Of Dogs and Men: La Belle Creole and the Global Subject

"Rien ne protege des morsures de cette enragee qu'est la chienne de vie" (1) It has often been noted that much of Maryse Conde's novelistic energy is spent challenging, questioning, or even mocking essentializing models of Caribbean identity. (2) Indeed, one might argue that every one of her novels, including those ostensibly concerning places outside of the Caribbean, has targeted one of a series of fixed concepts of the Antillean subject. In many cases, these have been ontological possibilities posited by one or several members of the African Diaspora in the wake of the combined holocausts of the slave trade and the colonization of Africa. (3) Conde has systematically dismantled each of these possibilities in turn, refusing the comforting assumption of a constituted identity and inevitably substituting the necessarily endless process of the search itself. As Mireille Rosello notes, "Conde's discourse shows that she is keenly aware that the island is a discursive, symbolic, and evolving construction rather than a natural identity [...]." Rosello adds that "she depicts a fragmented and diverse society, whose 'difference within' (as Barbara Johnson would put it) is neither erased nor naively celebrated as always already desirable." Neither the ethnically "pure" nor the celebration of the patchwork of hybridity is seen as a satisfactory end. As we will see in what follows, this deliberately inconclusive quest systematically refuses the mythical proportions of the epic quest for the self, recognizing instead the fundamentally and mundanely human scale of any pursuit, even of the absolute. (4) While this ideologically grounded refusal begins as a response to a series of specifically Caribbean discourses, it also, as I will show, allows Conde to reach beyond the local concerns of the Caribbean in order to enter into dialogue with the human wor(l)d. One might say that much of the effectiveness of Conde's writing lies in its creative reconfiguration of seemingly disparate elements and themes, a literal and literary performance of the Glissantian "poetique de la relation." This approach allows her to confront idees recues; to challenge the predictable "order of things." She destabilizes her world so that it remains in constant and unsettling movement. These strategies perhaps produce the richest paradox of Conde's work: its refusal to limit itself to discussions of the Caribbean while insistently challenging the Caribbean's favorite tropes and myths. Conde inevitably returns (even if surreptitiously) to her birth-place in her novels in order to leave it both literally and symbolically, just as she also leaves it to return. We see this contradictory movement--towards and away from Guadeloupe--in Les Derniers Rois mages' myth of an African ancestry, La Colonie du nouveau monde's fantasies of a Garveyite return to the motherland, and in Traversee de la mangrove's elaborate play on the symbolism of departure and return itself. In all of Conde's work, stable Diasporic subjectivities are inevitably open to a lacerating critique. (5) For each myth Conde substitutes fluctuating signs that refuse even the hope of arriving at their destination. Such flux is once again the challenge that I will face in discussing her 2001 novel La Belle Creole. It is my contention that, in keeping with the writing strategies that I have alluded to earlier, this novel addresses another myth of the Antillean experience, the dramatic and historic relationship between the fugitive slave and the dog. The novel refutes the mythical potential of this relationship to again underscore the ultimately human scale of Caribbean history. In L'Esclave fugitif dans la litterature antillaise, Marie-Christine Rochman underscores the historical importance of what she calls "cynegetics" in the Caribbean. She explains that "[a]ucun des recits [historiques] les plus connus sur ces chasses [a l'esclave] ne mentionne l'utilisation de meutes de chiens" and that "seul le vocabulaire de la cynegetique regulierement utilise en distille la presence. …