Embodied Antillean women

This article explores the intersection of gender and cultural identities in two novels, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) and Suzanne Dracius’s L’Autre qui danse (1989). Through comparative and close analyses, this article demonstrates that these two Antillean francophone women writers reject and renegotiate sexist and essentialist tendencies, in particular the auto-exoticization and disembodiment of women characters across the body of Antillean literature. These tendencies are notably present within Antillanité and Créolité, two dominant concepts of twentieth-century Antillean literature and thought. This article first explores these two writers’ responses to auto-exoticization, demonstrating how their literary treatment of women’s sexuality diverges markedly from hypersexualized portrayals of women by certain Créoliste authors. The article also examines the representation of Creole cuisine and language, and calls into question Antillean literature scholar Celia Britton’s argument that these two elements tend to reduce Antillean texts to ‘edible’ objects of exotic pleasure. In its second section, this article investigates Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacité. It suggests that Schwarz-Bart and Dracius adapt Glissant’s opacité to present women as impervious human subjects whose bodies do not make them exotic stereotypes but rather figures of resistance to masculine violence and colonialism.