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Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
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Gina Stumm
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network French Studies Channel. I'm your host, Gina Stumm, Associate professor of French at the University of Alabama, and with me today are Dr. Jacqueline Coutie and Annie Dominique Curtius, to discuss their new edited volume, Women Theory, Praxis and Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings, out last year from Liverpool University Press. Dr. Couti is the Lawrence H. Favreau professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Literature and Cultures at Rice University and The author of 2016's Dangerous Creole Liaisons, Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021's sex, sea and Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924-1948, as well as having edited several critical editions and special journal issues and authoring numerous articles and book chapters. Dr. Curtius is a Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs as Symbios du Memoires, Manifestations religiose, Rature de la Caribe in 2006 and Suzanne Archaeologie, Littereur et artistique du Memoires en Pechez in 2020. She has also co edited a special issue of Esprit Creature on The topic of Francophonies of the early modern and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. Drs. Kuti and Curtius, thank you so much for joining me.
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Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Thank you.
- [02:35]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Thank you, Gina.
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Gina Stumm
So I'll start out with some questions that could be answered by either one or both of you. And the first of these is what was the genesis of this project?
- [02:47]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Yeah, so I can jump in. So the genesis of the project is a conference, a video conference that Jaekin and I, we attended in March 2021. And the topic of the conference was the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the pioneering book, Pioneering Critical Edition out of the Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carol Boyce Davis and Ellen Savory. So that book, I think that we might all agree with that, is that it really relied on the calabash as a metaphor, as a matrix, as a guiding matrix, in order to open up conversation about the place of women in this masculine genealogy of thinking. So what was really interesting with this book, I remember using it when I was a graduate student in majoring in English. The primary goal of the collection was to unearth silenced women, silenced female voices, carve out multifaceted mutations through which these silent voices could express themselves, could liberate themselves from the different patterns of domination, so to speak. Look at the patterns of domination, the insidious protection that those women seem to be having and ultimately unsettle the masculine canon. So that was the primary goal of the, of the collection. So immediately after the. The zoom call, Jacqueline and I, we sat, we started to think and we were wondering how we could, in our small capacities, contribute to the afterlives of Arpa de Kumbla. And then the rest is achievement, the rest is accomplishment. And I must say that I'm so grateful for this energizing and thought provoking and sisterhood collaboration with Jacqueline. It has been really a delight to work with her and the entire process was just marvelous. So, yeah, so I think that maybe if we had not attended the conference, maybe our book would not have existed, but I don't know, it would have probably, you know, sort of emerged in different. In a different mode, in a different modality. But that was the starting point, Gino.
- [05:40]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
And I would like to quickly add. So, you know, it was still the end of the pandemic, but we were still in it. And this conversation took place via zoom. And it was really, I believe, a way to find some healing in a period which was kind of scary and try to think about the future and also trying to put into Action discussion we had previously about working together. And what was interesting, these conversations in the conversation we had after the conference and further later on, it's this idea we were thinking about, okay, they're doing the English speaking Caribbean, so we're going to do the French speaking Caribbean. And then realize this is not enough. What we like is the ocean. We like the sea. So then we decided to, in fact, make the scope bigger and, you know, and not to think about one single geography or one single linguistic zone, but try to put together a lot of different anchors, different points of viewing, of thinking, particular ideas about what is women's contribution in all this work. So the genesis is a commemorative conversation that evolved into a collective scholarly endeavor, but the discussion is about still. The genesis is love. I know it's weird and it's corny, but it's this kind of sorority sisterly love, but in a kind of womanist approach about, okay, so what can we do to bring forth women who were here but we didn't know about them? What can we do with a nice scholarly approach, theoretical approach, but simply a kind of human approach too?
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Gina Stumm
Wonderful. And so you've explained a bit about why you chose to focus on women and also why you chose to expand the focus out from a Caribbean or Antillean context. But could you talk a little bit about why you chose to call this a transoceanic approach as opposed to global or some other designation?
- [07:59]
Annie Dominique Curtius
I believe that the use of global, the term global would not have allowed us to acutely address what Jacqueline just mentioned would not have allowed us to address how cultural behaviors, queerness, activism, practices of care, artwork, protest poetry, embodied storytelling, choreographies of survival, all those things. I think that the term global would be too distant, too weak for us to grasp the multifaceted dynamics that are at play when you mention what I just said. And what was also very important for us, and I think that global would not have allowed us to do so, is to look at the ways in which, for all those modalities that I just mentioned, women put themselves in a position to derange the archives. The idea of derange the archive and on the multifaceted history of French colonialism, nuclear imperialism, enslavement. The term transoceanic, in a way allows us to explore how dominant ideologies, systems of power, promote for population, for island populations. This idea of forgetting, forgetting. And what was interesting for us is to look at the ways in which women, through praxis, doing praxis, doing theory through praxis, they unsettle those dominant narratives. Transoceanic allows us to bridge the gap between those three geographies and those three oceans. But at the same time, our goal was not to sort of promote sameness. This is not what we wanted. We didn't want to just say, oh, okay, we're connecting them because it's the same dialogue. On the contrary, we sought to.
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Gina Stumm
Bring.
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Annie Dominique Curtius
And we also didn't want to bring some closure by saying, okay, we did that, it's done. So here is a model. On the contrary, we thought, and that's after cultural historian Dilip Menon, that the ocean was and is a method. And it's a method for, as the readers will notice, it's truly a method for all the contributors. And the ocean is considered as a method in the ways in which we can rely on that space to foreground the gender dimension of the oceanic turn regarding slavery, colonialism, climate justice, nuclear imperialism. So the term is useful. So transoceanic. I mean, it's useful to theorize land and sea sovereignty for island communities, address complexities, messiness, mutations, metamorphosis, look at productive frictions and the ways in which the female artists and writers and activists whose works are explored in those contributions use embodied experience to unplug, to unsettle master narratives. So our volumes does fit within the post colonial oceanic turn along these lines. And because we. We do, and I say we, I'm sort of speaking for everyone here, we do unsettled the male discourses, the discourses of the captains or the missionaries, of the. Of the mariners, of the doctors, the ethnographers, unsettling their agenda and paying more attention to the ways in which women have theorized and poetized and lands and the seas. So I think that what's broadly the difference my vision about what global means sort of, you know, broadly speaking, and what transyranic focuses on and really gives us that space that we needed to do that kind of original work.
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Dr. Jacqueline Couti
And quickly I would just add to back up what Annie just did. Anyway, we worked together, so we have some vision is that we thought global would just flatten historically, but also geographically particular type of network of exchanges. So when we thought about transoceanic approaches, we thought about ways that will enable us to attend to multiple meanings of oceans because we are island people. So no matter what, again, it was very selfish. We are island people. And all the people who are talking in these volumes are talking about island people. Even if the ocean of the water are not mentioned, they're there. So that's important because this does something to your mind. So we were thinking about multiple meanings of oceans as sites of rupture, disruption, trauma, but also as spaces of circulation, encounters and feminist knowledge production across the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. World global would not have allowed us this flexibility, but also this idea of chaotic approach. Because we were not trying just to do a globalized flatline. We were trying to show that there are many entanglements. And all those entanglements are connected to the water, to the sea, and are physical, symbolic, epistemological, geographical implications.
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Gina Stumm
Thank you. And that actually leads me really well into the next question here. Because you've situated your engagement with the oceanic turn and talked about these kinds of network of exchange. And especially since the idea of entanglement is central to your title, what kinds of entanglement art play in this volume? Are these actual concrete networks of exchange and activism? Or are these more historical, thematic and theoretical resonances so you know when.
- [15:29]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
So basically, what's interesting is that the title already explicitly situates the volume without this oceanic term by foregrounding transoceanic movement, connection and entanglements, rather than a nation based or metropolitan framework. And then what we wanted to do, even with the term entanglements and the kind of theory we were dealing with, is not presenting works that constitute a single continuous network of transoceanic changes or coordinated feminist activism. Rather, what we wanted to do is foreground historical, thematic, theoretical and methodological entanglements that emerge from shared oceanic conditions shaped by colonialism, environmental violence and epistemic erasure. So there's a crisscrossing of many different things. And you know, again, the introduction was fun, but also very painful to write because we were trying to be very specific about what we were doing. So why some chapters document concrete oceanic circulations of political movements. For instance, in part one, you have activism and feminism. And this is the most network oriented section we discuss. Chapter one discusses Guadeloupe and women's labor activism embedded in Atlantic colonial economies. Because those women in Guadeloupe, they also took with a particular metropolitan discourse. The second chapter deals with Martinican communist women, so then Hanover island, who were engaged in internationalist and trans oceanic leftist frameworks. And then with the interview with Tatua Peru and Chantal Space. Chapter three, Then we foreground pacific intellectual circuits shaped by colonial and post colonial exchange. So the first part shows clear kind of interconnections so that we could open up for something else. Because other chapters, in fact, their great contribution lies in revealing resonant parallel practice of refusal, care, Embodiment and knowledge production across all these oceans, the Caribbean, Indian oceans and passive thing context. So for us, and I think what's important is that the volume does not posit a unified transoceanic feminist movement or a single web of sustaining exchange leaking all the sides. I mentioned instead, what Ani and I wanted to do, and in fact we learned that this is what we wanted to do when we were finished, is to work through entanglements as a relational analytic attentive to unevenness, asymmetry, interruption and refusal. That's why at the beginning Annie said, you know, we're not here to bring closure. This book is not here to be like, okay, we studied all of that and that's done. No, it's a conversation we're opening showing in fact asymmetry, asymmetry of power between genders, between former colonies and the so called metropole, but also within those islands as far as class is concerned. And then you know, when you have particular chapters about queerness. So that's also showing the difficulty is not with this term. Entanglement is messy. What we're looking at is messy because we're looking at dominant mode of domination, but also of ways we can resist this domination. And that is not always easy. So not to speak too much, I would just say that also with entanglements we thought about the idea of a shared condition that we talking about people from different sites, but they have this shared condition which is inherited from the colonial impulse. And how. But it was not about mapping, it was about their shared lived experience and how through kind of shared condition because of difference of geography, history, what can we see? What did they do with that?
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Gina Stumm
And if I might add, this is a remarkably cohesive edited volume. And the contributions really seem to speak to one another. So these resonances aren't only between the subjects of the articles, but amongst the articles themselves or the contributions themselves. And is this the result of beforehand coordination between contributors or is this an example of more really fortunate synergy?
- [20:59]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
So I could in fact, you know, start with that and Annie with that. You know, we were thinking carefully about the call for papers and we also contacted some people we thought could bring us closer to what we wanted to see in that volume. So it's both. We were lucky. We had a lot of contributions that were really carefully crafted for what we have to offer. And because in fact we were looking at this disruption not from a kind of totalitarian approach. It was easy to organize them. I mean, we have more people who proposed some work and some of the people, for whatever reason, could not submit a final piece. But we were really happy with this kind of coordination we had because, as I said, it's partly intentional, but partly the result of luck and a very generative synergy. And I think what helped us too is that we try to talk to a lot of rising junior scholars, and we were really open to what they have to say, and we were really open to, in fact, reaching out to people in the French context that haven't published in English. So we were really trying to. To find different type of scholars sharing the same vision of the geographies they're looking at. So the proposal stage was very, very important. And then Annie and I, even before submitting all the articles to our readers, we read them like three or four times and we make comments. And that, I think, also helped. So it was a lot of work. I mean, right now, I will not be doing this. I don't even know how we did. I don't even know how we did this, because when I saw the book, I'm like, oh my God, we managed to do that in a year and a half. I don't know how this happened, but we are really great contributors. And that's where the editorial process became a kind of a space of dialogue, as close reading and feedback encourage contributors to sharpen their connections. So we were very hands on in the sense that each contribution, we really read them carefully, we discussed them, we gave feedback, and then going through all of that, something magical happens. So I think sometimes when you put the work, then, then you see the results. And even for the translations essay, Kaplan, dear colleague, Cappy, as we know her, has been reading, translating, and we've been working to make sure that nothing is lost in translation, which is always kind of difficult to manage to do that. And as I said, because of this work, pre emptive strike, in a way, all VSS developed as for us, unexpected correspondences between the surface of oceans and what is beneath. And there were things that contributors showed us. And then this was in the introduction and in the conclusion.
- [24:46]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Yeah, if I can echo everything Jacqueline said. But I think that I want to highlight the fact that we worked with a group of young scholars that are. They are just amazing. Amazing in the sense that they quickly, I think, understood this sort of companionship, this sort of sisterhood, brotherhood type of dynamics that we wanted to generate in the volume. And I think that one can sense that and each contributor's unwavering dedication to explore transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge, production this is at the core of the volume. And they understood that. And, of course, the work behind. I remember that Jacqueline and I sometimes, as I was taking my bus running to my office, we were calling each other, deciding what to do for each specific occasion, something that happened. So it was constant work 24 7. But it was so rewarding. And again, I think that everyone sort of understood and got that feeling, that energy that Jacqueline and I, we were putting together. We sort of spread it across, you know, the. Across the waves, the way the technological waves. And they got it and they managed to produce those marvelous species.
- [26:37]
Gina Stumm
Thank you. And so to keep in the same line of inquiry here, while you contend that, and I quote you here, this book comprises one and the same body of discourse. Could you tell us about some of the individual contributions and how you chose to organize that body of discourse?
- [26:54]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
As you mentioned before, you know, we picked Vosquetribitus because we wanted to discuss feminist and feminine contribution across different regions, archive genre and methodologies. And all those contributions engage with women whose work, activism and form of knowledge production haven't been studied. So I want to. This is what I want really to also emphasize is we're trying to also shed some light on feminist feminine thought that needs to be studied more. So that's why we first organize the volume thematically rather than geographically or chronologically. So it took us some time to decide how to organize the book. So when you think part one, Trans oceanic performativities, Activism, Women's Movements and feminisms. So bring together chapters that foreground women's collective actions and political engagement across oceanic spaces. So Timothy Valentin's chapter on Guadalupe and women within the workers movement at the turn of the 20th century reveals how women articulated political futures through labor activism deeply shaped by colonial and maritime economies. So my own contribution examine Martinique and communist women in the 1940s, such as Jean Leroux and Solangeville Duval, whose transoceanic counter narratives and settled dominant feminist and political histories. Charlotte Jublot Fere's interview with Titawapeu and Chantal Spies extend this discussion to the Pacific, centering tation, women's perspective and space, voice and resistance within interconnected oceanic worlds. So part one has the Caribbean and also the Pacific, but it's really about activism. Then part two, practices of care and practices of refusal. And here you also have beautiful, a lot of beautiful, strong voice shift the focus toward embodied, affective, and often intimate forms of resistance. And I think this is what makes this volume, I think, intriguing and rich, is that we're really trying to go back to the roots of humanities and to go back to what it means to be human and to focus about not glorious, heroic actions, but what people do when they just want not simply to survive, but to exist and say, hey, I'm here. So Valerie Magdalene Adria Ja Futrimot's chapter on the daughters of Eva and Reynio. It's a very beautiful chapter. Explore how care and domestication coexist with emancipatory practices in an Indian Ocean context. And this article merges history policies. It was a pleasure to read, but we had, you know, Ani and I, a lot of discussions about this article to make sure that we can really beautify all that is in the text then. And, you know, as a nice pendant to that, you have Jennifer Boom Mackerel's powerful analysis of cancer and vulnerability that reframes care itself as a transoceanic praxis and resistance, while Lindsay Sinclair's reading of postpartum psychosis in Moi Etherdit and Lelive Demas theorizes radical self care as the colonial practice shaped by oceanic histories of displacement and trauma. So these two parts, I mean, sometimes it was sad, it was poignant to read those articles, to read those chapters, and to learn more about those women because some of them had so much hopes and, you know, nothing really. There was no fruitions to their kind of fights. And then taking together this contribution become a current body of discourse because they insist on women's agency, creativity, and intellectual labor within transoceanic spaces. And whether we think through activism, narrative, care, or the concept of refusal, the sea is never incidental in these two parts. Like, you know, the third part, too, that Annie is going to talk about, you know, the sea structures, histories, enables circulation, and shapes the condition under which women theorize, act, and perform.
- [32:11]
Annie Dominique Curtius
And I can add to that that Marlo Style's beautiful chapter Wave Song, Radiation, Ecologies, and Women's Transpacific Poetics goes along that line of thought that Jacqueline just developed. And this chapter studies the ways in which indigenous women from Oceania, the ways in which they wield poetry and art as powerful tools to unveil the devastating transpacific consequences of radiation, environmental ruin, displacement, and health crisis. So when Jacqueline was talking about the sadness, the emotions, the affect that we had to engage with when we were reading those chapters, I'm thinking, for example, of Mauro's chapter. And what is interesting with this chapter is that she explains how the text that she analyzes, the writers, they forge cross cultural solidarity, bridging French and English speaking Pacific communities. The essay is also interesting to look at the ways in which by.
- [33:52]
Marshall Poe
The.
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Annie Dominique Curtius
Writers and the activists reimagine Oceania not as a isolated space, as isolated islands, but as interconnected sea of islands that really comes out of this piece. And there's also a strong focus on Kanak poet Deruet Gouraudet embodying indigenous survivors and struggles through her poetics. In part three, titled Archipelagic Embodied Performance and Disruptive Body Grammars in Trans Oceanic Context, we have three pieces, Eric Desbrose, Ad Legal Brave and my piece for Eric's piece titled Francophone Trends of Color Critique is an Archipelago Black Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Islands. Cross Currents of Contemporary Gender Theory. Eric Disbro proposes a trans society perspective on Francophone genealogies of transness and he lays the ground for what he calls a Francophone trance of color critique. So the chapter examines Kamala Macroe's poetry collection Zomfa and Veronique Canors documented in Ephemes Vienne To See the Mars. And those two productions, they highlight the fluidity of gender identity. So focusing on the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Oceania, Eric contains that gender transgression and embodied gender expression are intrinsic to Francophone inquiries and Archipelagic Lens reveals the enduring influence of transness on Francophone's death. The second piece in that third part is by Adley Galbraith and it's an interview talking about the variety of forms. Okay, this is another piece. It's an interview with Ketley Noel, who is a Haitian born dancer and choreographer and a key figure in the Aphrodisan Contemporary dance movement and whose artwork.
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Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Whose.
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Annie Dominique Curtius
Artwork spans Europe, the Caribbean, Sub Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean, Iceland, North America. So Caitlin always is very interesting as a choreographer and dancer to sort of capture those different geographies and adapt movements, create movements. As she thinks about those geographies that she traverses, Noel addresses her experiences as a black female artist navigating a male dominated field and she reframes femaleness and blackness and hybridity and the impact of cross cultural collaborations on artistic identity. So this is something that the interview really highlights beautifully. In terms of my piece, I can talk about it a little bit. I mean, later when we sort of focus on our contribution. For the fourth part and the last part of the volume, we thought about a thematic titled the Power of the Pen, Unsettling Exotic Archives and Rejecting Dehumanization via Literary Praxis. The first piece in this last section is by Julia Franks. Her essay is titled Chantal Spitz and Flora Orima de Vatin's Maori decolonial Praxis. And this essay examines the literary and cultural work of two foundational Polynesian writers, Spitz and the Wattine. And Frank's contribution is very interesting in the ways in which she highlights the Waitins and Spitz key roles in creating institutional spaces for Maori expression, such as the founding of the literary review litera.
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Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Maori.
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Annie Dominique Curtius
In 2002 and the annual performance events Pinaynae in 2011. So what is highlighted in this chapter is the way the literary practice fuses orality, performance and written form to foreground Maori epistemologies and challenge and challenge. And this is important challenge the reductive colonial stereotypes, especially about Tahitian women. The other piece by Catherine Hammett, titled Voice and Silence in the work of Kanak writer Issa Kalla, focuses on Kalla's text L' tribus des veuves to explore how silence functions both thematically and formally through communal voices, visual motifs and song lyrics. So Catherine shows in Kala's work that silence is reclaimed. It's reclaimed as a mode of resistance and empowerment. So what is very interesting here is that silence is positioned as a foundational element of a distinctively Oceanian feminist poetics. The last chapter in that section and in the volume is by it's a co written piece by Frank, Andrea Narivo and Mike Lemon. And in that piece they both explore Ananda Davies trilingual text titled Cedularge in French, afloat in English and bainoiller in Mauritian English, sorry in Mauritian Creole. So the text is written first in French and David translated it in Mauritian Creole and in English. And Frank and Mike explored the text as. And they proposed the word a text, a book gesture to understand the ways in which translation and multilingualism is a structural matrix throughout David's text to refashion how migrant narratives are expressed, understood and disseminated. They also put forward a term that I really like and it's poethical. So it's a cross pollination of poetic and ethical. And through that concept they show that.
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Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Cross.
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Annie Dominique Curtius
That how can I say that the border crossing, yes, border crossing practices acknowledge the full humanity of displaced individuals across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. So for them, Davy's text display a poethical attitude. And that was important for them to go into a very close analysis of the mechanism of that type of poetical response that enacts a relational cartography of linguistics and emotional connectivity. So this is broadly how the Last two sections configure those multiple voices and those beautifully crafted analysis of all those texts.
- [43:35]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
If I have time just to add one thing, because after listening to Anya, I just realized also that we have also to put the emphasis on the diversity of forms that are reflected in the volume. And I mean, we have this insistence to make sure that we talk about theoretical and political insight, but we wanted also to talk about live, embodied and relational practices that challenge hierarchical distinction between who produces knowledge and how that knowledge is being expressed. So across these chapters, the use of interviews, dialogic structures, poetic language, and embodied reflections for us is not an aesthetic choice, but a political and epistemological one. I will get that word right. So by naming artists from writers and activists as theorists in their own right, and by allowing knowledge to emerge through practice, performance and lived experience, the work that Annie and I put together for the reader actively democratizes knowledge production while remaining deeply engaged in rigorous. I want to insist all that rigorous and consequent sequential intellectual work, as highlighted by our introduction, where we lay down a lot of the theory, but we still wanted this to be accessible to any kind of readers. Kids, they grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes in.
- [45:28]
Marshall Poe
Their princess dresses is two sizes too.
- [45:30]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Small and their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore.
- [45:33]
Gina Stumm
But don't cry because they're growing up.
- [45:36]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on Depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download Depop to start selling.
- [45:47]
Gina Stumm
And now, moving from the overarching scope of the book to your particular contributions. I'll start with you, Dr. Coetzee, regarding your contribution Unsettling feminist practice with Martinican Communist Women's transoceanic counternarratives. Jane Leroux and Solange duval in the 1940s. So could you tell us who these women were and how their activism is exemplary, according to you?
- [46:12]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
So Jeanne Leroux was one, was one of the first Martinican women who started this women feminist organization, Martiniques, you know, in short. But she was also one of the first Martin can women to affiliated herself with the Communist Party. And then Philip Duval also did the same, but with her brother Leton. And she was also a part of this feminist or women's organization, Le Femme. But she was. While Leroux was more concentrated in Fort de France, the capital, Solange Fille Duval was in another commune, another small Town in Saint Esprit. And her brother, who's been the mayor for Saint Esprit for over a decade, she did a lot. So I don't know anything about those women. And I was ashamed, I have to say, when I discovered all the things they did for other women. So they make sure that lactation. They were dedicated. They were not even married, they didn't have kids, but they were dedicated to implement policies so that Martinique could help women to lactate. Because it was at the end of the Second World War and Martinique was in disarray as far as health issues were concerned and political lives. So there were activists, but in the sense where they were trying to find ways to better their communities through communism. And particularly Jean Leroux, because she wrote in the Communist Journal in Martinique and she really thought she wrote pieces where for her, communism was the only ideology that we help women and that will help people of color, black people. And I have to say, I read that and you know, at time I wanted to cry because now when you look, she has so much hope. And then she was also a good friend with Cesaire. And when Cesaire left the Communist Party, she was so distraught, so she fell out of the balcony.
- [48:34]
Annie Dominique Curtius
So.
- [48:34]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
So this is what I mean by reading those stories is when I say sad is not even strong enough. Because some of the archives I read, they were like, she fell. And other people like, no, she jumped. And. And then because she was so dedicated to the cause, she just wanted to help her country. And that didn't work out. The way she fought. And Cesaire went another route. We're not a communist anymore. Challenge Fille du Valvo with her brother. They became, quote, unquote, the enemies of Cesaire. So it's a different history of Martinique that we're not thinking about because we think about Lisieux Nardal, the Nardal sisters. But they were from a kind of more elite. Those women were. Even if they were educated, they were not from the black middle bourgeoisie. They were closer to working class people or people who are emerging. So it was interesting for me to show this idea of entanglement in a more complicated way. And the ocean was there because some of them. So some members of the UFEM went to Paris to join other communist women. So this is how the collaboration, the dialogues happened. So my piece is a bit more historical, but at the same time it's not because it's. Those women never use the term feminist. And yes, when you read what they're saying, you're like, yeah, you just want to help other women taking care of their babies. You want to show that women is at the core of community and it's all about betterment. But it's not the kind of white feminism that we see emerges in the late 19th century. It's more this idea of the kind of feminism, third wave feminism, where the personal is political and you can never not put the two together.
- [50:41]
Gina Stumm
And you draw on your previous work for the notion of dangerous Creole liaisons. So what can you tell us what this means and how you apply it with Leroux here?
- [50:50]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Yes. So for me, when I talk about this idea of. Because, you know, I read La Clo, I saw all the movies, but what I like is this dangerous, the idea of a cross pollination of discourses. You don't know who said it first. At one point, you just so you know, I give the example of the beautiful moulatresse, the beautiful women of color. And then the term do do for a lot of people, it's a synonym of this beautiful seductress. But for us, it means like darling in Creole. So what's happening? Why do you have this shift between concepts and meaning? So this is the dangerous cruelty is what I'm talking about. Because Leroux, but also Solangefi, Duval, they were all for the Communist Party. They really believed that the Communist Party would save them. But Cesaire showed us that they didn't like black people. It was more complicated. So this is what I mean by dangerous. Cruel liaison is like. And I'm trying not to judge, though I'm a very judgmental person. Those women really believe in the communist ideology, but it was not an innocent ideology. And even within the Communist parties, some people were against whatever was happening. And there's a lag, historical lag, between the 30s and the 40s, when people in Europe start criticizing Communist Party. In Martinique, they're still praising that particular political ideology. So this is what I mean by dangerous. This kind of investment is discourses and practices that can be beneficial, but sometimes they're not, and sometimes you don't have enough. I want to say, I cannot think in English. I want to say, so you're not far enough. You're not far enough to see what is problematic. It's like some Martini government. Oh, yes, I'm a beautiful woman of color.
- [52:59]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Yay. I'm playing the role.
- [53:00]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
I'm dancing. People want me to dance. But then they're not aware of a bigger colonial discourse. Sexualizing those women and Leroux and Solentre Duval were very clear. They were not into any sexualization. They were not. They were like, we're going to have women voted in political arena. So they make sure that when you have mayoral elections, some of the women were also there. So that's what I mean. With den chauce que liaison, this is the entanglement of discourses, of ideas that are not always positive.
- [53:43]
Gina Stumm
And in addition to that concept of the dangerous Creole liaisons, you identify Filte Duval particularly with what you call matro centric feminism and with the Creole term. And please correct me if I'm pronouncing this wrong, but from Aquama.
- [53:58]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Yes.
- [53:59]
Gina Stumm
So what kind of praxis do these terms express for you?
- [54:02]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Yeah, so, you know, I took care a lot in this article because Aquama is one of huge tree in Martinique with huge roots, which. Which is usually people use that for foundation, to use that, you know, to create houses. So I found a nice magazine organized and printed by the ufem, where the title was Solent Sut du Val Pharmacoma. So it was all about how, in fact, she shouldered the weight of the community. And her brother, who was also the mayor of Saint Esprit, said several times, said several times that she loved the family so much because she loved humanity. So this is what I mean by matrice centric. She never had children. She never have children. She adopted the daughter of someone. But the idea of motherhood is not, you know, like, it's not, oh, I'm being a mother. No, no, no, no, no. It's very political. And I wanted to make a difference between the kind of political motherhood that you see, you seen in the late 19th century in Canada, in the U.S. in France, where it's very bourgeois centric. In fact, my argument will be this is where the African ancestry comes back again, where the mother. And again, this is also dangerous because the woman as the center is dangerous because, you know, like, I will have kids. I have two cats, okay? Because I don't want to carry the whole thing on my shoulder. But this is what she believed in. So all the feminism. And she was also, I mean, she's well known in Martinique. She was also a secondary teacher, and she was all about education, and she was about educating the mother so that the child we become. When I say wealthy citizen, I want to say psychologically and mentally, that for her, that was very, very important. So, Matthew eccentric, because mothers do not need to be, you know, real mothers. But I didn't want to go back to the nurse, the white Nurse metaphor. Because this is not what she's doing. She's about organization. She's, in fact, she was one of the first one to talk about abortion and, like, divorce and let's get rid of the husbands. That's not helping us. But at the same time, she was all about trying to find spaces for women to work and to support their families. So when you look at a lot of the archives, it's all about the woman is at the center, the mother is at the center. What can you do to make your family better? Because if you make your family better, you will make the community and ultimately the nation better. And it's all about care. Because she took care of a dying mother, she took care of a dying father. And this is what sometimes for me, so problematic. This is what is being celebrated. But, you know, sacrifice. I mean, the sacrificial mother thing is not mine. But this is what they thought was important. So that's why I use that term, Matthew Centric, because I found a lot of. And in fact, it's interesting because it's in Canada, they're really teasing out the role of the mother. And I thought that was as a political tool, not as a tool working with the state, but as a tool to make the community better, hence the term. I didn't find this in, you know, like, any kind of theoretical toolkit that From Europe or France, for instance.
- [58:05]
Gina Stumm
Thank you so much. And Turning now to Dr. Curtius, your own contribution is called Tidalactic Reclaiming Skeletons. Liana, Hips and Feet with Nathalie Armin, Suzanne Cesaire and Kamau Braithwaite. And you begin with the short with Hermine's short story, Le Verbe CE Filcher. Can you tell us about the series of real events referenced in that text and their significance for Ermine?
- [58:30]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Yeah. So Nathalie Hermin is Renionese writer, journalist and high school teacher. And the short story Le Verbe Sufficher is in a collection of short stories titled. My Greatest Heartache is not to be Able to help you. And this title is actually a quote from Variste de Parnis Chanson Medigas, where a daughter, sort of. We are, of course, in the. At the time of slavery, and it's her daughter speaks to her mother who sold her into slavery. Okay. So the title of the collection of short service is from that work by Variste de Parence, Le Verbe Svicher does. So the short story, the Verbe Sufficher does draw on. Does draw from real events. There's the conference at the Quai Braunly Museum. That conference did occur in May 2020. Sorry, May 2012. I think it was May 11, 2012. I want to give you the accurate information, since we're talking about real events. The Hurricane Gamed did blast through the island of reunion in February 2007, most specifically on February 25, 2007, and severely impacted the island with record tidal waves, rainfall, flooding, and everything. And after that hurricane, massive soil erosion exposed slave burial grounds on the beach, and human bones fell off the embankment that were dug by the winds. So Hermine accurately recounts those various events, and she actually, in a note that precedes. I mean, that comes before the short story, she explains where she comes from, where she gets that information, and how those events are going to be really important for her to sort of locate the short story first, first of all, at the intersection of fiction and reality. That's one thing. But she warns the reader in that note that precedes the short story, and you can see it, you know, between the lines, even though she doesn't express it, you know, clearly, but you can read it in between the lines, that those events are significant so that she can interweave complex layers of memory agency and historical modalities to memorialize the hounded presence embodied by the skeletons that were discovered fortuitously on those Jesus. So that's what I can say in terms of that balance between fiction and real events that gave birth to that short story.
- [62:22]
Gina Stumm
And you refer to her text as performing something of what you call a sanding through. And what is this process and how does it work through Hermine's text?
- [62:33]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Yeah, so my construction of the term sanding through draws from Dominique La Capra's work on trauma and his use of the concept working through and with Working through. La Capra describes how someone experiencing trauma or who has experienced trauma may try to gain critical distance on a traumatic situation, to distinguish between past, present, and.
- [63:06]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Future.
- [63:08]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Situations, and also to. To seek for balance and also counterbalance. So La Capre comes with this term and signals that working through is. And that's a term that I use directly from his work. Working through is a countervailing force. So that's the first layer, so to speak, of my construction of the idea of the concept sending through. Similarly, sending through draws from the expression sable un c' estable, used by Hermine in the short story where she is describing the ways in which Taina belongs, who is the archaeologist, the young archaeologist, the ways in which she meticulously look for the bones through the sand. Okay, so Taina, in the short story, she sends through. I'm saying that she sends through history. She works through. So she sends through history, grains down the sharp layers of memory, smooths trauma for access to an ancestral knowledge that is necessary for her as an archaeologist, but also as a woman of African descent who happens to be an archaeologist and who happens to work on that site where human skeletons were found. So basically, what I did with my notion of sending through, I cross pollinated, working through and Sable to express how Ermine does not look for definite answer. She doesn't look for closure, as Jacqueline and I, we did in the volume. We're not looking for closure. We are sending through the messiness. Okay. And so she does not look for definite answers, but she's attentive to the multiple layers of entanglement that are at play in recuperating all those real events and putting them in the short story. So it's a fascinating short story, and I'm really glad that I was able to include it in that conversation that I'm having in my piece and where I create a dialogue with Kamal Brathwaite, Natalie Earnings and Susanne Cesaire.
- [66:23]
Gina Stumm
And to speak just to that dialogue, actually. So you put Hermine's story in connection with two figures, the Bergilde or Bergilde in Cesaire's work, and then the peasant woman in Braithwaite. How do those three connect?
- [66:43]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Yeah. So in Ermine's short story, you have the enslaved African women rising from the ocean after the hurricane. Her skeleton is found on the beach, and the skeleton is the moment it's there on the beach. It's available to science, to archeology, to study your past, their DNA, the conditions of her enslavement, and maybe the conditions through which she was buried somewhere. Archeology can be really specific in determining those elements. So we have this woman. Then we also have Kamar Fwait's matriarch, who is, as he says, as he puts it, the chief of a poverty stricken household, sweeping a yard or sandy yard again. The sand comes again in all those examples, in all those situations, sweeping a sandy yard, but also walking freely on the Atlantic Ocean as she connects the African continent to the Caribbean. And this is all done in a tidal tical mode, according to brought. We also have Suzanne Cesaire's Bergilde, the female dancer, dancing with the ocean and connecting also through a dancing body, the African continent and the Caribbean to the Caribbean and protesting with her hips. The description of hips in that piece by Suzanne Cesaire is really Beautiful. The drumming, the drumming that is made by Bergil's co workers, demanding probably for better wages. As they're drumming, as they're dancing, this is not said, but we can feel.
- [68:58]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
It.
- [69:00]
Annie Dominique Curtius
In between the lines, as Susanne Cesaire is describing the scene of dancing and drumming, with Bergilde being at the center of all that activities. So all those female characters, so Bergilles, the female skeleton and the old grandmother in Brafre's piece, all those female characters, they have existed, okay? And they are in a way, the ancestors of our contemporary world. They are the one who can provide us with guidelines, roadmaps to understand our messy world. So in my work I argue that their body, their feet, their hips, the skeleton, the sand, all this form some sort of a transoceanic chorus. There is a chorus happening here and those free women activate this chorus with parts of their body and they craft a women centered consciousness where precarity, solidarity, agency, all those dynamics intersect. So the three female figures, they occupy this historical chaos of the ocean and they unlock the violent history that has happened and it is somehow still happening in the ocean. So I mentioned cause because for me a reality is important. And that's the reason why. That's another piece that is important for us in the volume. That's the reason why Jacqueline and I wanted to address the variety of forms, because we have interviews, we have people actually sort of speaking in the volume. So there is a rich orality when you think about those three women. And you know, Gina, I'm always fascinated by the ways in which, for example, our elders, our grandmothers, tell their dreams in the Caribbean, in the islands. When they tell us their dreams, it's as if we've actually seen what they dreamt and what they tell you in the morning. And it's the language, the body language, the ways in which they use the body to provide the details of the dreams. And when you listen to it, it's as if you believe that it really happened in real time. But it's a dream. So I've always been fascinated by storytelling, the grand, the richness of orality. And I believe that this is this embodied orality that I find in those three bodily expressions. Walking on the ocean, sanding the yard, emerging from the ocean, dancing with the ocean. So tidaly, which is a term that I borrow from Baphwaite, is important. It's a term he coined as he was exploring the possibilities for that women that he observed, observes from a house that is on a cliff in Jamaica. And he's saying that he's there looking. So it's a dream again, that's a story. So tidilectical is my. When I add the suffix, that's my contribution to the theoretical and philosophical thickness of the term tidilectics that Bradfield uses. So Bradfield coined the term as he's sort of doing philosophical reasoning. He's in a house on a cliff in Jamaica, and he believes that he observed this old woman sweeping a sandy yard. And then after that, he believes that he sees her walking on the ocean freely. So she's not a captive. She's a free woman with all her agency unplotting the transatlantic slave trade and giving the transatlantic slave trade a different perspective from her own, with her own body. So when you consider this embodied experience that Brathwaite dreams about, reasons about, it's so rich that the perspectives that he addresses, it's never ending. Every time I read Brad Faith thinking about what he believed that he had seen with that women sending through and walking, every time I read it, new ideas emerge, and it's just absolutely fascinating to work with this concept.
- [74:39]
Gina Stumm
Wonderful. Thank you so much. And while I would love to continue this conversation, we are unfortunately out of time. So I would like to thank both my guests one more time. Thank you so much. Dr. Jacqueline Couti and Annie Dominique Curtius.
- [74:55]
Dr. Jacqueline Couti
Thank you.
- [74:56]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Thank you.
- [74:57]
Gina Stumm
And for our listeners, their volume is Women Theory, Praxis and Transoceanic Entanglements and Francophone Settings. Thank you so much.
- [75:14]
Annie Dominique Curtius
Foreign.
- [75:19]
Gina Stumm
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