La nature caribéenne postcoloniale
Postcolonial Caribbean Nature

Towards an Insular Ecosensitivity

Author(s): Michał Obszyński
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Caribbean literature; ecopoetics; postcolonial ecocriticism; Jacques Stephen Alexis; Édouard Glissant
Summary/Abstract: As a component of identity, as a receptacle of history, as a witness of the past or as a companion in the anti-colonial struggle, Caribbean nature is charged with the most diverse meanings and feeds a particularly rich and multidimensional Caribbean imaginary. This article proposes to trace some aspects of this multitude of meanings and values, as it manifests itself in the French-speaking Caribbean prose, notably through the prism of the concept of semiotics of nature. Through the analysis of natural motifs in the novel "Les Arbres musiciens" (1957) by Jacques Stephen Alexis and with reference to the poetics of Édouard Glissant, we will attempt to show the narrative and discursive strategies of these two writers who give voice to nature in a logic of colonial emancipation. For, if colonization rests, on the ideological and symbolic level, on the reduction of the colonial territory and its inhabitants to silence, the anti-colonial revolt and the overcoming of the after-effects of domination also pass by the restitution to the colonized universe of the right to say and to say itself.

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