The boss—but at that moment there wasn’t simply a boss and a worker present—Sauveur Emmanuel Absalon started to speak again. He had to go home and face Madame Absalon. Well, he was used to that. What he truly feared was how his little girl would look at him, her questions, how he’d see her change when he told her the truth, how she’d distance herself from him, just like the other children had done, judging him, taking a silent stand against him when he and their mother argued.
He knew the little one had worked herself into such a state that her mother had taken her to his sisters’. His little girl was shaken by his absence.
“Three days away, Guy-Albert. Three days. It’s the first time I didn’t have the guts to go home to my unfinished house. I feel like tearing it all down. It’s the first time I don’t have a clue what to say to the children, the first time I won’t be able to tell them stories to make them laugh. The first time we won’t cry from laughing so hard; the first time they won’t wonder why their father cries so easily when he’s always said that real men don’t cry. You’ve seen me cry, Guy-Albert, you know. I don’t understand why the tears come, all by themselves; I can’t control them. They seem to erupt from an endless river that’s been running through me for a long time, at least since that spoon seared Augustine’s shoulder.
“I’m ashamed of the people I associate with, ashamed of those men with their big equipment who used to come sit in my salon, even if I was proud of my work sites, of the roads we were building. I was proud but at the same time I hated those men. I hated the kickbacks I had to pay them, the bribes to the mayor’s office, the jewelry offered to his wife to avoid the scrutiny of the tax collectors, those fake friendships, those miserable games of pinochle—all of it so I could take care of my children. Yours, as well, even if you don’t believe I was thinking about them. I’m ashamed of spending time with people who sell their friends, who inform on them, like that principal who turned in Émilienne’s teacher, who said she was a dangerous revolutionary, someone who believed in independence and autonomy, someone we had to keep away from our children. She even bragged about bringing up the October 15, 1960, regulation, the one that says: On the recommendation of the Prefect, and without other formalities, employees of the state and all other public institutions working in overseas departments whose behavior is found to disturb the public order can be immediately called back to metropolitan France by the Minister who heads their division in order to be assigned elsewhere. Yeah, I can recite it by heart, and it makes me even more ashamed. Ashamed because all I asked was to let the children finish their year with Madame Ladal, knowing how much my little girl loved her. My darling Émilienne could finish the year, and then the principal could inform on Madame Ladal, send her away later, but send her away, all the same. Do you see, Guy-Albert? I’m ashamed not to have had the courage to tell that principal how despicable I thought she was, with that wig she wears because she can’t accept her own hair, just like she can’t accept being black, and with her obsequious manners—the way she lowers her eyes, bows and scrapes to obey the people she’s accepted as her masters. I wasn’t brave enough, and now I’ll have to face my daughter. She’ll have two questions that terrify me: ‘Where were you?’ ‘What’s happened to my teacher?’”
When he’d finished talking, I told him that his little girl had been in the streets of La Pointe when the rioting broke out, that I didn’t know why or why she wasn’t in class then. I told him how I brought her home, reassuring him that after what she’d seen, she’d be far more worried about him than her teacher. And that was that. He could go home now. He’d better go back to his family, because the madness was going to keep up all night long and tomorrow and for a long time after. He’d better take shelter pretty quick. Me too. A little girl was waiting for me as well, not too far from where we were.
3.
They finally all arrive home: Émérite, Emmy, Émelie, Émilie, Emmanuel, Émilio, Emmett, Émile.
Mama grabs each of her children and holds them close; she feels a little better. “Now all we need is your Papa.”
My brothers and sisters have come with stories that are a lot worse than mine.
Emmett saw some guy’s head blown open and one of the guy’s friends hold his brains in his hands, trying to keep his friend alive.
Émilio saw bodies being hauled around in bicycle carts, like dirty bundles of bloody laundry.
Émelie didn’t see any dead or wounded, but she knows a lot of people were hit by stray bullets; they’re saying tonight will be terrible, that no one should go out because the dogs are loose.
She says that a few times, “The dogs are loose.”
We sit down in the courtyard and wait.
Émile asks, “What are we waiting for?”
We’re all exhausted. We’re so tired, so knocked out, we feel like throwing up. Nobody’s able to answer Émile.
Mama goes off to close the hallway door so that nobody will go out again or come in. That’s when we hear her cry out.
I think it’s you.
A man we don’t know is there. He repeats to my big sister Emmy what he’s just told Mama: Uncle Justin was killed today, on the street.
“And Papa?”
Nobody answers me. Mama isn’t hearing anything anymore.
So I say I’ll wait for you, wait all night long if I have to. In the courtyard.
I sit down on Mama’s little bench.
I’m still sitting there.
I’m still waiting for you to ring the doorbell.
4.
The time has come to end this quadrille.
It’s time for us to accompany the ladies,
Greet the Queen,
One, two, three.
Time to call it a day.
But let’s be clear.
We will wait with Émilienne, even if, as she requests, we wait at a distance.
We’ll wait, but not just for our father.
We’ll wait until someone tells us how our Uncle Justin was killed, why Colette and Julien Ladal have disappeared. We’ll wait until someone explains all this to us. To us, too.
We’ll wait for the finale of the finale. For the dance to end.
END
A Conversation with Gerty Dambury
by Judith G. Miller October 15, 2016
Judith G. Miller: Your novel depicts centrally the experience of one family’s response to the upheavals of May 1967 in Pointe-à-Pitre, the largest city in Guadeloupe. I’d like to start this interview by asking about the context, that is, the refusal of management and business owners to cede to the construction workers’ union demands for better pay. As I understand, it went like this: the construction workers strike and demonstrate. The French prefect running things in Guadeloupe calls in not only local police (mostly white guys) but also the French military, and both respond to the strikers with clubs, tear gas, and bullets. This leads to indiscriminate killing. Possibly hundreds of Guadeloupeans lose their lives.
Gerty Dambury: That mostly sums up what happened. There were all kinds of people killed and wounded, people shopping with their families and not at all demonstrating in the part of town where the strike was happening. That shows how really mad the police were! But you know what really interests me about this tragedy is how the event was covered up, as though it never happened. In that sense, it’s not unlike what went on after the demonstration by Algerians in Paris in 1961. In that instance, protestors in favor of Algerian independence were also attacked by riot police. A lot of people ended up dead, floating in the Seine. And this terrible violence was also covered up by the French government. We’ve only recently started to see reporting and statistics on what actually occurred in both cases.
JM: So you write about May 1967 to memorialize it, to make us think about the relationship of former colonies with the centralizing power of France?
GD: Yes, but not just that, because imaginatively recasting May 1967 also allows me to try to capture the complexity of Guadeloupean society at a point whe
n many rural people were pouring into the big city to try to find a way to survive. The sixties were a turning point for Guadeloupe. After World War I and World War II, Guadeloupeans demanded French citizenship. But twenty years after we became a department in 1946, we realized that not much had changed. We were asking in the sixties—and we’re still asking—what it means to be French, but not really French.
JM: Is that because of Guadeloupe’s status as an overseas department?
GD: That and the fact that France has never come to grips with its own involvement in slavery. In Guadeloupe, the majority black population’s still much poorer and less powerful than what’s left of the white planter class. These former plantation owners kept their land and even received financial reparations for having “lost their slaves”! Moreover, metropolitan French people still come in to run things. In fact, the entire administration is made up of white French people.
JM: If I’ve understood things correctly, this project was also a way for you to recover some of your own lost memories.
GD: That’s right, because I was only ten years old when it happened, and like the rest of my brothers and sisters (there were eight of us), I’d repressed it. It all came back to me during a conversation with my big brother in the late nineties when we were working on a musical homage for my father. We sat in my brother’s kitchen in Switzerland and the memories started to flood in, things we’d never talked about before. He’d seen some of the gruesome incidents I talk about in the novel, and he’d also been dispatched to fetch me home from school on May 26, when everything erupted. We took back alleys to avoid the street battles.
JM: Is this, then, an autobiographical novel? I ask because the main character, Émilienne, around whom everything turns, is nine years old, and the chorus that protects her and helps develop her story is made up of her eight brothers and sisters.
GD: First of all, I did a lot of research on this period, especially after the immense social unrest of 2009, and a lot of what I learned finds its way into the novel. Second, nothing I write is truly autobiographical, but there are bits and pieces of what I’ve observed all my life in the characters. The father, for example, Sauveur Emmanuel Absalon, is a striver and a small businessperson, like my father was. But he also has the character traits of a couple of my aunts, and of a lot of people I’ve known. He’s cautious, he bows down to the white power structure because he can’t bear being humiliated. He’s like a dog who’s gotten used to being beaten. A dog who hunkers down with its belly to the ground when someone approaches.
JM: That’s the opposite of your women characters, at least most of them.
GD: Well, Émilienne, the schoolgirl; Nono, the ninety-eight-year-old ghost who comes back to tell Émilienne about her father; and Madame Ladal, the schoolteacher who’s gone missing and who launches Émilienne’s quest to understand what’s happening, are all fighters. That’s for sure. Three generations of women who say no to authority, who resist and put their own lives in danger, who won’t be bossed around by the men in their lives.
JM: Even Émilienne’s mother resists the petty bullying of the father, at least in her own way.
GD: Yes, she does resist. She’s even insolent! But talking about the father: that bully, that guy who goes too fast, who’s had no time to think about why he’s doing what he’s doing, is the character who changes the most. He finally understands what his form of collaboration has led to, and he revolts. He’s like what the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant says about Caribbean people in general: “In every person from the Antilles, there’s someone who accepts and someone who refuses.”
JM: This gutsiness to refuse, to not cooperate with a structure that debases certain people for the benefit of others, characterizes all five “visitors” who come to witness in Émilienne’s courtyard as she waits for her father to come home. They help her solve the riddle of her disappeared teacher. The five outside voices create a mosaic, a kaleidoscopic portrait of Guadeloupe.
GD: Yes, and almost all these night visitors are dead and ready to condemn by their own example the ways in which a certain social and political hierarchy has truncated their existence.
JM: Hilaire, for example, once a neighbor, has taken his own life because of how another neighbor had snitched on him: telling school authorities he’s a pedophile and confusing that with being gay.
GD: I wanted to highlight the homophobia that’s very present in Guadeloupe—despite the way Guadeloupeans enjoy cross-dressing during Carnival! But I also wanted to think about snitching, which is also what gets Émilienne’s schoolteacher in trouble. Snitching is left over from the slave system, and we shouldn’t ever forget what being a slave island has bequeathed to the mind-set of Guadeloupeans. Snitching, I think, is a sick survival strategy, a part of the desire to be seen positively by the white power structure. Hilaire shows us that, as does the self-hating principal who denounces Madame Ladal for her political position and especially for how she nurtures independence in her students.
JM: Are these dead characters, these revenants, your way of nodding to an aesthetic of magical realism?
GD: I suppose it might have that effect on some readers, but honestly it has nothing to do with my literary tastes. The dead are never really dead in Guadeloupe. We speak to them, have lunch in cemeteries to chat with them, and call on our loved ones when we need to. Or sometimes they call on us. My father, for example, came to say goodbye right after the wake, at the point where his soul was leaving to go elsewhere. I could smell his presence in my room. I could feel him in the breeze that came in through the window. So it’s no imaginative stretch to have a series of “dead” characters stop in to recount their story and connect it to the churn of the disappearance of the schoolteacher.
JM: There is, of course, one character who is not dead who tells his story, Guy-Albert. I think he’s my favorite, probably because he’s such a searcher and so sweetly generous.
GD: Guy-Albert, a straightforward worker, is the opposite of the pretentious father, but he’s also the character who makes it possible for the father to divest himself of his lack of courage, of his ambiguous patience.
JM: Maybe the alliance between the father and Guy-Albert at the end of the novel—brought about, it seems, through Émilienne’s unwitting intervention—is a signal for the reconstruction of Caribbean identity?
GD: That’s an interesting way to think about the ending, but in this novel, I wasn’t precisely speaking about Caribbean identity. I wanted the novel to be centered on questions of social class. Émilienne’s father wants to change his social class, and thus he’s bent on rejecting black people who are too poor. He builds his success on others’ weakness. What the newfound comradeship between Émilienne’s father and Guy-Albert brings up is how class counts and how it can be rethought—something that’s not happening very much these days in political discussions among people of color in France.
JM: How so?
GD: Let me give you an example. I was at a conference on diversity in Rouen a few weeks ago, and a film called The Color Line was shown. It’s all about how young people are suffering because they aren’t recognized as being French. One guy, ethnically Chinese but born in France, said the French don’t consider Asians to be full human beings. A lot of the black actors interviewed thought they simply represented the exotic other, what they called the “pineapple factor.” I found the whole thing sad and even silly. Everybody was talking about a dream of France as a great universalist country. That France doesn’t exist. France is built, like every other nation, on inequality. In economics, financial matters, social possibilities, education—inequality is everywhere and particularly present in the lives of people of color! You can’t think issues of color without thinking social class. To kill yourself to get to the dream of a country called France presumably based on “liberty, equality, and fraternity” is naive and dangerous.
JM: But don’t we need a nation and boundaries in order to have form, in order to feel we exist?
GD: Y
ou know, all my life I’ve been against the idea of a nation, interested instead in the kind of internationalism represented by utopian communism. This return to nationalism that we’re feeling everywhere has completely surprised me. I’m stunned to see twenty-and thirty-year-old people being nationalistic (even if they won’t use the term). Their way of thinking about living in France is connected to class privilege. It doesn’t include any concern for refugees, for example.
JM: Well, you may not be a French or even a Guadeloupean nationalist. But you do communicate in your plays and novels, and especially in The Restless, the fabric of Guadeloupean society.
GD: That’s because we learn to construct our worlds through the cultures we live in (which is the situation of my characters), but that doesn’t mean we can’t acquire other lenses.
JM: So let’s talk concretely about how you constructed this fiction. I’m fascinated by how you use the Caribbean quadrille to divide up the novel’s sections, which also correspond loosely to the three days of the “action,” if I can use that term. I’ve kept the French terms for the dance moves, except for the first one, the waltz. But the others can be understood as a slow movement (pantalon), a jumpy strut (l’été), a steady repetition (la poule), and a kind of lament (pastourelle).
GD: Right! The quadrille, which I see you’ve translated quite correctly as “square dance,” is one of those syncretic cultural forms found everywhere there’ve been massive movements of people from one place to another. We dance the quadrille less now than when I was a girl, but there are still many dance societies that practice a form of disciplined partnering in group formation (as in the European quadrille). The music, of course, is local, changing the beat suddenly, which signals a change in formation. I wanted to use that strategy to think about how the different voices come in as they witness and to determine their intensity, their emotional thrust. I listened to quadrilles while I was writing the novel.
The Restless Page 16