An Interview With Myriam Warner-Vieyra

Guadeloupe to France or Africa, they simultaneously set out on a parallel inner journey, thereby embarking upon the process of self-discovery. Seeking to conquer physical space, they move along a parallel trajectory, the appropriation of imaginative space. When her father, an island fisherman, prevents her from continuing studies that will further her identification with French colonial culture, the protagonist of Le Quimboiseur . . leaves her village in Guadeloupe, and sets sail for France with her mother. Suzette, an ambitious adolescent who has spent her childhood on an island big as two coconuts does not intentionally reject her roots; she seeks greater depth and breadth of experience. Yet in her quest for open space and a wider field of action, she encounters its antithesis, closed space and confinement. Recounting her experience later, Suzette states: J'avais choisi une route large et fleurie, elle s'6tait transforme'e en 6troit sentier plein d'embuches mais je devais poursuivre mon chemin, n' ayant pas d'autre choix possible [I had chosen a wide, flower-filled road, it had become transformed into a narrow path full of ambushes; but I could not turn back, I had no other choice open to me] (139). Drawing attention to the important structuring devices of her narration, reversal and binary opposition, Suzette expresses the gap between goal and outcomes in terms of spatial metaphors. She acknowledges an important strategy of Third World women's writing, the conquest of physical space as a metaphor for psychological independence. Feminist theorists and critics remind us that questers require models that balance attachment with autonomy, and value relationships and bonding. Yet Suzette is physically and metaphorically ex-iled. Once separated from her island home, she lacks a guide, a helper, a friend. In her world of reversal and binary opposition, her mother is diabolically maternal. A lightskinned Mulatto escaping her Afro-Caribbean identity, trying to pass in a White world, Suzette's mother rejects her own African roots. Rosamonde divorces her dark-skinned husband for a Frenchman and abandons her children. Instead of guiding her daughter, she rejects her; rather than free her, she enslaves her. On board the ship en route to France, Rosamonde initiates the process of rejecting Suzette by

Art · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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  Sandra M Gilbert, Susan Gubar•The Madwoman in the Attic•1980

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• Archetypal patterns in women's fiction

  Annis Pratt•Archetypal patterns in women's…•1982

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• Inscriptions of Exile

  Françoise Lionnet, Joseph Heath•Callaloo•1992

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• Reading Warner-Vieyra's Juletane

  Jonathan Ngate•Callaloo•1986

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