Lecture, Session 12
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Analysis: La Rue Cases Nègres
A contest over the politics and meanings of education is central to the earlier autobiographical novel of Joseph Zobel. La Rue Cases Nègres, Black Shack Alley, was published in 1950. The novel begins in rural Martinique during the early-mid twentieth century. This vivid, readable narrative traces the boyhood and coming of age of José Hassam. We meet the curious child when he is seven years old, living in desperate poverty on a rural sugar plantation. Thanks largely to his grandmother’s stalwart determination and José’s own limitless curiosity and critical mind, the boy escapes the inhumane servitude of the sugar cane plantation and succeeds against all odds through the colonial, French school system. He begins attending school in a rural town an hour’s walk from the plantation. Though his Francophile teacher`s harsh discipline is a model for the instructor in Chamoiseau’s School Days, this one’s ambivalence does not prevent him from recognizing the child’s brilliance. The teacher champions José’s cause and his move to the Capital and an elite secondary school where José’s dark skin is most conspicuous. The novel ends as José prepares to take the bachelaureate exam. He had wallowed in boredom with French history and literature, whose total exclusion of Martiniquan texts mirrored his ostracism as a child from a poor, Creole speaking, female-headed family. Then, during his last year of school, in rebellion against the colonial curriculum, he discovers Creole-informed literature by and about Caribbean people, a politicized literature resisting colonial rule and valorizing Creole culture. This discovery reignites his limitless intellectual curiosity, which he shares with those less fortunate. He organizes an informal Caribbean book group of avid readers--one of whom he teaches to read--composed of poor servants of the rich in the capital city of Martinique. Like Patrick Chamoiseau’s narrator, Zobel’s credits his infatuation with writing (and his ticket out of poverty) to his belated introduction to Caribbean literature.
The young José’s consciousness is shaped not only by his indomitable grandmother, M’man Tin, but also by another elder, Mr. Médouze. Medouze is a worker on the sugar cane plantation; like M’man Tine, he is slowly being killed and starved by his life there. As José’s mentor, he teaches him to understand the structural violence of the sugar cane plantation. These lessons are imparted in Creole, using Creole genres, riddles. In Creole, a performer announces the start of one of these routines by suddenly, rhythmically shouting, E Krik! The responder just as suddenly responds in syncopation, e kraken! And the exchange begins. These rhetorical, syncopated, competitive games function like math quizzes; they test and sharpen José’s mind. The medium and the message converge to communicate and valorize resistance, counter-hegemony. They might be colonized physically but their minds are not colonized. Even if they can’t oust the elite, they can reject their meanings and values.
Medouze teaches José about Guinée, or Africa. He valorizes that legacy, a source of pride and morality. He retells the history of the unjust system of slavery that imprisoned his grandparents. But he also rejects the notion that as a result of abolition in 1848, they are now free. He rejects the hegemonic definition of freedom. After abolition, he recounts, "We were free but our bellies were empty." "The Master became the Boss." "There were no more beatings but there was no obligation to pay a decent wage."
Later in the novel, the late Medouze’s influence on José’s consciousness comes alive in an essay José writes in French for the lycée. His prose betrays the lie of free wage labor since abolition. The essay presents the harsh contrast between the sweet juice of sugar cane and its bitter conditions of production. In capitalist ideology, commodities only have meaning in the market--the brand name, the price, the store you purchased it at, the person who gave it to you. But the conditions of its production are invisible.
The essay’s final haunting image of the emaciated worker’s body crucified on a plank recalls the death of his friend and teacher, Mr. Medouze. José’s grief begins when, one night, he goes, as usual, to Medouze’s hut, but finds the door locked from the outside. The workers form a search party and discover his emaciated body in a field. When they seize his body, they simultaneously assert symbolic control over the meanings of his life and death, in a tangible exercise of resistance. At his funeral in the clearing between the shacks, they tell and act out tales. E Krik! The leader yells out in staccato. E Krak! The chorus jumps in in response. The master storyteller expertly mimes the stances of beasts, and the carriages of all sorts of people. The tales are interspersed with call and response songs, both full of ribald language. Bitter irony, wicked self-mockery are the rule. In between, they re-present the meaning of Medouze’s death, inverting the power relations to reinvent the story of Medouze’s life. Medouze was literally worked to death in the cane fields, though ostensibly free, enslaved to the sugar cane plantation owners.
Among the poor in the French Antilles, there have always been those who resisted the view of their speech and themselves as inferior. They don’t seem to suffer from the ambivalence that haunts people like The Teacher in School Days or various characters in Black Shack Alley who create, use and abuse the Other to deny their own Creole identities .
