Disaster, Transgenerational Endurance and Duration in Béké Writing

This article interrogates the preoccupation with transgenerational endurance and duration apparent in b ek e representations of "natural" disaster. It begins with a brief overview of the earliest literary texts to emerge from the French Caribbean islands: Auguste Pr evost de Sansac de Traversay's Les Amours de Z em edare et Carina, et description de l' le de la Martinique (1806), and Jules Levilloux's Les Cr eoles ou la vie aux Antilles (1835)-both of which feature catastrophes that claim the lives of plantation owners and pose a threat to their daughters, the bearers of b ek e culture. I then consider texts by b ek e women who lived in Martinique at the time of Mount Pel ee's eruption in 1902, an unprecedented disaster which eradicated almost half of the island's white population: Cl emence Cassius de Linval's Coeurs Martiniquais (1919) and Elodie Dujon-Jourdain's Le Sablier renvers e (1912). In doing so, I trace a lineage of male and female b ek e authors who lament white losses in the aftermath of "natural" disaster and remain anxiously preoccupied with the caste's longevity. Such an approach reveals how white Creoles have, across generations, taken to writing to promote, protect and preserve their culture. Anxieties around the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language consistently resurface in this intergenerational literary output which spans more than a century. As we shall see, some of these temporal concerns converge with Edouard Glissant's observations on time and memory in the French Antilles, specifically his sedimentary poetics of duration

Art · Ethnology · Genealogy · Literature · Martinique · Population · Sociology · Transgenerational epigenetics · West indies · White (mutation · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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