| For four decades, Fanon's negative criticism has over-determined all attempts to read Mayotte Capecia's work. This introduction to Je suis martiniquaise therefore focuses on Capecia as a writer, as a reader and as a theorist in order to demonstrate that she was a serious artist worthy of critical attention.;Chapter one argues that confusing the author with her narrator has contributed to the persistent mis-understanding of the text. Once Mayotte, the narrator, is distinguished from Capecia, the author, the narrative strategies Capecia employed in seeking to authorize herself come to the fore.;Chapter two unpacks the central metaphor of whitening around which Je suis martiniquaise is organized in order to highlight Capecia's strategic re-reading of the travelogue tradition. Earlier critics have assumed that Capecia herself was at one time a laundress like her protagonist. Even those critics who have caught the significance of the pun ("blanchisseuse" literally means "whitener" in French), have taken this as a fortuitous coincidence. In fact, Capecia is deconstructing the chapter on "Les Blanchisseuses" in Lafacadio Hearn's 1887 travel narrative, Martinique Sketches. Her deliberate selection of this image allows her to "air the dirty linen" of French colonial history by reading through the female experience of sexual commodification.;Chapter three contrasts Fanon and Capecia's approaches to theorizing Antillean subjectivity. Capecia and Fanon were at odds in their approach to the travelogue tradition, the application of psychoanalytic theory to the Antillean context, the interpretation of the hegelian master/slave dialectic and, most importantly, the departmentalization of Martinique. Fanon agreed with his mentor, Aime Cesaire, that the Martinican is French. Capecia's Je suis martiniquaise was actually a nationalist allegory which included a serious critique of negritude in its anti-colonial assertion of national identity. |
