Amnis (Jul 2017)
La littérature de la Caraïbe pour la jeunesse : des histoires à part ou l’histoire à part entière ?
Abstract
Children’s literature produced by writers born in the Caribbean is prolific. However, it still remains less known than the stories of Franco-Algerians and has drawn less attention from specialists. As all West Indian literary productions, it grants a significant place to the writing of history: whether it is the memory of slavery or of immediate history (news item, conflicts, stories of immigration). As a major witness the young subject confronts the history, which forges his personal development and place in the world. For the younger generation, the analysis of the texts of three important writers – Maryse Conde, Gisèle Pineau and Dany Laferrière – helps to show how undocumented parts of the history, little or badly known, fit in well in Francophone literature and thus become objects of questioning and knowledge. Maryse Condé considers history as a political rebus which can be deciphered from a militant perspective. In an ethico-political way, its protagonists question the recent conflicts, the sinuosities of history, and thus learn what textbooks conceal. Gisèle Pineau’s stories unveil what C. Pinconnat calls the « endofiction ». For instance, the history of West Indian immigration in France, personally experienced by the author, is told with its wrench, ambiguities and horizon of reconciliation, among which the Caribbean space and the maintaining of the island memory. The texts Dany Laferrière dedicates to youth are made up by part of his earlier work, which is rewritten and extended. They create a personal mythology which sets himself and Haiti at the center of the story in depicting political exile and continual literary returns to the native island. The stories of the three authors ultimately suggest an interconnection between the (young) reader and the history in which he acquires his own place through the sharing of knowledge.
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