Kunapipi XXVI:1

ELIZABETH WALCOTT-HACKSHAW
Cyclone Culture and the Paysage Pineaulien

In the opening pages of Gisèle Pineau’s, L’Espérance–macadam, the female narrator’s language is broken, fragmented, as the body of the text itself reflects the passing of a cyclone or, as it is called in the novel, ‘Le passage de La Bête’. There is a direct link between the violence and violation of the woman’s body by the ‘Beast,’ which in the novel is both man and cyclone — man as cyclone — and the Guadeloupean landscape. This dual force not only razes the landscape, destroying vegetation and homes but is used metaphorically to describe analogous acts of violence by men against the physical landscape of the female body. The novel begins and ends with a cyclone and it is within this seasonal, cyclical or what I would like to call cyclonic structure that Pineau takes us into the community of Savane.

Pineau is preoccupied in L’Espérance-macadam with the violence and victimisation of the Antillean woman and, with few exceptions, there is a pathological comportment of the Antillean man, as unpredictable, indifferent, destructive and as apocalyptic a force as a cyclone. This is in no way a new theme in Antillean or even Caribbean literature but what sets Pineau apart is the link that she creates between cyclone, culture, metaphor and landscape. Her language both reveals and conceals voices but at the same time continues to suppress. This essay, as part of a longer work examining the treatment of the paysage antillais in the works of French Caribbean women writers, explores Pineau’s use of the cyclone metaphor and the manner in which it affects and effects a cultural landscape, creating a cyclone culture.

SAVANE’S CRIMES
The reader is taken into the community of Savane through several voices, but Pineau privileges the female voice and in particular that of Eliette. This widow who has survived two hurricanes and two husbands tells the story of Savane from its Edenic beginnings to its present cycle of destruction. A before and after scenario is presented: the natural earthly paradise of Savane in the time of Joab, Eliette’s stepfather, becomes the Savane after Joab — ‘a paradise lost’. Eliette for most of her life has closed herself off from the community in an attempt to block out and protect herself from the chaos and crimes committed in Savane. Pineau uses Eliette to explore and exploit the violent, complicit nature of Savane and its crime of silencing stories of violation.

From the onset Eliette foregrounds natural devastation and Savane’s own violent nature, by exposing the reader to the effects of the brutal forces of the cyclone and to the man made forces of destruction. These atrocities, with multiple authors and victims, are piled like refuse in the opening pages of the novel and are scattered throughout it, along with images of broken tree branches, mattresses and sheets of galvanised iron.

Du sang répandu dans les herbes du chemin. Une langue bleue tirée d’entre les fleurs du pied-mango. Des yeux gris amarrés au bout d’une corde. Un petit corps démantibulé au bas du pont des Nèfles. Une Hortense débitée par le sabre. Et ces enfants parties dans la montagne et jamais revenues. Et combien d’autres faits raides à évoquer. (11)

(Blood spread on the grass along the path. A blue tongue pulled from the flowers of the mango tree. Gray eyes tied to the end of a rope. A small mangled body at the bottom of the Nefles bridge. Hortense chopped up with a cutlass. And those children having left for the mountains, never to return. And how many other acts too terrible to mention)1

Each crime will be recalled and listed by Eliette because she is aware of her dual role as both perpetrator and victim in this culture of Rien vu Rien entendu.