The Restless
Page 17
JM: And you’ve imagined a group caller, instead of one single voice.
GD: Yeah, in the original quadrille, there is one caller, traditionally a man. A few women are callers nowadays. But for the novel, I imagined a group of callers made up of both men and women: Émilienne’s brothers and sisters control the movement in and out of the courtyard of their spacious bourgeois home, where the voices who visit turn around Émilienne, who is waiting. These circling voices also circle around the country, stopping frequently at the other main location of the novel, La Place de la Victoire, where the strike occurs. Émilienne also has a space, the blue bathroom, where she can try out her real feelings. And she also has to leave the house, which is another way we get to see other sides of Pointe-à-Pitre. She, who is gifted, who can bring forth revenants, helps the readers discover all the dimensions of life in the city, its environs, and even other parts of Guadeloupe. So, we travel from a very tiny blue bathroom to several Guadeloupean towns and villages.
JM: I wanted to ask you about the way you use Creole throughout The Restless. I can see the playwright in you in the colloquial language, the quick humor, the snappy remarks, the truculence of the characters. The Creole phrases help locate the novel elsewhere, and so I kept them, sometimes using paraphrasing, sometimes translating into English. What’s your own relationship to Creole?
GD: As children we were punished if we used Creole in school, and if people heard us speaking Creole in the streets, they’d tell our parents. I couldn’t really speak Creole and, you know, I had to relearn to speak and write it when I returned to Guadeloupe after a prolonged stay in France. In Guadeloupe today, people can and do switch back and forth from French to Creole. This ability to switch is the result of a fight and a political movement to impose Creole everywhere: on TV, on the radio, in meetings, etc. I love to use Creole in my texts. But my writing language is French. I like adding that extra texture, like some Jewish American writers do with Yiddish. And I use Creole whenever it’s impossible for my characters to use French to express a precise feeling or thought.
JM: I think one of the intriguing aspects of this novel is how you manage to communicate acts of extreme violence, of terrifying fury, so lightly, so deftly.
GD: I guess you could say I always work towards making my readers and spectators feel the depth of what I’m saying without indecently vomiting awfulness into their ears. I try to put some distance between my own emotions and how I tell my stories. That’s one of the reasons the musicality of my texts is so important to me.
JM: But in your life, outside of writing, you remain pretty direct in your activism, pretty militant.
GD: Now that I’m back in France, I’ve organized a forum for Caribbean people living in Paris to speak about their concerns, for us to listen to each other’s work, to organize. I call it the Senate (le Sena in Creole), and we meet every two or three months. I’m also working with a group trying to decolonize the arts, hoping for more representation for people of color, especially on stage and in films.
JM: And you’re still trying to make sure that women have “a room of their own”?
GD: All my writing concerns women, violence against them, their need for freedom, their resistance to being confined to “family life.” I think I was born a feminist, seeing how difficult it was for women, like my mother, to make a go of it after she divorced my father, with all those kids to take care of. Maybe the happiest I’ve ever been, certainly the freest, was when I returned alone to Guadeloupe in the eighties as a teacher, living according to the natural rhythms of the island, plunging into politics with other artists and writers. And now I take that energy and put it into my women characters.
JM: Well, Gerty, that energy is not just in your characters!
GD: I know, I think it’s in the universe, but you have to grab for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR
© EMIR SRKALOVIC
GERTY DAMBURY is a playwright, novelist, and poet from Guadeloupe. She won the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde in 2015 for her essay “Le rêve de William Alexander Brown.”
JUDITH G. MILLER is Professor of French and Francophone Theater and Collegiate Professor at NYU and Affiliate Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi.
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