Many Jews lived alongside enslaved Africans in the Antilles from the seventeenth century onward. Drawn by the commercial needs of the nascent colonies, a great many of them settled in Martinique or in Guadeloupe, taking advantage of the United Provinces’ independence from the Spanish crown — decided at the Congress of Münster in 1648 — to expand their activity on the islands. There, like so many others, they bought enslaved people arriving from the African coasts1. At first glance, the asymmetry of the power relations forbids any joint consideration of their persecutions. And yet, on closer inspection, Jews and enslaved people are subject to systems of exclusion which, even if not similar2, can be compared — particularly when one examines their lived experience through the prism of invisibility, and when invisibility is defined not in a literal sense but as a “denial of recognition,” in the sense the philosopher Axel Honneth gives the term3. This “social non-existence” is the corollary of many phenomena of subalternity: the feeling of disaffiliation, the impossibility of being heard in the public sphere, the impossibility of speaking out. Many Jews were indeed able to acquire a comfortable social position in the Antilles, but they carried with them the centuries-long history of antisemitic violence — when they did not also suffer it on the islands themselves.
Two Guadeloupean novels, both inspired by slave narratives, place these persecutory violences in confrontation with one another, while at the same time rehabilitating real-life figures from the Antilles. The first is Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière… (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem) (1986)4. The author, born Marise Boucolon in 1937 in Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe), is a journalist, professor of literature, founder of the Centre des études françaises et francophones at Columbia University in the United States, and also a playwright and novelist. Among other works, she has published the historical novel Ségou, which traces the fall of the Bambara kingdom of Ségou in Mali across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as Moi, Tituba sorcière…. This latter work retraces the itinerary of Tituba, daughter of an enslaved woman, initiated into supernatural powers by Man Yaya, who, after her marriage to John Indian, arrives in Boston and then in Salem, where she is a victim of the Salem trials, imprisoned, then amnestied. She is then bought by Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, a Jew, who will give her back her freedom a few years later. The second novel is André Schwarz-Bart’s La Mulâtresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude)5. The author was born in Moselle in 1928. A native Yiddish speaker, he frequented Parisian Antillean circles, published Le Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just) on 1 July 1959 and won the Prix Goncourt that same year. In 1961 he married Simone Brumant, a Guadeloupean student, with whom he settled in Guadeloupe from 1972 onward, after the failure of La Mulâtresse Solitude. This text, inspired by the life of the Guadeloupean enslaved woman Solitude, is divided into two parts. The first, “Bayangumay,” recounts the life of a young enslaved woman up to her departure for Guadeloupe. The second, “Solitude,” traces the path of the child she brought into the world, Rosalie known as “Deux-Âmes” (Two-Souls), a mixed-race child born of rape on the ship that carried her to the Antilles.
How, in these novels, do the Jewish and the enslaved lived experiences interweave, thereby shifting the way we look at violence? How does the invisibility of one group refer back to that of the other, in the sense of a negation of subjectivity and of a “precariousness”6 that prevents them from gaining access to speech? From there, how is this concept of invisibility heuristic in these novels, and how is it impossible to consider it independently of the idea of a “quest for visibility”7 or of visibility itself? Finally, how do these two novels, because they question the emergence of a subjectivity within a context of alienation, allow us to reflect on the mechanisms of the writing of violence and of history?
Weaving together the Jewish and enslaved experiences
If the destinies of enslaved women and of Jews meet in Maryse Condé and André Schwarz-Bart, it is in order to blend more closely into reflections on invisibility and the quest for subjectivity. In Maryse Condé, just as Tituba is alienated, Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo is, in his very body, lopsided and marginal: “Three days later, Noyes came to open the door of my cell. Behind him, in his shadow, slipped the Jew, redder and more lopsided than ever.” (TS, 190) The presentation of Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo is placed under the sign of religious persecutions (TS, 192), and if the witch was imprisoned, the Jews, for their part, are denied access to places that matter to them, such as a synagogue (TS, 193). Tituba and Benjamin are ultimately parasites, in the eyes of those who live alongside them, side by side in the diegesis as in the discourses about them. In chapter 10, a Puritan exclaims: “Really, what are those who govern us thinking? And was it for this that we left England? To see Jews and Negroes proliferating beside us?” (TS, 206)
In André Schwarz-Bart, it is through the play of a “reversibility” between Jewish history and the history of the marrons (maroons) that Solitude’s invisibility and the Jewish persecutions are knotted together8. The slave narratives articulate themselves with Jewish history and Jewish prose, according to a double referentiality, almost at every moment, as Michael Rothberg emphasizes with regard to this author9. Jewish and Antillean identities answer one another, but so do the positions of victim and executioner — in the wake of the problematic of the “gray zone”10. The details of Solitude’s lived experience (down to the names of the characters) can be read both as elements of marronage and as indices of the Jewish persecutions. The novel’s epilogue weaves these links still further, giving La Mulâtresse Solitude the key to a double understanding:
Feeling a faint taste of ash, the stranger will take a few steps at random, will trace circles of ever-widening radius around the site of the Habitation. Here and there, beneath wide dead leaves, lie sleeping foundation stones thrown far afield by the explosion and unearthed, reburied and unearthed again by the innocent hoe of the cultivators: he will strike one of them with his foot. Then, if he cares to salute a memory, he will fill the surrounding space with his imagination; and, if fate is favorable to him, all sorts of human figures will rise up around him, as still do, it is said, beneath the eyes of other travelers, the ghosts that wander among the humiliated ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. (MS, 156)
It should be noted that one of the last lines of Moi, Tituba sorcière… can act in the same way, as an epilogue bringing together singular experiences. Deodatus asks Tituba, on the ship taking her back to her native village: “What is your freedom worth in the face of the servitude of your own people?” (TS, 213). Because this sentence appears after the persecutions committed against Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo’s family, the links are easily woven.
Despite two different strategies, several common themes bring these parallel destinies to light — these lived experiences of persecution and of social invisibility. The first is the extreme violence of History. In Maryse Condé, within a few pages of each other, Tituba’s past “crush[es] her with its weight of sorrows and humiliation” (TS, 200), and the Jews “are so used to persecutions” that they “sniff them out” (TS, 205)11. The dialogues between the enslaved woman and her Jewish master make their experiences answer one another explicitly:
— Tituba, do you know what it is to be a Jew? As early as 629, the Merovingians of France ordered our expulsion from their kingdom. After the Fourth Council under Pope Innocent III, Jews had to wear a circular mark on their clothes and cover their heads. Richard the Lionheart, before leaving on Crusade, ordered a general assault against the Jews. Do you know how many of us lost our lives under the Inquisition?
I did not let myself be outdone and interrupted him:
— And we, do you know how many of us have been bleeding since the coasts of Africa? (TS, 198)
It is also after a discussion of the persecutions of the Jews that Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo wonders about the shadow in Tituba’s eyes: what would give her back her happiness is “Freedom!” (TS, 199). But the two violences are not merely juxtaposed; they can interweave, through intertextual and lyrical mechanisms. By a semantic shift, the Salem trials are perpetrated by the “Gentiles,” those very people — paradoxical name for the young enslaved woman — who have so persecuted the Jews:
I wonder whether Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo was aware of the trials of the Witches of Salem […]. In any case, if he was aware of this sad business, he attributed it to that fundamental cruelty which seemed to him to characterize those they called the Gentiles, and absolved me entirely. (TS, 193)
In André Schwarz-Bart’s work, Rosalie hears, in the midst of the violences, a soft song that recalls the prose of numerous Jewish texts after 1945, like those of Elie Wiesel for example, in La Nuit (Night) (1958): “We go away into the night / We walk in the darkness / In suffering and in death” (MS, 60). The same is true of the image of the human line, found as much in the slave narratives as in testimonies on the concentrationary universe12. The prose is traversed by a breath that can be found in narratives of pogroms (a breath the author had already summoned in Le Dernier des justes) as for example in Bayangumay’s dream:
The huts all around blazed like torches, projecting a thousand cinders onto bodies torn from their sleep and for the most part naked, men, women, children, old people, and the misshapen bodies of grandmothers with pink skulls and drooping jaws. The beings of the night also made use of long curved knives with which they harried the crowd, provoking ill-considered gestures among the children; but, if one of them tried to leave the circle, a stick spat upon him thunder and lightning mingled. Sounds escaped from Bayangumay’s mouth; paying attention to them, she realized that she was murmuring without stopping: what is it?… what is it?… what…? (MS, 35-36)
It is remarkable that the two novels choose, in order to stage the ambiguity between Jewish and enslaved lived experiences, dream-nightmares. In Maryse Condé too, the oneiric space allows Tituba’s lived experience to fuse with that of the Jews. The young enslaved woman dreams of her own confinement at the moment when the smoke of the fire at her Jewish master’s house begins to reach her: “When night came, I had a dream. I wanted to enter a forest, but the trees were leagued against me and black lianas, falling from their tops, ensnared me. I opened my eyes: the room was black with smoke.” (TS, 206) It is moreover during this drama that the nine children of Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo die (TS, 207) — a hyperbolic death insofar as it inverts the traditional images of engendering and birth. These dreams are an efficient framework for the description of violences, as Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron has shown, in particular because they enable the deployment of strategies such as the uncanny13.
It is therefore a common death that awaits the Jews and the enslaved. The image of d’Azevedo’s deceased wife makes the link between Tituba the enslaved woman and her Jewish master: “It was the dead woman who pushed us toward each other.” (TS, 194) The witch wears the dark garments of the deceased wife: “the clothes Benjamin Cohen had given me […] kept the soft, penetrating scent of the dead woman.” (TS, 202). But in both novels, this death quickly slides toward the evocation of a universal death. The communication between Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo and his deceased wife — a transcendence of death made possible by the witch — unfolds after an episode evoking persecuted and massacred Jews: “This generally took place on Sunday evenings when the last friends who had come to exchange news of the Jews scattered across the world had withdrawn after a reading of a verse from their Sacred Book.” (TS, 196) La Mulâtresse Solitude also opens onto a “universal history14” of the persecutions against the Jews, and in Schwarz-Bart as in Maryse Condé, in every detail lodges the intuition of a violence that exceeds it. Hebrew provokes “a kind of anguish” (TS, 196); “the tribulations of the Jews across the earth” (TS, 193) lie behind each of Solitude’s escapades. Thus what is played out in the singular adventure of the two young women are the cycles of violence that André Schwarz-Bart described in Le Dernier des justes. From then on, if Tituba needs milk and blood to perform her witch-sacrifices, that of animals inevitably recalls that of the victims of violences (Blacks and Jews): “Milk, blood! Did I not have the essential liquids, along with the docile flesh of the victims?” (TS, 215) In the same way, the blood spilled becomes, through lyrical prose, an emphatic trace of universal violence: “Blood flooded the earth” (TS, 195).
From then on, beyond death, what is uttered is a common call to liberation. The emancipation of the enslaved is read through the Jewish prism, as the Exodus from Egypt. André Schwarz-Bart wrote in the Figaro littéraire of 26 January 1967, concerning a remark his father had made about this biblical episode: “I believe it is this Jewish child, whose fathers were enslaved under Pharaoh, before becoming so again under Hitler, who took on a fraternal and definitive love for the people of the Antilles15.” When Tituba, for her part, recovers her freedom, Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo recites Isaiah to her:
Thus says the Eternal
Heaven is my throne
And the earth my footstool
What house could you build me
And what place would you give me as a dwelling? (TS, 208)
In both novels, then, we witness “the construction of a textual space inhabited by multiple voices16” as Fleur Kuhn-Kennedy notes with regard to André Schwarz-Bart’s Le Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas). The persecutions refer back to a universal violence.
Invisibility as the condition of a rebellion
This violence performs an invisibilization of the protagonists. Marginalized, set apart, the maroon and the witch, but also the Jews (whether present or not in the plot in André Schwarz-Bart), endure the assaults of the other characters, who deny them any form of subjectivity — whether that subjectivity is a source of mistrust or simply obliterated. But the two novels have this in particular: that they constantly stage a rebellion against this process of dehumanization. It is first of all Tituba and Solitude who are posited as the instruments of the true contestation, of the “quest for visibility.” Indeed, if Jews and the enslaved are alienated, persecuted, it is above all, in these two novels marked by the slave narratives, through the destiny of enslaved women that Jewish history is problematized. The very fact, for both authors, of having chosen female figures, whose bodies are apprehended under the double paradigm of fascination and anguish, particularly in European culture17, is not innocuous. Tituba is unceasingly woman, “Witch of Salem,” “Negress” (TS, 210), and her female identity is reaffirmed many times over in the text. Solitude, for her part, bears the attributes of disquieting femininity: she has heterochromatic eyes — which is a frequent motif in Ashkenazi Jewish literature, often characterizing transgressive female figures, after the manner of Rechele in Der Sotn in Goray — and her complexion is “greenish,” which brings her close to the Lilithian figure18. It is therefore naturally through their bodies in revolt that they rise up, and if the sexual sphere is the original site of the two young women’s disaffiliation (both women were born of rape, that of Abena, that of Bayangumay), it is also the space of their insurrection. Through their bruised flesh, with its fascinating sexuality, they are invisible while escaping invisibility.
And if their destinies as women offer the two heroines the possibility of rebelling, this rebellion takes on another scope, in both authors, through recourse to Jewish references. Revolt then escapes the contingency of their experiences, to take on a broader, even cosmic, meaning. Already, in Moi, Tituba sorcière…, the witch’s transgressive sexuality is read by Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo through the prism of the Bible:
But I, I do not believe in that. It is God who is punishing me. Not so much for having burned for you. Jews have always had a strong sexual instinct. Our father Moses in his old age had erections. Deuteronomy says so: “His sexual power was not diminished.” Abraham, Jacob, David had concubines. Nor does he hold it against me for having used your art to see Abigail again. He remembers Abraham’s love for Sarah. (MS, 207)
In André Schwarz-Bart, Jewish history truly furnishes the elements of resistance to oppression, particularly thanks to the opening of a broad messianic thematic: as in the Warsaw Ghetto, after the apocalypse of enslavement an eschatology can come about. In this, Solitude is as much a Jewish messianic figure as a symbol of resistance from the slave narratives. Her filiation is Antillean: “From her earliest age, the little girl dreamed of her grandmother Pongwé, who was the reflection of a more ancient grandmother, who herself was the reflection of a still more ancient grandmother, and so on, to infinity.” (MS, 12) But she is also inscribed within the Jewish thought of the transmission of generations, as in Le Dernier des justes: “in order that there might operate in her the germination that animates all things, from the depths of the earth to the stars.” (MS, 30) In the same way, the sacrifice of the young maroon, even if it can find echoes in the slave narratives, is here clearly identified, through the intertextual references, with Jewish sacrifice: “At the last instant he stopped before Solitude and murmured, in an infinitely sorrowful voice: And you, poor zombie, who will deliver you from your chains? The young woman answered, smiling: What chains, Lord?” (MS, 89), since the chains can refer, among other things, to the Psalms (2:3): “Let us burst their bonds asunder, And cast away their cords from us!” For Solitude, to free herself enables the eschatological fulfillment and the quest for a true subjectivity.
Transcending the lived experience of the invisible
The heroines finally emancipate themselves through their capacity to open spaces of transcendence. These spaces allow them not only to question their invisibility, but also to acquire a form of speech, albeit other. In the first place, they make use of witchcraft or are possessed by the dybbuk. In André Schwarz-Bart, the Black presence in “Two-Souls” functions as a resurgence of the Ashkenazi demon: “[…] the evil spirit that had taken hold of her heart […]” (MS, 18);
So it went all through that day. Each time Solitude turned her gaze toward the sky, toward the trees, toward her old companions, it seemed to her that a Negress’s heart was beating within her while her eyes saw all things in the manner of the Moudongue Sanga. (MS, 128)
This dybbuk is the “[in-]between two worlds”19 (MS, 50) that characterizes Solitude’s ambiguity. In Moi, Tituba sorcière…, witchcraft functions as the key to a visibility located beyond the earthly. The enslaved woman can communicate with the dead: “Do you know that death is only a passage whose door remains wide open? […] Do you want to communicate with her?” (TS, 194) During these witchcraft scenes, symbols of transcendence abound: the flowering tree, the sheep with an immaculate coat, or the moon which “play[s] [a] decisive role in the ceremonial” (TS, 195), a sidelong overcoming of death. This celestial body, like Tituba’s witchcraft, feeds on darkness to attain a subliminal whiteness. The development of an occult, magical, hidden visibility thus engenders the overcoming of the protagonists’ invisibility. Thus, through the figures of the maroon woman or of the witch, the Jews seem to escape persecution, or at least seem to transcend their painful existence. In Maryse Condé, communication with death passes through sacrifice — that of the witch, but which blends with Jewish sacrifice through the mention of the shohet: “This evening, when the children are asleep, join me in the apple orchard. Get hold of a sheep or, failing that, some poultry from your friend, the shohet.” (TS, 195) If Tituba can “communicate with [the] invisible ones” (TS, 195), these invisible ones are as much the dead as those who live close to death — Blacks and Jews. Speech is given to them, to those for whom precariousness, in Guillaume Le Blanc’s sense, removes any possibility of being heard in the public sphere. The quest for visibility is therefore as much that of seeing as that of being-seen.
The second space of transcendence is the staging of a new birth. When she is bought by Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, this is, for Tituba, a second engendering:
I howled as the blood that for so many weeks had kept apart from my flesh flooded it once more, planting a thousand stings, a thousand fiery points beneath my skin. […] I howled and this howl, like that of a terrified newborn, hailed my return to the world. I had to relearn to walk […]. I had to relearn to speak […]. I had to relearn to look my interlocutors in the eye. I had to relearn to discipline my hair […]. Few individuals have this misfortune: to be born twice. (TS, 190-191)
The Jew allows Tituba to come into being, and thus to escape her destiny of persecutions, and the mention of the cry, like that of a newborn, is explicit in this sense, while it opposes this new lived experience to the silence of confinement in prison. Furthermore, in Maryse Condé, sexual relations enable a sublimation of bodies — generally suffering bodies — through a kind of mysticism of the flesh: Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo and Tituba give themselves to one another after the scene of the dead wife’s reappearances (TS, 197); and the very expressions that characterize this sexuality, deliberately hyperbolic, present it as a rebirth: “I believe that the first time this happened to us, he was even more surprised than I was, for he believed his sex to be a tool out of use, and was astonished to find it inflamed, rigid and penetrating, swollen with an abundant juice.” (TS, 197) Just as Tituba is reborn when she is bought by Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, he sees his sex reborn through Tituba the woman. Alienation is overcome, and sexuality allows them to recover freedom and the native village:
My sweet, lopsided and misshapen lover! I remember, before losing you forever, that poor happiness we knew!
When you joined me in the big bed of the attic, we pitched as in a drunken boat upon a stormy sea. You guided me with your oarsman’s legs and we ended by reaching the shore. Sleep offered us the softness of its beaches and in the morning, full of a new vigor, we could undertake our daily tasks. (TS, 217)
La Mulâtresse Solitude develops still further the schema of nativity through the trope of successive generations. The birth of Solitude’s child is explicitly described as the birthing of a Messiah:
Many fresh-water Negresses had themselves made with light-skinned children, who would escape the color, the old Black curse. They saw in the events a sign from God, the assurance that he was forgiving, was on the point of saving the race. Some already pushed before them a solemn belly, laden with a messianic promise. (MS, 92)
The father is Maïmouni, whose name recalls Moshe ben Maimon better known as Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), a rabbi who in his Commentary on the Mishnah proposes thirteen principles of faith, the twelfth of which is the coming of the Messiah and the advent of the messianic era. But it is also a reference to Genesis that is woven here, because this engendering is linked to the death of the mother20. “The unfinished child” — as is also the case in Moi, Tituba sorcière…, through abortion (TS, 178-179) — is the one who will be completed in the sacrifice of his mother. The staging of births effects an exit from the invisibility to which the protagonists are condemned. But, because this exit from the alienating frame is conceived only as an unfinished and unfinishable conquest, the heroines reaffirm their invisibility while obliterating it.
For the true escape from the invisibility of the maroon-witches, but also of the Jews, is made through writing. On the one hand, thanks to the parallels they draw, and to the inclusion they make of this violence within history, the novels give back to the invisible a visibility through diegetic and narrative presence. On the other hand, the novel allows the invisible, the subaltern, to reappropriate their subjectivity, by opening spaces of freedom. In André Schwarz-Bart, cosmic prose, inherited from the fairy tale, functions in this sense, as “the enchantment of azure” (MS, 146). The images unfold in a magical universe that writing carries away like the river at the novel’s opening:
And Bayangumay herself was one of those images the river was carrying away, and no doubt one day she would open the way for a little girl just as interesting as the one of today, who would bear the same nose, the same eyes, the same shoulders shivering in the wind, the same mark of strawberry or rather blueing mulberry on her belly, and who would lean over in the same way to caress all sorts of thoughts in the mysterious, changing waters of the river. (MS, 12-13)
The image of the bird in Moi, Tituba sorcière… can reflect the destiny of each of the two rebels, Solitude as much as Tituba:
I stared at the sea, a burning forest. Suddenly, a bird sprang up from the motionless embers and rose straight up, in the direction of the sun. Then it stopped, described a circle, became motionless again before resuming its dazzling ascent. I knew that it was a sign and that the prayers of my heart would not remain without echo. (TS, 215)
But it can also reflect the destiny of the Jews. Indeed, every call to freedom, especially in Maryse Condé, weaves together Jewish and maroon references. Tituba cries out:
O Benjamin, my sweet lopsided lover! He had taken the road to Rhode Island, prayer on his lips: “Sh’ma Yisrael: Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ehad!” How many stonings? Burnings? Boiling bloods? How many genuflections still? I began to imagine another course for life, another meaning, another urgency. (TS, 211)
It is also after the mention of “Sh’ma Yisrael: Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ehad!” that the image of fire unfolds — Tituba, the Mulatto-woman — a rebel fire that ravages violence in order to transcend it: “The fire ravages the top of the tree. He has disappeared in a cloud of smoke, the Rebel. So he has triumphed over death and his spirit remains. The frightened circle of the enslaved takes heart again. The spirit remains.” (TS, 211) For each one — André Schwarz-Bart as well as Maryse Condé — appeals to one and the same God, universal: “— Our God knows neither race nor color. You can, if you wish, become one of us and pray with us. I interrupted him with a laugh: — Does your God even accept witches?” (TS, 204)
Thus, the reversibility of Jewish history and the history of the enslaved in Maryse Condé and André Schwarz-Bart offers the “invisible” a possibility of escaping that invisibility. In La Mulâtresse Solitude, exclusion (and the marginality it implies) is the very condition for being seen, through revolt and messianism. In Moi, Tituba sorcière…, it is the condition for remaining invisible, and for developing, through occult powers, another form of vision and thus of visibility. But, beyond this, the deployment of the schema of invisibility allows the highlighting of the unsayable — that which may be unveiled, but also that which must remain unspoken: the unsayable of the dead who, generation after generation, do not cease to proclaim the silence in which they rest.
Cf. Jacques Petitjean-Roget, “Les Juifs à la Martinique sous l’ancien régime,” Revue d’histoire des colonies, vol. 43, no. 151, 1956, pp. 138-158; Aviva Ben Ur, Le Monde Sépharade, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2006; Seymour Drescher, “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade,” in Jonathan D. Sarna & Adam D. Mendelsohn, Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, New York, New York University Press, 2010; Suzy Halimi, Commerce(s) en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1990.↩︎
Pierre Pluchon, Nègres et Juifs au XVIIIe siècle. Le racisme au siècle des Lumières, Paris, Tallandier, 1984; William F.S. Miles, “La créolité et les Juifs de la Martinique,” Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe, no. 16, 2010, pp. 129-162.↩︎
Cf. Axel Honneth, “Visibilité et invisibilité. Sur l’épistémologie de la ‘reconnaissance,’” Revue du MAUSS, vol. 23, no. 1, 2004, pp. 137-151. Axel Honneth, “Invisibilité : une épistémologie de la reconnaissance,” Réseaux, no. 129-130, 2005. The philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc takes up this idea in L’invisibilité sociale (Paris, PUF, 2009).↩︎
Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba sorcière…, Paris, Gallimard, 1988 [1986]; Ségou, 1984-1985, Paris, Lafon. In what follows, references to this work will be indicated “TS,” followed by the page number.↩︎
André Schwarz-Bart, La Mulâtresse Solitude, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1972. In what follows, references to this work will be indicated “MS,” followed by the page number.↩︎
Guillaume Le Blanc, Vies précaires, vies ordinaires, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2007.↩︎
Nathalie Heinich, De la visibilité: Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique, Paris, Gallimard, 2012, p. ?.↩︎
Francine Kaufmann, “Le projet judéo-noir d’André Schwarz-Bart : saga réversible,” in André Schwarz-Bart et Simone Schwarz-Bart à Metz, Présence francophone : Revue internationale de langue et de littérature, vol. 99, no. 1, 2012, pp. 15-38. Cf. also Kathleen Gyssels, Marrane et maronne. La coécriture réversible d’André et de Simone Schwarz-Bart, Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi, 2014.↩︎
Cf. Michael Rothberg, “The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor,” PMLA, vol. 119, no. 5, 2004, pp. 1231‑1246; Michel Salomon, “Jewishness and Negritude: An Interview with André Schwarz-Bart,” Midstream, March 1967, pp. 3‑12.↩︎
On André Schwarz-Bart’s work, cf. Francine Kaufmann, “Les Sagas identitaires d’André Schwarz-Bart : Faire aimer l’étranger pour la dignité de sa différence,” Nouvelles Études Francophones, vol. 26, no. 1, 2011, pp. 16‑33.↩︎
TS, 205: “It began when the mezuzah, placed above the entrance door of Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo’s house as on those of the two other Jewish families, was torn off and replaced with an obscene drawing in black paint. The Jews were so used to persecutions that Benjamin, sniffing the wind, counted his children and brought them inside, like a docile flock.”↩︎
MS, 37: “[T]he human line along the paths of servitude, occasionally letting a weary head flutter carelessly above its wooden yoke. So it went for those who were not sick, who were neither too old nor too young, and who consented to the irons and the placing of the yoke, so it went.”↩︎
Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, Les temps de la fin : Roth, Singer, Boulgakov, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2006.↩︎
Kathleen Gyssels, Marrane et maronne…, op. cit., p. 123.↩︎
André Schwarz-Bart, “Pourquoi j’ai écrit La Mulâtresse Solitude,” Le Figaro Littéraire, 26 January 1967, p. 1. The article appeared five years before the publication of the novel.↩︎
Fleur Kuhn-Kennedy, “D’un je à l’autre : les langages d’André Schwarz-Bart,” Que faisons-nous de notre histoire ?, Plurielles: Revue culturelle et politique pour un judaïsme humaniste et laïque, no. 18, 2013, p. 32.↩︎
Cf. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, Paris, Gallimard, 1976-1984. Cf. also Alain Corbin: “The contemplated body, the desired body, the caressed body, the penetrated body, the fulfilled body constitute a set of obsessive historical objects in the century that saw the elaboration of the notion of sexuality.” “La rencontre des corps,” in Histoire du corps, vol. 2, De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello (eds.), Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2005, p. 149.↩︎
Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron, “Messianisme et intertextualité dans La Corne du bélier d’Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Raisons politiques, no. 8, 2002, pp. 81‐96, p. 92.↩︎
The subtitle of Shalom An-Ski’s Dybbuk (1920) is “Between Two Worlds.”↩︎
Genesis 35:16-19.↩︎