Terre." The list-which was reproduced from an eighteenth-century newspaper and included names, descriptions, and "country marks"-is similar to many others available in the archives of Guadeloupe and in archives throughout the Americas. Within the archives, then, it is a fairly unremarkable document. Its placement next to the prison, however, transforms it into something very different. Members of the independence movement in both Guadeloupe and Martinique have often referred to the history of the maroons in presenting their political and cultural agenda, associating their contemporary struggle with that of these ancestors. The maroons are seen as precursors for those who resist in the present, as heroes who refused the colonial order, struck out violently against it, and created their own communities in the heights of the island. In slavery times, it is often recalled, they were hunted down by a police force-the maréchaussée (many of whose soldiers, as is less often recalled, were actually slaves or free coloreds)-and when caught, according to the stipulations of the French Code Noir that governed slavery, were stamped with a beur-de-lis on their arst offense, had their hamstrings cut on their second, and punished with death for further attempts at bight.1 Aimé Césaire called on the history of the maroons in his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land when he wrote, "I accept . . . the spiked iron-collar /and the hamstringing of my runaway audacity /and the deur-de-lys bowing from the red iron into the fat of my shoulder."2 More recently, in the song quoted in the epigraph that begins this essay, the group Voukoum has evoked the maroons as a way of countering the way they see the history of Guadeloupe too often told-as a story of its white colonists and of the generous actions of the French state in freeing the slaves in 1848 and making the island a department in 1946.3 The literary and cultural presence of the maroons is vibrant in the contemporary French Caribbean-through novels, plays, songs, and carnival costumes called nègmawon- and the placement of an archival document pertaining to them in front of Basse-Terre's prison is a powerful gesture of criticism made through a potent and well-understood analogy. The document was placed there as part of a townwide project of the public presentation of historical documents, led by the director of cultural affairs in Basse- Terre, the historian Josette Faloppe.4 In the main park of Basse-Terre, the Champ d'Arbaud, for instance, were posters of the famous declaration written by Louis Delgrès, a free-colored ofacer, as he battled the French troops who reestablished slavery on the island in 1802. Among these documents, however, it is the one placed in front of the prison that most directly speaks to and rebects the political situation on the island. The prison is overseen by the centralized police force of the French state, whose members are often mostly from metropolitan France, on short tours of duty in Guadeloupe. The local government of the town, however, is in the hands of local Guadeloupean administrators and politicians, who for most of the past decades have been armly on the Left. Within the ranks of the local administration are several who share many of the sentiments and hopes of those who have agitated for independence of the island. Although they work within the French administrative system, they argue for the need for more local autonomy in social and economic decisions and have propelled an impressive array of cultural initiatives (such as the placement of historical documents in Basse-Terre) aimed at valorizing the particularities of the Guadeloupe and the French Caribbean. Through both the mural and the list of the maroons, the archive of slavery is made present in the streets of Basse-Terre and is called upon as part of a present-day cultural and political struggle. This is one of many ways in which the past of slavery, slave resistance, and emancipation is brought to bear upon contemporary debates about the political status and economic future of Guadeloupe. As in Haiti, where the evocation of the Haitian Revolution takes place within a web of silencing explored by Michel-Rolph Trouillot,5 the ambiguities and complexities of the past, and of the documents it has left, are often overlooked in the production of contemporary narratives. At the same time, the French Caribbean has seen a rich discussion about both the possibilities and the limits of the archives left by slavery and emancipation, most notably through several novels that take on the problem of history and incorporate the archival document as a literary form. These novels interestingly confront a broader problem faced by all those who seek to write the history of slavery and, more particularly, the stories of the slaves themselves-the absences and silences in the archives. In a sense, their aim is similar to that of historians of the Caribbean who seek to uncover the voices and actions of slaves and ex-slaves and to understand their struggles. Yet they also have a very different relationship to the question of evidence and a different sense of how to imagine the relationship between present needs and the facts of the past. There has not been much productive discussion between historians and novelists in the French Caribbean, to a large extent because many see their approaches as fundamentally different and incommensurable. Some novelists have argued that traditional historical work, because of its dependence on archives written by white masters and colonial ofacials, can never tell the true story of the people of the Caribbean, while historians have sometimes criticized the ahistorical and mythological approaches of novelists. Yet, as I hope to suggest, the relationship between history and action can in fact highlight important issues about the constitution of the archive of slavery and emancipation in Guadeloupe. In this essay, I begin by describing the material archives of the history of Guadeloupe and some of the ways they have been constituted through the history of the island, as well as the social and political forces that shape both the structure and the use of these archives. I then move on to a discussion of the ways in which novelists have made archives of a different sort part of their literary work in the quest for the production of histories for the present of Guadeloupe. Finally, I draw on some of my own research to suggest the ways in which the silences of the material archives have in some ways been overdrawn by such novelists. In general terms, the kinds of points I make here about the archives of Guadeloupe could, of course, be made about almost any archive and any historical problem, but I hope that the speciacs of this case can help illuminate the broader problem of interpreting archives as "agencies of cultural difference," as well as suggest the possibilities for a more sustained discussion between the various groups who take it upon themselves to narrate the past in the French Caribbean. © 2006 by University of Michigan Press. All Rights Reserved.