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Sketching a Literature from the French Antilles: FROM NEGRITUDE TO CRÉOLITÉ Maryse Condé
When the islanders of Guadeloupe and Martinique get together they tell a story of how one day the Good Lord woke up feeling bored. The earth seemed so empty with its flamboyants, its mapoo trees and the sea that never wearied of lashing out at the rocks. Something was missing, someriling that would add a little imagination, create a little, chaos. That's how God got the idea of creating man. He gathered up a little sand from the seashore, kneaded it, rolled it, and made His first figure, which He put in an oven to bake. Then He went and lay down under a tree and fell asleep. A smell of burning woke Him up. It was His first version of man that had come out all burned and black, no use to anyone. He threw it away as far as He could and set to work again, harder than ever. But the same thing happened again. He fell asleep while His creature was in the oven, and when He awoke with a start it was a little overbaked, slightly too brown. Once more He went to work, this time determined to demonstrate His talents as Creator. His third version turned out perfect, the color of the waxing moon. He hugged it to His heart out of sheer joy.
The first creature that had come out black, ugly, and useless, was the ancestor of the black man; the second, the mulatto; while the third, the one He clasped to His heart, the one He preferred in its perfection, was the forefather of the white man.
Though it may be a folktale told in fun, this story has all the makings of a myth of origin, for isn't a myth of origin nothing less than how a people sees itself symbolically within the world and its relationship with the rest of the Universe? I would say that to a certain extent the entire history of the literature of the Lesser Antilles is composed of the ceaseless efforts of its writers to uproot from the collective unconscious this myth, this seemingly innocent tale of creation that is nonetheless loaded with negative values, and to...