Slavery in Modern Caribbean Fiction

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Slavery in Modern Caribbean Fiction
Although the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe are famed for their tourist attractions, they are steeped in a long and brutal history of slavery, occupation, and colonialism. After their discovery by Christopher Columbus, the islands’ native Indians were massacred, and for many centuries, African slaves were shipped to the islands to work in the sugar cane, cotton, and coffee plantations. The islands were then colonized for brief periods by the French and British before the former restored their claim over the regions and their peoples. Modern-day Martinique and Guadalupe may be free of their colonial masters, but they continue to have limited autonomy and rely heavily on the French metropole. Given the enduring legacies of dispossession, slavery, and colonialism, such themes as dislocation, racism, and trauma continue to make their way into most of the writing originating from the two islands long after the end of slavery. For instance, the post-colonial novel Black Shack Alley by Joseph Zobel illustrates the identity, social class, and race struggles faced by many of the descendants of slavery in Martinique even after the institution was abolished.
Crossing the Mangrove by Maryse Conde, another work of fiction from the region also highlights the distinct and profound sense of loss and identity experienced by the peoples of Guadeloupe as they navigate a post-slavery French Antilles society. This essay argues that although slavery was abolished in 1848, it continues to haunt modern Caribbean fiction, as is demonstrated by Zobel’s Black Shack Alley Conde’s Crossing the Mangrove. Black Shack Alley is a coming-of-age novel that explores themes of race and class discrimination, cultural assimilation, and the colonial educational system from the perspective of Jose Hassam. The novel relates the harrowing poverty of the rural setting, the brutal realities of the plantation society, and the confines of race and class to illustrate the continued exploitation of the black peasantry in Martinique’s colonial system. The childhood narrative relates a string of Jose’s existential transitions as he furthers his education and moves outside of the Black Shack Alley milieu to become a part of the working class. Plantation life is a pivotal element in the novel and serves to illustrate the centrality of the system in Martinique society and culture.
Zobel’s Black Shack Alley is a literary representation of the organization of plantation space and time in Martinique. The scene of the plantation is revisited compulsively from the start of the novel to illustrate how the non-evolving economic mode of production is still based and largely dependent on a slave structure. In the novel, plantation society is characterized by a strict hierarchical regimen: at the top of the pyramid is the plantation owner (who is mostly white and affluent), and beneath him is the overseer (who is either mixed or black but largely advantaged), followed by the blacks (the poor black peasants), and finally the child gang (of which the narrator is part) (Zobel). Plantation housing also follows the same organization where the privileged have proper homes while the plantation workers live in rows of cabins, which is the seminal setting of the story and the narrator’s background. The novel bears the name of these black peasant dwellings, which are not far removed from those of earlier slaves. Throughout the novel, there is a pervasive sense of constriction and confinement: the plantation is reclusive in that many of those who live inside it remain relatively unaware of the outside world.
The strict management of space in Zobel’s Black Shack Alley is demonstrated by the fact that the black peasantry’s dwellings are situated just next to the cane fields. There is little opportunity for a break between labor and life: M’man Tine, the narrator’s grandmother, and fierce guardian works hard in the fields for a measly salary so that there is no hiatus between exploitation and existence. The absence of internal boundaries between work and life in Black Shack Alley is not very different from the punishing system of slave production, where exploitation was the principal and permanent feature of plantation life. In addition to the rigors of plantation life, hunger and poverty dominate the narrator’s childhood. Although his grandmother does her best to eke out a living for the two of them, Jose is faced with the threat of destitution and the lure of earning some wages by joining the small bands of children working in the cane (Zobel). The latter threatens to derail the narrator’s course of studies, a possibility that is altogether distressing since education appears to be the only way Jose can map out of Black Shack Alley, a community where his ancestors have been the unfortunate victims of cane production for centuries.
Although a high level of integration exists within the plantation community, as demonstrated by Jose’s strong social support system, the Black Shack Alley is socially isolated from the rest of the plantation. Jose’s success is strongly tied to his local mate-ship system of family relatives, teachers, and friends. However, this all changes when he moves to an urbane school and discovers the racism perpetuated by the upper class against the black peasantry. Jose is forced to confront the impediments of obtaining an education in a system created to marginalize the black peasantry and prevent their social mobility. Jojo, a mixed student at Jose’s school, is forbidden from playing with the latter because he comes from a Creole family: the affluent white and mixed parents prevent their children from interacting with Creole-speaking, uneducated cane cutters (Zobel). The high school that Jose attends is unlike his village school in that the latter is impersonal and elitist while the former is personal and egalitarian. White plantocracy pervades the entire school administration, and the curriculum is focused on fostering servile imitation of French thinking while eroding all Martinican perspectives.
Jose is forced to study and memorize French history and literature, while his poor upbringing gives teachers cause for doubt about his abilities to meet school academic standards. A central interest in Zobel’s Black Shack Alley is the impact of slavery and colonialism on the social fabric of the community: the book illustrates how power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few, thereby distancing the dominant class from the servile c...