The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean
408
The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean
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Overview
Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822386513 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2005 |
| Series: | a John Hope Franklin Center Book |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Doris Garraway is Assistant Professor of French at Northwestern University.
Read an Excerpt
The LIBERTINE COLONY
Creolization in the Early French CaribbeanBy Doris Garraway
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3453-8
Chapter One
Border of Violence, Border of Desire: The French and the Island Caribs
To speak of the Caribs poses a difficulty for students of colonialism in the region known also by that name. Although the term Carib is claimed today by the last descendants of indigenous people living on the island of Dominica, it refers to the first and arguably the most destructive instance of cross-cultural misapprehension that marked the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians in the New World. For most anthropologists and ethnohistorians working today, it is not at all clear to what extent anything like a "Carib" ethnicity or group identity existed in the Lesser Antilles before the seventeenth century, when indigenous people themselves began using the term as an ethnic self-ascription. What is certain is that the term Carib and its early variants, Caniba and Canibal, were imposed on a culturally unfamiliar group by Christopher Columbus and his chroniclers. In time, the term and its accompanying stereotype became central to an ideologically charged ethnic map through which Europeans validated their colonial ambitions in the region.
The politicalnature of the ethnic ascription Carib was already evident in the publications documenting Columbus's voyages to the New World (see figure 1). In his journal, Columbus compared those he called "Caribes" or "Canibales" unfavorably to his hosts on Hispaniola, whom he perceived as peaceful, timorous, and willfully subservient to the Spanish. Based on his professed understanding of the entirely foreign language spoken by his native guides, Columbus declared the Caribes/Canibales to be a monstrous race of men who made war on their neighbors and ate them. Yet Columbus was initially skeptical about the charge of anthropophagy among the Caribes, since he assumed they were soldiers of the "Khan" of Cathay in the Asia of his imagination. His acceptance of the accusation was prompted not by eyewitness confirmation but rather by the only reported instance in which he was attacked by Indians. When describing a hostile encounter with a group on the coast of Hispaniola, he asserted that those people were "without doubt ... those of Carib and that they would eat men," thus collapsing their hostility with the still unproven allegation of anthropophagy. The circumstances of this determination foreshadow the future basis for ethnic distinctions in the Spanish Caribbean: resistance or accommodation to the Spanish. Those Indians who submitted to Christianity and acquiesced to Spanish demands for gold were considered vassals of the Crown, legally free though subject to royal authority. Carib, on the other hand, became a generic label for Indians deemed hostile to Christians. Allegedly identifiable by a conflation of undesirable traits, including anthropophagy and aggressiveness toward the Spanish, they were subject to legal enslavement.
Over time, the geographical boundaries of the Carib/non-Carib distinction shifted considerably. Initially limited to the Lesser Antilles, where Spanish royal edicts authorized the enslavement of "Caribs" resistant to Christianity, the ethnic map was revised when slave armadas encountered resistance in the smaller islands. As slavers expanded into the discovered territories of Venezuela and the Guyanas in response to an increased colonial demand for labor, the simple accusation of anthropophagy sufficed to identify a group as Carib. This led to indiscriminate slaving throughout the Spanish Main. In 1520, the Crown moved to regulate this slave trade by redefining as Carib those territories uninhabited by Christians whose populations had engaged in armed resistance against the Spanish. No longer an ethnic ascription limited to the Antilles, the term Carib was applied in the islands and on the mainland to make political distinctions between tractable and resistant populations.
The strategic nature of the Carib stereotype notwithstanding, those living in the Lesser Antilles did retaliate against Spanish incursions and slave raids in their territory. In addition to defeating at least one attempt by the Spanish to colonize Guadeloupe, "Caribs" were repeatedly accused of attacking the Spanish colonies in the Greater Antilles. Yet one of the most remarkable consequences of this instance of ethnic stereotyping was the impact it had on the ethnic identities and affiliations on the ground, literally setting the terms within which resistance took place. If the warlike Carib identity was invented to serve Spanish colonial imperatives, in time it was appropriated by the islanders themselves. Some groups struck up strategic alliances with the Spanish by denouncing others as Caribs, knowing full well the consequences of doing so. By the seventeenth century, however, indigenous peoples began to use the term Carib to describe themselves, a fact that is amply demonstrated in the French ethnographic record. When the French arrived in the Caribbean, they encountered people whose 130-year battle with European interests had predisposed them to identify with their "given" name and its warrior connotation, if only to repel further European conquests in the region.
Creolization and cultural exchange between French settlers and Island Caribs thus raises the vexing question of the border. Unlike subjugated Africans, who were forced to live with European colonists, sharing the same physical, cultural, and even domestic environment, Island Caribs and French settlers did not live in the same communities. The Caribs' very group identity was based on a historic refusal to submit to European colonists on their own territory. The French colonizing companies approached the islands of the Lesser Antilles with a view toward the production of tobacco, an activity in which the Caribs would have little part given their notorious resistance to enslavement. The Caribs were never colonized by the French; rather, they were repeatedly displaced and their numbers diminished through a series of bloody conflicts in the first several decades of colonization. Beginning in Saint-Christophe, where French privateers and buccaneers joined forces with the English to drive out the Caribs, territorial warfare increased in the 1630s as the French expanded to surrounding islands. In Guadeloupe, starving and desperate French settlers planned an all-out attack on the Caribs, provoking a four-year struggle. From the neighboring island of Dominica, Caribs launched guerrilla-style raids against the fledgling colony before losing the island to the French. The story in Martinique was no less bloody; an initially warm welcome by Caribs turned violent when the French constructed a fort. In the ensuing conflict, Caribs were defeated by massive artillery and cannon fire and withdrew to the eastern half of the island. Following a brief period of peace in the 1640s, hostilities between the two parties were reignited when individual governors led a second wave of expansion. Perhaps the most devastating episode was Du Parquet's possession of Grenada, which led to a mass Carib suicide at the site of the eponymously named "morne des sauteurs."
The story of French-Carib contacts was thus one of a moving border that shifted across space so as to reduce Caribs, finally, to the islands of Saint-Vincent and Dominica. Yet, despite the recurrent hostilities that marked the first contacts with European colonists, the border was not impermeable to exchanges and contacts of various kinds. The particular ambiguity of the French-Carib border is strikingly apparent on a map of Martinique produced for Du Tertre's 1667 edition of the Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (see figure 2). The map represents the island of Martinique, drawn with a line separating the "Territory of the Savages" from the "Territory of the French." The border is not sharp but broken, a fact that makes the map a fitting visual allegory for the instability and porousness of the boundary between the French and the indigenous peoples. As a border of conquest, the dotted line is equivocal. It signifies a boundary that is not fixed but indeterminate, tentative, and contested. An imagined limit to the French territorial presence on the island, the broken line marks a frontier that would move with future French expansion. Du Tertre himself reported that by the end of 1658 the French had driven out the remaining Caribs in Martinique, thus claiming the entire island for themselves. Just as importantly, however, the dotted line denotes the permeability of the interstitial zone-that is, its porousness to exchanges of all kinds, which became important to the livelihood of both communities. Interactions between the French and the Caribs included the movement of people, ideas, commodities, culture, and language, as well as the creative reconstruction and adaptation of various elements according to the needs of emergent or displaced communities. In addition to ensuring the survival of several French settlements, such an open border was central to the ideology of French missionary colonialism, which was based on the pledge to Christianize the Caribs and assimilate them into the French state. The particular permeability of the French-Carib border is evidenced in the richness of the ethnographic information produced by French missionaries. Surpassing Spanish and English writings in amount and quality, French accounts are still considered by anthropologists to provide the most valuable observations on Island Carib culture, language, and society. The broken line thus figures a border of desire as well as a border of war; it is a site of exchange rather than merely a delimitation of what is to be excluded.
Too often border studies have transformed the border into a placeless metaphor for the presumed fluidity, complexity, and heterogeneity of post-modern and postcolonial identities. The border has been figured as the site of a liberating transculturation, a refusal of essentialized notions of bounded identities, and the production of subaltern knowledges that contest the hegemony of rational modernity. The implication is that borders accrue significance only from the perspective of the subaltern, or only in the aftermath of colonialism, a view that forecloses important questions as to how actual borders were produced in the imagination of the colonizing power. Theories of creolization, on the other hand, while assuming the cross-pollination of cultures and languages between disparate groups from the inception of the colonial presence, have only recently considered the Amerindian contribution to Creole societies. Thus far, they have not accounted for the specificities of cultural flows across borders marked by militarized violence. In this chapter, I explore colonial representations of the border in order to better understand the kinds of exchanges (missionary, linguistic, commercial, or ethnographic), migrations, and power dynamics, that characterized early French-Carib contacts. Scenes of encounters between the French and the Caribs offer insight into the values and meanings that the French attached to the intercultural border. In particular, narrative representations of cultural encounters reveal a central tension between the missionary assimilationist ideal and the repressive effects of territorial appropriation on indigenous peoples.
I begin by examining the ideological foundations of colonialism outlined in the documents that established the first commercial companies. These project the incorporation of Island Caribs into the French social body through the logic of reciprocity and religious conversion. I then analyze Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's history of the French Antilles, which provided the first comprehensive account of the bloody settlement of the three main islands under French control. I argue that in his representation of violence and the emergence of territorial boundaries between French and Caribs, Du Tertre reconciles the failure of reciprocity with a providential narrative of French colonialism. Turning to ethnographic writings on Caribs, I show that stories of Carib origins, as well as scenes of peacetime exchange, serve to sublimate missionary anxiety over the failure of incorporation and the continued violence of the colonial encounter. In particular, I analyze the work of Raymond Breton, arguably the most important colonial ethnographer of Island Caribs, who lived for many years in Dominica and produced an encyclopedic dictionary of the Carib language. I argue that the Carib language becomes a surrogate object through which the missionary imagined the incorporation of the Carib other. At the same time, the dictionary stands as an unexplored source of discourse by speaking Carib subjects, who both acquiesced to and contested the French colonial desire for their land and language. Although relations of desire and violence influenced the kinds of information produced about Caribs in French colonial narratives, the border between Caribs and the French eluded representation except in the dictionary, where Caribs appeared as speaking subjects.
Fictions of Reciprocity
The French colonial enterprise in the Caribbean was born of a peculiar alliance of private, state, and church interests. The first royal trading companies were founded in response to proposals by the Norman naval captain and corsair Pierre d'Esnambuc to establish a colony on the island of Saint Christopher. An avid privateer on the Spanish Main, d'Esnambuc conceived of the idea after a shipwreck led him and his privateering companion Urbain du Roissey to take refuge on the island. There they discovered a small number of English colonists, who were successfully producing tobacco. Impressed by the commercial potential of the crop, and undeterred by the potential for hostilities with the native population, d'Esnambuc set off for France in 1625 to present a proposal for colonization to the king and Cardinal Richelieu. He arrived at an opportune moment, for Richelieu had recently been named grand master of navigation and commerce. After several failed colonial ventures, he was committed to restoring French naval power and commerce abroad by forming colonies in the New World. Richelieu enthusiastically endorsed d'Esnambuc's venture, and in 1626 the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe was established, with the cardinal as its largest shareholder.
From its inception, the company's attitude toward the indigenous population was ambiguous. There is no question that the French expected staunch resistance from the people of the Lesser Antilles. Since the sixteenth century, Spanish travel accounts had depicted Caribs as hostile man-eaters whose ferocity in war was enhanced by their use of poisoned arrows. Even before making his proposal before Richelieu, d'Esnambuc and an English captain named Warner had effectively driven the Caribs from the island. In theory, however, seventeenth-century colonialism was based as much on a policy of engagement with indigenous populations as it was on territorial acquisition and cultivation. Reacting against the presumed barbarousness of Spanish conquistadors, and in recognition of the historic resistance of Caribbean peoples, the French did not view native peoples as a necessary source of labor power. Instead they had a vested interest in gaining native favor so as to appropriate local knowledge of the land and its resources, create a hospitable environment for colonial recruits from France, and enable military alliances against rival European colonizers. Hence there emerged in France what Philip Boucher has called an independent colonial theory based on the union of colonization and evangelization. The Christian mission became the official strategy by means of which French officials and the company leadership legitimated colonialism and pursued a policy of "friendship" with the natives.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ixPreface xi
Introduction: Creolization in the Old Regime 1
1. Border of Violence, Border of Desire: The French and the Island Caribs 39
2. Domestication and the White Noble Savage 93
3. Creolization and the Spirit World: Demons, Violence, and the Body 146
4. The Libertine Colony: Desire, Miscegenation, and the Law 194
5. Race, Reproduction, and Family Romance in Saint-Domingue 240
Conclusion 293
Notes 299
Works Cited 371
Index 401