Loving words: new lyricism in French Caribbean poetry.

Hurley, E. Anthony

New or rarely heard poetic voices from the French Caribbean, such as Marcelle Archelon-Pepin, Ernest Pepin, and Gilette Bazile from Guadeloupe, or Michele Bilavarn and Annick Collineau de Montaguere from Martinique, each of whom has published a collection of poems within the last ten years, have been exploring the link between words of love and love of words. The works of these poets provoke the question: what is the function of poetry in the "new" French Caribbean? This essay examines the different role played by these five poets (four women and one man) as they celebrate love, sensuality, and verbal beauty in their search for a new life. It will provide both brief examples of the productions of these writers that illustrate what I am calling the new lyricism of the French Caribbean and an interpretive synthesis of these new features.

The Guadeloupean Marcelle Archelon-Pepin's poems, published under the title Ciselures sur nuits d'ecume,(1) are for the most part very short (usually four or five lines long), self-referential, highly imaged, but with little direct political content. The brevity of her poems demands, like the haiku, a condensing of imagery and a maximizing of the associative and evocative force of individual words. There is no attempt to inscribe or proclaim a Caribbean cultural heritage in her poetry. Her very real connection to her native land is expressed allusively at the level of emotion rather than of social commitment. At the same time some aspects of her poetic practice provide a clear link with metropolitan French literary conventions.

One such feature of Archelon-Pepin's poetry is her use of classical allusions, references to figures of Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian mythology (Serapis, Persephone, Morpheus). A typical example of this practice is to be found in the poem "Mirages" (6): "Les cases d'ebene / dans un ciel de jade / ont defie Artemis, / Une colombe / de ses ailes blanches / les a parties" (The ebony shacks / in a jade sky / have defied Artemis / A dove / with its white wings / have decked them out). The privileging of Western "classical" traditions that were formerly associated with exposure to the "best" in education is curious in the light of the decline in the value of such an education even in the modern metropole, where "scientific" expertise particularly in relation to electronic technology has created a new elite. Thus Archelon-Pepin's poetic practice in this respect represents a desire for reconciliation with an outmoded but still relevant European cultural tradition. This is a departure from the direction implicitly proposed for French Caribbean poetic creation by Leon-Gontran Damas and Aime Cesaire since the late 1930s. The Negritude-oriented poetry of these two writers was generally "committed" to the reclamation of an African or Caribbean cultural identity and to the liberation of the Caribbean peoples of color. It focused therefore primarily on political and sociocultural "realities" and often took the form of voicing individual and community convictions and aspirations in relation to race and culture and specifically to the African heritage, particularly in response and opposition to the negating and alienating force of metropolitan French culture. This aspect of Archelon-Pepin's poetry thus represents a rejection of cultural separatism.

Archelon-Pepin furthermore links herself to nineteenth-century metropolitan literary conventions through her self-conscious focusing on the exploration and expression of her internal experience as a poet. In "Le desespoir du poete" (The Poet's Despair; 8) she describes herself in these terms: "Je suis le poete / aux mains vides / qui hante le monde / dans sa ronde rituelle" (I am the poet / with empty hands / haunting the world / in its ritual round). This self-consciousness manifests itself, as with other French lyric poets before her (including Ronsard, Hugo, Lamartine, Baudelaire), in meditating on the source of her poetry. Thus, in "Inspiration" (11) she reveals that poetic inspiration for her is inseparable from pain. Water and fire are presented as elemental forces of painful purification and are used as metaphors for her writing: "Comme une cascade, / comme une flamme qui pousse / comme une pluie infinie / cette douleur en un tonnerre / devale le flanc des ecritures" (Like a waterfall / like a growing flame / like an unending rain / this pain in a thunderclap / hurtles down the writings' side).

The pain of creation is related to the experience of love, which is a major theme in Archelon-Pepin's poetry. Two poems in this collection bear the title "Amour" (Love). In the first (30), love is associated metaphorically with sensuous caresses that have the explosive passion of a volcano: "Une main / court / la peau grise du volcan" (A hand / roams over / the gray skin of the volcano). In the second "Love" poem (33), love is associated both with suffering and with the harmful power of words: "Il est des jours / mon coeur sanguinolent / de tes mots en torture / s'ouvre en corolle / pour t'aimer un peu plus" (There are days / my heart bleeding / from your words in torment / opens like a corolla / to love you a little more). In an untitled poem (25) it is the repetition of variations of the words "t'aimer" (love you) throughout the poem that gives it its harmony: "Hier / je t'ai aime / pour les reflets de ton ombre. / Aujourd'hui, je t'aime / pour la transparence de tes yeux. / Etranger / Vais-je t'aimer demain?" (Yesterday / I loved you / for the reflections of your shadow. / Today, I love you / for the transparency of your eyes. / Stranger / Will I love you tomorrow?). Love is represented as a process that leaves only doubt, in which the loved one remains a stranger and the future only a question without an answer. The conflicting qualities associated with the loved one of reflection and transparency, indicating opposites of impenetrability and penetrability, produce only uncertainty and pain. It is this pain, however, that functions as the spur to creative production. In "Regard" (Look; 26), for example, the pain of love is an exciting source of the words that constitute the poem: "Vos yeux, / ces Oceans / m'ont fouettee / avec leur houle de mots" (Your eyes, / those Oceans / have whipped me / with their swell of words). In "Message" (27) the lover's eyes have a different function and a different effect. They represent threats to her existence as a woman: "Dans vos yeux / mon essence de femme / s'est evaporee. / Vous avez voulu de vos mains la tenir en berceau. / Entre vos doigts, elle est passee / Comme vous passez" (In your eyes / my woman's essence / has evaporated. / You wanted to keep it cradled in your hands. / Between your fingers, it has passed / As you are passing). In neither poem is the gender of the love partner specified. What is important is the connection established between the partner's eyes and the woman poet in her twin roles as poet and woman: the partner's eyes have the paradoxical potential both to initiate the creative process and to dissolve gender identity.

The poetic persona projected by Archelon-Pepin is self-consciously and assertively female, sensitive to the possibility of her own existential annihilation as a woman in any love relationship. Pain serves as a stimulus and as the connecting link between poetic creation and love, both of which have special meaning for this woman poet. Not only does the love experience operate as the very substance of poetic activity, but poetry acquires dynamic significance as the affirmative act by means of which the poet retains her freedom and integrity as a woman.

The Guadeloupean Gilette Bazile is similarly self-conscious as a poet. The preface to her 1989 collection Clins d'OEil(2) (Winks) characterizes Bazile's verse as "oneiric poetry" and suggests that the poet is beyond theme, instant, subject, and object, since artistic creation is the only thing on earth that allows her to snatch herself away from the constraints of temporality and to fix in the Elsewhere the drafts of ideals to come. Bazile's poetic practice, the preface further asserts, makes her above all a witness, a researcher, and often a guide. These assertions are undoubtedly valid, and Bazile does assume poetic responsibility by placing great emphasis on the "je," on the I-subject of the poetic discourse. What is also striking is the way in which her poems, which are often self-referential, deliberate, and conscious, move constantly toward lyricism.

This fusion of features that may be characterized as traditional and modernist is reflected also in Bazile's tendency to adopt directly or indirectly the rhythm of the classical alexandrine. In "Je chante" (I Sing; 10) poetic ancestry is conveyed somewhat contradictorily in hidden (broken) alexandrines that are firmly linked to a metropolitan French literary tradition: "Je chante quand il pleut. / Je chante comme un cri, / cette ancestrale veine / qui me tient par le gout / par les doigts par le crane" (I sing when it rains, / I sing like a shout, / this ancestral vein / that holds me by the taste / by the fingers by the skull). While the ancestry alluded to by Bazile is not identified in the poem, the use of the alexandrine as the basic form of the poetic song suggests that the poetic ancestry which prevails here is not the African, reclaimed by so many Caribbean poets since the 1930s, but implicitly the European.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that Bazile reverts in "Dis, poete" (Tell Me, Poet; 21) to the convention of poetic reportage, of self-inquiry following an experiential journey of the type made famous by Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The poem presents itself as an internal dialogue, in which the poet responds to the questions she has posed herself: what have you seen, what did you take, what did you understand? The poet's reply - "Ai appris le fier silence / de toute grandeur innee, l'ordre classant les etres et les choses" (I have learned the proud silence / of all innate greatness, the order classifying beings and things) - situates her within the universalizing European lineage of cosmic magi-philosopher-poets.

In "Attente" (Expectation; 62) Bazile reveals the mysterious word that her poetic search has discovered - Love, the emblem for the poet of all poetic activity: "Moi qui revais d'argile et de voix interieures / Pour faconner au siecle un mot rare, vibrant, / . . . / Je ne trouvai qu'un mot dans l'ardeur eveillee" (I who dreamed of clay and of inner voices / to craft in the century a rare word, resonant, / . . . / I found only one word in fervor awakened). The fixed verse form in which this dependence on love as a poetic panacea is expressed creates a strong impression of anachronism. Even when the form changes, however, and becomes more flexible, more modern, the same impression persists. "Mon coeur chante" (My Heart Sings; 75), for example, is another celebration of love, as the poet seeks to convey the depth of her emotion intensified by separation and anticipation. The capitalized personifications of Hope and Peace impart a flavor of archaism to a text which without them would not have drawn attention to its temporality: "Mon coeur qui vit de toi / A pare son autel / De ses fleurs d'Esperance / Engrangees aux moissons / De mes etes de Paix / Pour t'accueillir bientot / Au quai des retrouvailles" (My heart that lives on you / Has decked out its altar / With its flowers of Hope / Gathered in the harvests / Of my summers of Peace / to welcome you soon / At the reunion quay). By this device the poet takes a leap backward onto a tradition of writing and feeling with which she evidently feels quite comfortable.

Significantly, it is in the one poem which attempts to explore the identity dilemma that a conspicuously fresh note is struck. The poem "Identite" (92) stands out among all the others, despite its use of a conventional rhyme and versification: "Je suis nee d'un arcen-ciel. / Mes veines, fleuves d'horizons divers, / Sont d'un enfant d'univers. / Charroi d'epices, de tamtam, de miel, / De mistral doux ou de pomme" (I was born from a rainbow. / My veins, rivers of diverse horizons, / Are those of a child of the universe. / A cart full of spices, tom-tom, honey, / Of sweet mistral or apple). This poem echoes the consciousness of racial polyvalency expressed by Damas in Black-Label: "trois fleuves coulent dans mes veines" (three rivers flow in my veins).(3) The narrow shoe of Damas's Negritude, however, with its privileging of the African cultural heritage, clearly does not fit Bazile. The focus and themes Bazile adopts are rooted in metropolitan conventions that are already outdated in continental France, and her avoidance of contemporality diminishes the vigor and conviction of her poetry. What her poetry exemplifies is a desire to avoid poetic production grounded in a new sociocultural reality. It is evident from the inconclusive note on which this poem ends that the identity dilemma has not been resolved for this poet. But it is the awareness and the acknowledgment of this dilemma that helps Bazile find her voice.

The Martinican Michele Bilavarn expresses a different sensibility and different preoccupations. Her highly sensual poetry attempts to capture in impressionistic strokes the outer and inner, the visual and emotional, aspects of her woman's experience. Her primary poetic identity is that of a woman, and the thematic focus of Les ombres du soleil (Shadows of the Sun),(4) as the titles of so many of her poems indicate, is women: "Une femme d'ombre" (A Woman of Shadow; 11), "Femmes" (Women; 13), "Mouvement de femme" (Woman's Movement; 15), "Nina" (17), "Femme" (Woman; 19), "Nazila" (23), "Petite fille de l'amour" (Love Child; 86). She explores an inner world ignored or neglected by the poetic patriarchs of the French Caribbean. For her, considerations of gender supersede those of racial or cultural affiliation.

Bilavarn's poetic activity is grounded in and stimulated by her identity as a woman, and it is within this world closed to men that she chooses to let her creative imagination take flight. In "Premiere rencontre" (First Encounter; 22), for example, the poet evokes an experience of physical and emotional intimacy between two lovers identified clearly by the feminine personal pronouns as women: "Elles s'assirent dos a dos / Sur la crete luisante / De l'ecume des jours. / Leurs mains s'eleverent / Cherchant l'espace immense / Ou leurs coeurs et leurs corps / Se comprendraient enfin" (They sat down back to back / On the gleaming crest / Of the foam of the days. / Their hands rose up / Seeking the immense space / Where their hearts and bodies / Would finally understand each other). In "La panthere en folie" (The Crazy Panther; 30) Bilavarn transforms a characterization that in a typical male perception would have reduced the woman to objectified animal sexuality into an image of self-conscious power and beauty. The wild feline is the alter ego and emblem of the woman, in whom violence is transmuted into the essential rhythm by which she is defined. The sensuality conveyed by these female characteristics (violence and rhythm), moreover, is presented not as subject matter that is external to the text but becomes part of its substance and is reinforced by the spatial arrangement of the poem, which moves from left to right in a descending sinuous pattern across the page: "Un matin de printemps / la panthere devint / rythme du corps / immense . . . / La violence meurtire mourut / pour laisser place / enfin / aux rythmes essentiels / d'une danse / SENSUELLE . . ." (One morning in spring / the panther became / the body's rhythm / immense . . . / Bruised violence died / to give way / finally / to the essential rhythms / of a SENSUAL dance). The use of uppercase characters for "SENSUELLE" and of the suspension points immediately following dramatically isolates the word and underscores the importance the poet attributes to sensuality.

Bilavarn conceives of the poem as a form of dance that opens the door of the imagination. She therefore tries to capture the dance rhythms by which for her the essence of the universe is revealed and to reproduce these in her poetry. In "Danse" (34) the cadence of the short lines is underscored by alliteration and the images convey the fusion between human and plant life. Here it is the submission to natural rhythms that permits the transcendence of a purely corporeal existence and guarantees an entry into a reality of true life: "Dans le rythme universel / De la Danse, / Il y a comme un murmure / Comme une blessure. / . . . / Dans le rythme universel / D'une danse innee / Ton corps devient tige / Et le feuillage ardent / De tes mains / De tes yeux / S'envole a tout jamais / Vers l'horizon dore / D'un monde bien reel / Ou tu vivras / Enfin" (In the universal rhythm / Of the Dance / There is like a whisper / Like a wound. / . . . / In the universal rhythm / Of an innate dance / Your body becomes a stem / And the ardent foliage / Of your hands / Of your eyes / Flies away for ever / Toward the golden horizon / Of a very real world / Where you will live / At last).

Rhythm is invested with the same life-giving potential in "Paysage" (Scenery; 79), a poem that is marked by its self-conscious transcription of emotion. The poet's sensitivity to rhythm enables her to move from observation of an external scene of beauty to participation in its essence: "Je vivais au rythme du paysage / Et j'inscrivais en moi / La paix d'un lieu si beau. / Je me sentais / En mutation intense / Face a un passe / Qui mourait doucement . . ." (I lived by the rhythm of the scene / And I inscribed in me / The peace of so beautiful a place. / I felt myself / In intense mutation / In the face of a past / That was quietly dying). As the poem intimates, the poet's response to the scene is linked to the creative process: the poem is born from and conveys the transforming vibration of her inner rhythm.

There is no suggestion in Bilavarn's poetry of a creative impulse related to a desire for social transformation, nor is there any explicit or implicit political message. For Bilavarn, poetry primarily derives from and transcribes her experience as a woman, which includes her accessibility to universal and cosmic rhythm and dance. It is a profoundly personal and individual activity through which the poet gives expression to a voice that sings its own songs. Her poetic vision is directed internally rather than externally, toward self-transformation rather than toward social change. But it is precisely this concentration on a realm of experience that Bilavarn explores with passionate skill which enables her to produce very strong, highly original poetry.

The poems of the Martinican Annick Collineau de Montaguere in Nostalgie (1989)(5) do not consistently convey the intensity of creative imagination exhibited by the other poets under study here. Her poems are for the most part "occasional," in the sense that they are personal reminiscences of family members and friends, or memories of the pains and joys of love. The poems are generally marked by a transparent simplicity with little evidence of figurative or formal boldness. A discussion of recent variations on the poetic representation of love in the French Caribbean would, however, not be complete without reference to one of her poems, "Toi, l'amour" (You, Love), which stands out among Caribbean "love" poems if only because of its candid sexuality: "Comment ne pas fremir / Et mourir de plaisir, / Quand de tes mains gourmandes, / Mes formes tu parcours, / Lorsque mes seins se tendent / A la bouche d'amour? // Demain est encore loin! / Caresse-moi encore, / De tes baisers j'ai faim, / Promene-les sur mon corps! // Quand tes suaves levres / Viennent devorer la fievre / Et ma gorge se noue! / . . . / Amour incontrolable, / Qui me rend malleable, / Demeure toujours en moi, / Je suis faite pour toi!" (How can I not tremble / And die with pleasure, / When your greedy hands / You run all over my body, / When my breasts stretch out / To your mouth of love? // Tomorrow is still far away! / Caress me some more, / I am hungry for your kisses, / Run them over my body! // When your smooth lips / Come and devour my neck, / I feel the fever rising / And my throat gets knotted! / . . . / Uncontrollable love, / That makes me malleable, / Stay always in me, / I am made for you!). In this poem the poetic persona speaks for herself, takes responsibility as "je" (I) for the speech act as well as for her own physical pleasure. The frequent rhymes - regular and internal - and assonances intensify the ambience of sensuality by titillating the ear. The poet owns and names her body as well as her reactions and issues instructions to direct the sexual activity.

Such an explicit expression of frank sensuality by a woman poet is rare even in the metropolitan French literary tradition and particularly in the French Caribbean, where male-centered social values have had, to a greater extent than in continental France, a restrictive effect on women's self-expression on the subject of sexual desire. Collineau de Montaguere does have, however, at least one distinguished antecedent within the French Caribbean tradition. Her compatriot, the Martinican Marie-Magdeleine Carbet, the most prolific of French Caribbean women writers from the late 1930s to the 1970s, published similarly sensual poetry, including poems celebrating sexuality between women.(6) Whatever her limitations as a poet, Collineau de Montaguere has asserted her right to her own voice as a woman despite the expectations and restrictions of a cultural milieu that has been unwilling to recognize this strain of poetic activity.

It has been more comfortable for the French Caribbean to recognize, accommodate, and even applaud the use of women, objectified or essentialized, by the male luminaries of the francophone literary tradition (particularly Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and to a lesser extent Edouard Glissant) to represent their connection to their native land, in Africa or the Caribbean, as mother or lover. This practice, undoubtedly intended to pay tribute to the importance of women in these societies, carries its own baggage of patriarchy all the more deleterious in that it has generally been unconscious. It could be for this reason that Negritude attracted the wholehearted support of so few women writers of the 1940s and 1950s. One of the most original male voices to adapt and renovate this practice is the Guadeloupean Ernest Pepin, whose poetry provides interesting convergences with the works of the women poets we have examined so far, particularly in the increased attention attached to love and to women, reflected in his 1984 collection Au verso du silence (On the Reverse Side of Silence).(7) His poetry is, however, more explicitly rooted in the sociocultural realities of the Caribbean than is that of the women.

The first poem, "Notre amour sans archives" (Our Love With No Archives), sets the trajectory of the Whole collection, in its focus on the role of women and the role of love. While the tendency to reification of the woman manifests itself in the opening apposition of the first two lines, the poet's project is to bring to light the forgotten and unrecognized contributions and beauty of African women. Thus he pays tribute to the "Reine du royaume de Guinee / Amphore laquee de noir / laissant ebloui le potier/ Reine du royaume de Guinee / oubliee" (Queen of the kingdom of Guinea / Amphora lacquered in black / leaving the potter dazzled / Queen of the kingdom of Guinea / forgotten) as well as to "Celles qui suivirent Behanzin / celles que le navire forca / celles / effrayees par l'aurore bleme arrondi dans leur ventre / Leur chair germee loin d'elles / dans les champs negriers" (Those women who followed Behanzin / those whom the ship forced / those / frightened by the pale rounded dawn in their bellies / Their flesh germinated far from them / in the slavers' fields; 13-14). The motivation, as the title indicates, is love. This is an African-Caribbean love poem, directed not to a single woman as the French lyric convention requires, but to the many black women with whom the poet recognizes a historical and spiritual connection.

Pepin's evocation of African women and their beauty, despite his use of metaphors that are reminiscent of nineteenth-century Parnassian objectification, is, however, never impersonal. His descriptions are colored by and infused with empathy, admiration, and love. Love is presented as the missing component in the history of Caribbean people of color: "nous voila / tressant les nattes de l'amour / mais notre amour n'a pas d'histoire" (there we are plaiting braids of love / but our love has no history; 14). Other poets, including Cesaire and Glissant, have attempted their own historical rewritings out of their awareness of the omissions, inaccuracies, and distortions of the prevailing European narratives of the Caribbean. Pepin introduces another perspective. He alludes to the fact that accounts of the past of the Caribbean peoples have not presented the people of the Caribbean as human beings with human emotions and have not been authored by people with a primary responsibility and emotional attachment to the Caribbean people. Thus it is this form of love that impels Pepin to acknowledge his debt as a man to the women of his race and to recognize poetically the vital role of their heroism throughout the history of slavery and colonization: "Femme / capitale ou s'edifie mon courage / . . . / tu as pose sur moi l'etole / et me voila fait homme" (Woman / capital where my courage is erected / . . . / you placed the stole upon me / and here am I become a man).

Love in Pepin's poetry does not manifest itself solely as admiration and respect. It also takes the form of sexuality. It is evident that his imagination is sometimes stimulated by his own woman-directed sexual desire as a male. Woman is presented in "Alors" (Then; 22) as "femme-pirogue" (canoe-woman), "femme-marronne" (maroon-woman), but this celebration of the woman as heroine and as courageous is fused with sensuality: "l'eau neuve du desir / lavera notre histoire" (the new water of desire / will bathe our history). The poet seeks a new relationship in which adoration and sexual desire may become reconciled. This is not the expression of a spiritually and emotionally sick sensibility such as that reflected in the prurient mixture of religiosity and sexuality prevalent in the decadent strain of French nineteenth-century romanticism, of which Baudelaire was a preeminent exponent. The poet's interest here is precisely to repair the damage done in the past to relations between black men and women and to forge a healthy new alliance based on honesty.

In this collection, therefore, love for women serves as the emotive force on which many of Pepin's poems depend. The relationship between love and poetic practice is illustrated admirably in a brief untitled poem (27) which demonstrates the poetic search for beauty through the concentrated fusion of imagery: "Coupe en deux / l'amour n'a plus sa perfection / de frere siamois" (Cut in two / love no longer has its perfection / of a Siamese brother). The awareness of separation has long been a preoccupation of French Caribbean writers. This separation has usually been conceived of as the result of the slave trade that forcibly isolated Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean from their continental African base communities. While Pepin is conscious of this loss, he focuses on a related form of separation (emotional and spiritual) that has resulted from the same set of historical circumstances and implicitly suggests the practice of love as a solution to the problem of cultural fragmentation.

The voices of these five writers, who have as a common denominator an interest in love, particularly in passionate, sensual love, indicate a new direction in French Caribbean poetry. Since the appearance of Legitime Defense, the journal launched in June 1932 by a group of young Martinicans in Paris,(8) there has been a consistent attack on a variety of writing emanating from the French Caribbean perceived as inauthentic. Writings that could be considered as lyrical or "romantic," exploring natural beauty or love, were dismissed as bourgeois, imitative, assimilationist, exotic, doudouiste, and beneath consideration as serious Caribbean literature. The situation of people of color in the French Caribbean was perceived as being so desperate that commitment to the solution of their problems was expected to take precedence over everything else. Poetry, it was felt, should be a weapon of the sociocultural revolution that needed to take place if the French Caribbean were to be free. Cesaire himself asserted that literature should be regarded as "sacred": "Artistic creation must, by its force, mobilize virgin emotional forces, so that unsuspected psychic resources would rise to its call and contribute to the restoration of the social body that has been shattered by the shock of colonialism."(9)

These five writers demonstrate that there is now a movement, conscious or not, toward avoiding what might be considered "committed" or directly political poetry. Poets are moving toward a new lyricism and a new estheticism, even when informed by a retrograde movement toward the conventional lyricism of metropolitan poets. The poetic subject is becoming less communal, less the voice of a people, and more an individual voice, conscious of her/himself as a poet, seeking beauty in language, associating beauty with emotional experiences, concerned with passion and desire, and interested in translating these emotional experiences in their poetry. Poetry is reclaiming its territory: that of the word, divorced from political intent and transcending considerations of cultural specificity. This means, in fact, that these French Caribbean poets are making peace with the French language and with the notion of cultural domination with which the language has been associated. They have found a new path between exoticism and commitment, between cultural self-alienation and political activism. The experience of the greatest of the Caribbean poets (Cesaire, Damas, and Glissant) indicates that poetic power necessitates self-awareness and vision - the capacity to apprehend present realities with honesty and courage and to envision alternative realities with faith and lucidity. The beauty of their poetry is directly proportional to its "truth" and to its power to transcend the limitations of temporality. The focus of these younger poets on love may well be a new stage in the continuing movement in the French Caribbean toward the reclamation of artistic integrity and freedom.

SUNY, Stony Brook

1 Marcelle Archelon-Pepin, Ciselures sur nuits d'ecume, Paris, Silex, 1987.

2 Gilette Bazile, Clins d'OEil, Nimes, Bene, 1987.

3 L.-G. Damas, Black-Label, Paris, Gallimard, 1956, p. 9.

4 Michele Bilavarn, Les ombres du soleil, Saint-Esteve, IMF, 1984.

5 Annick Collineau de Montaguere, Nostalgie, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Debresse, 1989.

6 See particularly "Tourment" and "Rancune" in Marie-Magdeleine Carbet's Point d'orgue, Paris, La Productrice, 1958, pp. 16 and 25-27 respectively.

7 Ernest Pepin, Au verso du silence, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1984.

8 In an essay entitled "Misere d'une poesie," intensely critical of the kind of literature produced by the French Caribbean bourgeoisie, Etienne Lero stated: "L'etranger chercherait vainement dans cette litterature un accent original ou profond, l'imagination sensuelle et coloree du noir, l'echo des haines et des aspirations d'un peuple opprime" (It would be impossible for a foreigner to find in this literature a profound or original note, the sensuous and colored imagination of blacks, or the echo of the hatred and aspirations of an oppressed people).

9 See Aime Cesaire, "L'homme de culture et ses responsabilites" (Deuxieme Congres des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, Rome, 26 mars - 1er avril, 1959), Presence Africaine, 24-25 (February-May 1959), p. 122. Translation mine.

WORKS CITED

Archelon-Pepin, Marcelle. Ciselures sur nuits d'ecume. Paris. Silex. 1987.

Bazile, Gilette. Clins d'OEil. Nimes. Bene. 1987.

Bilavarn, Michele. Les ombres du soleil. Saint-Esteve. IMF. 1984.

Carbet, Marie-Magdeleine. Point d'orgue. Paris. La Productrice. 1958.

Cesaire, Aime. "L'homme de culture et ses responsabilites" (Deuxieme Congres des ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, Rome, 26 mars - 1er avril, 1959). Presence Africaine, 24-25 (February-May 1959), pp. 116-22.

de Montaguere, Annick Collineau. Nostalgic. Paris. Nouvelles Editions Debresse. 1989.

Hodge, Merle. "Beyond Negritude: The Love Poems." In Critical Perspectives on Leon-Gontran Damas. Keith Q. Warner, ed. Washington D.C. Three Continents. 1988. Pp. 119-45.

Lero, Etienne. "Misere d'une poesie." Legitime Defense, June 1932. Reprinted in Lilyan Kesteloot, Les ecrivains noirs de langue francaise: Naissance d'une litterature. Brussels. Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles. 1975. P. 25.

Pepin, Ernest. Au verso du silence. Paris. L'Harmattan. 1984.

E. ANTHONY HURLEY, a native of Barbados, is Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature and Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He formerly taught for ten years at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and Trinidad. He has written extensively on French Caribbean literature, and some of his articles have appeared in L'Esprit Createur, Callaloo, Degre Second, and Black Images.