Mapping the Mangrove Empathy and Survival in Traversée de La Mangrove

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Mapping the Mangrove: Empathy and Survival in Traverse de la Mangrove Author(s): Ellen W. Munley Source: Callaloo, Vol. 15, No. 1, The Literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique (Winter, 1992), pp.

156-166Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931409Accessed: 23-06-2015 03:17 UTC

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MAPPING THE MANGROVE: Empathy and Survival in Traversee de la mangrove

By Ellen W. Munley

You cannot pass through a thicket of mangrove trees. Their stiltlike stems and roots impale you. You dig your own grave and suffocate in the brackish water. (202) I will seek the sun, air, and light to live the rest of my days. (116)

Contrary to the novel bearing the same title within Traversee de la mangrove which its mysterious author, Francis Sancher, will never complete, Maryse Conde's novel bears thoroughgoing witness to the stories of twenty individuals. Some become en- tangled and drown in the mangrove thicket, a metaphor for present-day Guadeloupe; others move toward an originative sun illuminating the way home to personal truths that they must discover by themselves. On another level this complex narrative, com- prised of ten first-person and ten third-person accounts intricately interwoven between a narrative introduction entitled "Le serein" [dusk] and a closing chapter named "Le devant-jour" [dawn], furnishes the reader with a metaphoric map detailing all the death-inducing traps in the mangrove thicket and ways to avoid them. The path to life and freedom stretches out unencumbered to welcome the reader at book's end. The passage through the thick forest which surrounds us all has already claimed Fran- cis Sancher's life when the novel begins; at least six of the characters whose stories surface during the night of Sancher's wake slip further into their figurative graves. Other characters, however, succeed in extricating themselves from the obstacles that have thus far choked off life, and they move toward the light of a new day and the promise of collective salvation.

What are the obstacles and why do some continue to struggle toward life while others stagnate, resign themselves to solitude and exclusion, or beckon death? All casualties in a literal or figurative sense can be traced to social exclusion or parental rejection; all rebirths spring from an empathic connection between the individual characters and Francis Sancher, the dark sun at the center of this interconnected galaxy, who reflects the insights and wisdom which each of the characters possesses but is initially incapable of generating without him. A representative of the past, he sees into the souls of all but himself. His stories unlock the untold stories and secrets buried in his listeners. He becomes mentor, friend, and ally to those who come in contact with him, mirroring the thoughts and feelings comprising their inner lives and empowering them.

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Francis Sancher, alias Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez, has come to Riviere au Sel to die. To him the place resembles a watery grave and conjures up the briny water he envi- sions engulfing and choking those who try to cross a mangrove thicket. We never discover why this idealist beyond ideals gives up and fatalistically courts the death he anticipates as ineluctable on his fiftieth birthday. Several interlocutors hear the stories of his ancestors who were forced to succumb to a curse that deprived them of life after half a century in spite of their best efforts to escape. He cannot possibly save himself, or can he?

Whether his death is occasioned by an ancient curse pronounced on his forefathers and their progeny because of some unspeakable deed committed in the past or whether it results from a self-fulfilling tragic prophecy remains an open question for all but Xantippe. This outcast poet and prophet who assumes mythic proportions in the text discovers answers which the novel does not presume to provide. His life- story, juxtaposed with all the others, nevertheless offers several clues: "Personne ne sait exactement en quelle matiere le coeur de l'homme est fabrique"' [No one knows exactly what the human heart is made of], declares Aristide (83). Sancher's death is no more imponderable than the jealousy which motivated Xantippe's enemies to set fire to his home and family, condemning him to a life of irreparable loss.

The real unanswered question at the heart of this novel is why we inflict death and suffering on each other. Man Sonson, the older woman who peers into others' souls and futures as acutely as she reveals the healing powers of plants, comments that "sur le coeur des Negres la lumiere de la bonte ne brille jamais" [the light of goodness never shines on the heart of Negroes] (89). Mira Lameaulnes, the striking, light-skinned object of desire and the malice seething in her neighbors' hearts, lives as if in exile on "notre ile a ragots, livree aux cyclones et aux ravages de la mechancete du coeur des Negres" [our gossip-filled island, at the mercy of cyclones and the ravages of spiteful Black hearts] (66). Moise, the physically unattractive product of his father's unex- plained relationship with a Chinese woman, receives the nickname "Mosquito" and the unmerited disdain of all the islanders he encounters on his mail route every day. Spurned even by the local prostitute, he withers along with his dreams, observing that "Seul celui qui a vecu entre les quatre murs d'une petite communaute connait sa mechancete et sa peur de l'etranger" [Only one who has lived inside the walls of a small community knows its malice and fear of strangers] (39). The place that serves as the locus of this "small-minded community" is Riviere au Sel, a name which sym- bolically reflects a social fabric composed in large part of prejudices, hatred, and mis- understandings. It needs purifying as much as the salt-laden water in order to support life.

Each of the spokespersons whose names divide the novel's twenty central chapters lives in virtual isolation, excluded from participation in a larger community by the barriers that have defensively grown up in their own hearts, or by the fences that shut them out of the narrow boundaries defining the acceptable in Guadeloupean society. Francis Sancher, whose story lies embedded in the personal accounts of these individuals, shares their profound exclusion. In reality the exclusions are multiple and overlapping and fall into three main categories: parent-child, wife-husband/lover- beloved, social insider-outsider. At the end of Traverse'e de la mangrove, Francis Sancher

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has found acceptance through death. His death in turn acts directly on the lives of nine of his acquaintances whose actions will undoubtedly affect their children, their co-citizens, and perhaps even touch the two patriarchal representatives of wealth and social standing who head the Ramsaran and Lameaulnes families.

The dynamic that triggers these transformations lies in an acceptance and validation of one's self that can then be extended to other individuals and groups. Francis Sancher, a former doctor often referred to as "el curandero" [the healer] in former times and places, serves as the healer of hearts and minds in Riviere au Sel. Discussion of his role within the context of the practice of psychoanalytic self psychology eluci- dates the power for personal and political change that can result from empathic attunement.

Self Psychology and Transmuting Internalizations

Psychoanalytic self psychology is a theory of psychotherapy based on the analyst's empathic immersion in the patient's experience. It grew out of the work of Heinz Kohut (1913-1981), a Freudian analyst who reconsidered his theoretical perspective when confronted with patients who "stumped" him by not responding to treatment in the classical tradition of psychoanalysis. His prolonged empathic immersion in the inner worlds of these patients led him to explore new and previously unrecognized psychic configurations. In a letter to another analyst dated May 16, 1974, Kohut wrote:

It was on the basis of feeling stumped that I began to entertain the thought that these people were not concerned with me as a separate person but that they were concerned with themselves; that they did not love or hate me, but that they needed me as part of themselves, needed me as a set of functions which they had not acquired in early life; that what appeared to be their love or hate was in reality their need that I fulfill certain psychological functions for them and anger at me when I did not do so. (Mac Isaac and Rowe 9)

This intuition offered new perspectives on the place of empathy in analytic cure. The psychological functions he refers to in the above excerpt came to be theorized as the mirroring selfobject transference and the idealizing selfobject transference.

Briefly stated for our purposes, the selfobject is "another whose responses and at- titudes are vitally experienced by the developing psyche not only as shapers of but as part of the self" (Lang 398). The term, then, denotes one's experience of another part of the self. In the mirroring selfobject transference, the analyst tries to be in tune, be "in" the experience of the patient, understand the experience, and verbally express that understanding. The idealizing selfobject transference occurs when the analyst is experienced "as the consistent, powerful, and protective parental image" (Mac Isaac and Rowe 260). Mac Isaac and Rowe summarize Kohut's speculations that this latter transference allowed patients whose idealizing needs were thwarted as children to

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move beyond an arrested stage of development in which they continued to long for a perfectionistic image of their parents and "tended throughout life to search for some- one who could fit this unfulfilled and primitive picture" (32). Since the power of the selfobject relationship is not simply one of "reinforcement" but of extending the boundaries of what is or is not "Me" beyond the individual self, this method of analysis based on interdependence and relationship has enormous potential for the understanding of relationships between individuals as well as those between intrapsychic and sociocultural forces.1 New ways of verbally formulating and seeing intercon- nectedness imply possibilities for transforming those relationships. Extending the boundaries of the self permits a purificatory return to the sources of the figuratively salt-tainted and life-threatening waters of Riviere au Sel. There is hope for reconfi- guring the social fabric and common existence, beginning with the individual.

Transmuting Internalizations in Traversee de la mangrove

In order to examine how Francis Sancher functions as a catalyst for psychic healing in the novel, let us group the characters according to the three categories of exclusion alluded to above (parent-child, wife-husband/lover-beloved, social insider-outsider) and elaborate the relationships between one or more representative persons from each group and Sancher.

Exclusion and Parental Rejection Among those who experience rejection from either or both of their parents, we find

Sonny Pelagie rejected by both his parents, Loulou Lameaulnes rejected by his mother, Sylvestre Ramsaran rejected by his father, Vilma Ramsaran rejected by her mother, and Mira Lameaulnes whose illegitimate birth coincided with the death of the "Negresse," Rosalie Sorane, who bore her. The mother and step-mother of the two young women provide a fruitful starting point for this discussion because they verbalize convictions that harken back to preceding generations and echo forth in the lives of their daughters. Rosa Ramsaran's statement that "le malheur des enfants est toujours cause par les parents" [children's unhappiness is always caused by their parents] (177), recalls Dinah Lameaulnes's fear that "les malheurs des enfants sont toujours causes par les fautes cachees des parents" [children's misfortunes are always caused by their parents' hidden faults] (111). These reflections can be understood and positively acted upon when we examine them in the light of self psychology which goes beyond the Freudian legacy wherein an unhappy woman who was either frus- trated, repressed, martyred, never satisfied, or rejecting was afflicted by the repres- sion of her instinctive wishes and the distortions which this strangulation of need created in her relationships. Calling upon the concepts of the mirroring and idealizing transferences explained above, these two statements relate directly to Vilma and Mira as two children who did not experience certain representatives of their human sur-

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roundings as joyfully responding to them and as available to them as sources of ide- alized strength and calmness.

Vilma and Mira both live individually with Francis Sancher for a period of time; the former is lodged in his house and pregnant at the time of his death, the latter has already given birth to his son. Curiously enough, neither of these young women has a transformative relationship with Sancher in spite of their physical intimacy with him. Both will escape the confines of their previous lives but not because he has exercised a direct influence on them as he does on the other people he helps to redirect. Con- vinced of the curse upon his family, he wants only to end it with his death, not per- petuate it in future generations. Mira and Vilma will be liberated from the stifling confines of their families and the narrow possibilities in Guadeloupean society as a result of Sancher's association with other members of their families and the community.

Both young women underscore the central importance of another relationship re- curring throughout the novel and probed by Sancher in his conversation with Vilma's mother: that between mother and child, and here specifically between mother and daughter. Mira cannot understand that, for her, there is no mother on this earth, and finds her sole refuge in the flowing water of a hidden ravine whose scarcely audible song recalls her in utero relationship with her mother. There she imagines life with a flesh-and-blood mother who approvingly watches her growing up, meets her at the end of the day, and explains all the mysteries of her body to her. After Sancher gives Mira an infusion designed to put her to sleep long enough to abort the child she is carrying, she poetically evokes her sleep-state in terms that again harken back to the embryonic period:

Mon esprit s'est detache de mon corps, paisible, paisible. Il m'a semble que je revenais habiter comme autrefois le ventre om- breux de ma mere, Rosalie Sorane aux dents de perle. Je flottais, je nageais eperdue de bonheur dans sa mer uterine et j'entendais assourdis, affaiblis, les tristes bruits d'un monde dans lequel j'tais bien decide a ne jamais faire mon entree. (115) [My spirit detached itself from my body, peacefully, peaceful. It seemed as if I were coming back to live, as in times gone by, in the shadowy womb of my mother, Rosalie Sorane with the pearl white teeth. I was floating, swimming, wildly happy in her uterine sea and the sad sounds of a world I had resolutely decided not to reenter were coming to me, muted, diminished.]

Reenter she does, in time to save her unborn child. She later realizes at Sancher's wake that her true life begins with the latter's death and her personal quest for truth: "Alors, moi, je dois decouvrir la verite. Desormais ma vie ne sera qu'une quete. Je retracerai les chemins du monde" [And so then, it's up to me to discover the truth. From now on my life will become a quest. I will search on all the roadways of this world] (244- 45).

Vilma Ramsaran, on the other hand, wants only to follow Sancher to the grave, thus reenacting the fate of her Indian foremother who followed her beloved to the funeral

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pyre. A better fate, however, awaits her. Having grown up under the resentful gaze of a mother who mourned the death of Vilma's recently deceased sister, the former has known only rejection from Rosa Ramsaran. When Rosa visits Sancher to speak with her daughter, she flees from Vilma's menacing shouts but not before she has a conversation with this enigmatic man which will change not only her life but her daughter's as well. Francis Sancher, this "moulin a paroles" (93) who seems to artic- ulate what each person might find written in his or her heart if all defenses were down, remarks in passing that his mother had Rosa's black, lustrous hair but that she did not love him very much. In response to Rosa's stammering protestation that all mothers love their children, he respectfully notes that his mother was impregnated in less than ideal circumstances; his parents made love without any real communication: "Pour donner, pour rendre l'amour; il faut en avoir requ beaucoup, beaucoup" [In order to give, to return love, you have to have received a great deal of it, a great deal] (181). Rosa feels the shock of recognition; he has stated her case. She responds with a remark that others will repeat verbatim upon hearing Sancher utter their as yet un- formulated but deeply felt convictions: "Comment savez-vous cela" [How do you know that?] (180). Sancher's words, "In order to give, to return the love, you have to have received a great deal of it, a great deal," continue to reverberate and punctuate Rosa's review of her empty life. They ultimately lead her to the realization that the absence of understanding, love, and sharing might still be supplanted by their pres- ence in the days to come:

Je dirai a ma fille, mienne: -Sortie de mon ventre, je t'ai mal aimee. Je ne t'ai pas aidee

a eclore et tu as pousse, rabougrie. Ii n'est pas trop tard pour que nos yeux se rencontrent et que nos mains se touchent. Donne- moi ton pardon. (182) [I will say to my daughter, mine:

-Outside of my womb I loved you badly. I did not help you to blossom and you grew up stunted. It is not too late for our eyes to meet and our hands to touch. Forgive me.]

Rosa's determination mirrors the ultimatum that Dodose Pelagie addresses to herself regarding her child, Sonny, who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage shortly after birth and has lived with the consequences ever since. Francis Sancher welcomes the boy and becomes his only friend, the only person to speak with him and treat him hu- manely and not as punishment or a nuisance. Although Dodose refuses to listen to Sancher's evaluation of Sonny and meets his steady, unreproachful gaze with a bar- rage of injurious words, she relives this chance meeting with him on the Saint Charles path in the forest where he has met many other inhabitants. Remembering his look and his words, she begins to question herself during the night of his wake, asking herself if she has ever really loved her son or regarded him as a cross to be borne, a wound to her pride, a punishment to her husband, Emmanuel, whom she hates but has not known how to leave. Visualizing Sancher on that twilight path leads her to clarify her direction as dawn approaches: "Pourtant, il m'a montre la voie.... De- sormais, je prendrai soin de lui (Sonny). Je frapperai a la porte de chaque hopital, de

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chaque clinique, de chaque dispensaire.... Je laisserai Emmanuel, enferme dans ses rancoeurs et Riviere au Sel, ses petitesses immuables" [However, he showed me the way.... From now on, I will take care of him (Sonny). I will knock on the door of every hospital, every clinic, every dispensary.... I will leave Emmanuel, wrapped in his resentment and Riviere au Sel, in his meanness] (224-25).

It is not too late for parents and children to find new ways of relating to one another. Children relate to their parents as selfobjects; adults continue to interact with others as selfobjects throughout their lives. Insight and new beginnings follow empathic contact with a therapeutic other capable of reflecting the needs and remembrances "safe- guarded in the folds of memory, in the deep recesses of the heart" (Mangrove 251).

Exclusion and Relationships between Men and Women

There are two powerfully drawn, joyful, sensuous relationships in Traversee de la mangrove: the first briefly alluded to between Man Sonson and Simeon, her dead husband, "un vaillant Negre, de l'espece qui a disparu de la surface de la planete`' [a valiant Negro, of the kind who has disappeared from the face of the planet] (87); the second between the mythical figure Xantippe and Gracieuse, the wife he has mourned for time immemorial. Excluding Francis Sancher's ties with Vilma and Mira, however, there are three prominent marriages in the novel between Loulou Lameaulnes and Dinah, Sylvestre Ramsaran and Rosa, and Emmanuel Pelagie and Dodose, within which husband and wife have withered and felt imprisoned. The Ramsaran and Pelagie marriages were arranged, and neither Rosa nor Dodose ever overcame their initial repugnance at being married to men they would never have chosen. Dinah chooses to marry Loulou against her mother's advice who warns her that "Il a trois garqons et une fille batarde. Tout ce qu'il cherche, c'est une bonne pour eux. Voila ce que tu seras" [He has three boys and a bastard daughter. All he's looking for is a maid to take care of them. That's what you will be] (108)! She is largely ignored by her husband, and her home becomes her "prison" and her "tombeau": "Par moments il me semblait que j'etais deja morte, que mon sang ne coulait plus chaud dans mes veines, qu'il etait deja caille"' [At times, it seemed to me that I was already dead, that my blood no longer flowed warmly through my veins, that it had already clotted] (110). Curled up alone in her bed at night she imagines her mother and the father she has never known there with her, and hears their bedtime stories until she drifts off to sleep in the early hours of the morning. Mme Dinah Lameaulnes seems no more than a child herself. In the period before either Mira or Vilma takes up residence in San- cher's household, he visits Dinah in hers. After one of their conversations, during which she tries to fathom why Loulou has brought her from Saint Martin to be his wife only to abandon her, she is left with two questions which he has asked her: What kept her tied down? Why didn't she go away? She comes to a decision the night of Sancher's wake: she, Dinah Lameaulnes, will. Francis Sancher, the first person whom she feels has understood and talked with her, provides the empathic bond that leads to the power to make changes in her life.

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Exclusion and Social Groups

Deeply rooted prejudice against anyone "different," "from the outside," or from a different ethnic or racial background smothers at least half of the characters in Traverse'e de la mangrove. Here the individual tragedies and the redemptive power of the novel meet. If, as Heinz Kohut theorized, we all possess lifelong needs for selfobjects and the functions they provide, if the healthy self cannot survive or thrive without others who affirm our deepest sense of person and selfhood and steady us on our way, then the inhabitants of Riviere au Sel are doomed to think little of themselves and feel even less enthusiasm for life. This is a society where relationships are governed by malice. Social and cultural exchanges in this closed society thwart rather than foster those mutual selfobject functions essential to the capacity for empathy and a sympathy for the realities of others.

Each of the people who tells his or her story, or whose story is recounted by a self- effacing narrator who prioritizes the individual's experience, is susceptible to the rejection and exclusion they encounter in society. Inclusion and exclusion, the longing to be accepted as one is, and the experience of rejection dominate the novel. MoIse, dit Maringouin, le facteur; Desinor, l'Haltien; and Xantippe live in permanent exile where no place is home. If Leocadie Timothee, the retired schoolteacher, and Loulou Lameaulnes have any say in the matter, it will remain that way. Both decry the fact that Guadeloupe is "on the auction block," in the words of Leocadie Timothee: the influx of Haitians, Dominicans, all kinds of Whites from Canada or from Italy, Viet- namese, and "puis celui-la (Francis Sancher), vomi par on ne sait quel mauvais por- teur" [then that one (Francis Sancher), vomited ashore by who knows what bad tide] (147).

It is ironic that Leocadie Timothee, the privileged Black who taught in order to better her race, was rejected by those Blacks less fortunate than she: "A leurs yeux, j'etais une traltresse! Je souffrais de cet isolement, car j'aurais voulu qu'on m'aime, moi. Je ne savais pas que le Negre n'aime jamais le Negre" [In their eyes, I was a traitress! I suffered from that isolation, for I would have liked people to love me. I did not know that Negroes never love their own] (150). She never questions, however, what distin- guishes her from the outsiders she herself relegates to the margins of society.

Examples of discrimination and exclusion abound in the novel, but Emile Etienne's situation illustrates both his marginality and the determination to overcome it, thanks to the influence of Francis Sancher. Emile summarizes his childhood as that of a "petit Negre noir, sorti du ventre d'une malheureuse, assis aux derniers bancs de la classe, du C.P. au C.M.2. Son adolescence morose. Aux bals de 'La Flamme,' les filles se cachaient de lui et le surnommaient 'Sirop Batterie' " [small black Negro, born to an unfortunate woman, seated in the last rows of class, from C.P. to C.M.2. His morose adolescence. At the dances held at "La Flamme," the girls hid from him and nick- named him "Sirop Batterie"] (253). With the aid of scholarships and his mother's sac- rifices, he obtained the baccalaureate but then had to be satisfied with becoming a nurse to help support his younger sister and brother. Speaking with the older people of the island on his nursing visits to their homes, he is struck by their vivid recollec- tions of the past and writes Parlons de Petit Bourg. After two years of work and savings

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invested in the printing of the book, it is met by the sneers of the educated in La Pointe who make fun of its misprints and "stylistic improprieties." When he is with Francis Sancher, however, he speaks of himself and his great ambition to write a different kind of oral and social history of Guadeloupe. Sancher approves and, as he has done with so many others in Riviere au Sel, poses the question that Emile is afraid to ask himself: "Qu'est-ce qui t'en empeche" [What's stopping you?] (252). And once again, contemplating Sancher's coffin the night of the wake like so many others, he confronts what prevents him from acting:

Regardant le cerceuil, Emile Etienne eut soudain honte de sa lachete.... Qu'est-ce qui lui faisait peur?. .. Il se sentit plein d'un courage immense, d'une energie nouvelle qui coulait mys- terieuse dans son sang. (252) [Looking at the coffin, Emile Etienne suddenly felt ashamed of his cowardice.... What was he afraid of? ... He felt full of immense courage, new energy which was flowing mysteriously through his blood.]

Feeling that his promise to write the book unites him to Sancher beyond death, he is ready to work, to search for a place where the color of one's skin does not matter. It is as though Francis Sancher's death has been the catalyst for Emile Etienne's self actualization. His death functions in a similar way to liberate the living in regard to another young writer ensnared in a different trap.

Lucien Evariste, the aspiring novelist caught between his favored background rooted in Catholic France and the Patriotes espousing atheism and creole, finds himself buried alive in Guadeloupe, waging a no-win battle mainly against himself. Through his conversations with Francis Sancher, including the last one the night of Sancher's wake when he remembers and hears again segments of previous exchanges, he succeeds in placing himself within the narrow confines of the island and beyond it. For him, Sancher was "le grand frere et le jeune pere qu'il n'avait pas eus, moqueur et tendre, cynique et reveur" [the big brother and young father that he had never had, mocking and tender, cynical and dreamy] (238). Overwhelmed by emotion and an irresistible life force, Lucien integrates his feelings of loss and caring for his dead friend with his literary aspirations smothered from the right and the left:

Au lieu, enfant d'aujourd'hui et de la ville, de traquer des neg mawon ou des paysans du XIXe siecle, pourquoi ne pas mettre bout a bout souvenirs et bribes de confidences, ecarter les men- songes, reconstituer la trajectoire et la personnalite du defunt? ... Il lui faudrait refuser le vertige des idees recues. Regarder dans les yeux de dangereuses verites. Deplaire. Choquer. (240) [Instead of remaining a child of today and the city and tracking down escaped slaves or peasants of the nineteenth century, why not bring together memories and snatches of secrets, dismiss lies, reconstitute the trajectory and the personality of the deceased? . .. He would have to refuse the headiness of precon- ceived notions. Look dangerous truths in the eyes. Offend. Shock.]

He will write the biography of Francis Sancher.

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From the Darkness of Isolation Toward the Light of Community

Light is a puissant metaphor in Traverse'e de la mangrove. Those characters who affirm and recover their faith in themselves as a result of their friendship with Francis Sancher feel compelled to act, to speak, to write, to leave, to move toward the light, each one as vulnerable and indestructible as a plant toward the sun. Dinah Lemeaulnes, whose recitation of psalms is answered in chorus by the inhabitants of Riviere au Sel assem- bled at Sancher's wake, echoes the resolution of those who have escaped impalement or suffocation in Maryse Conde's figurative mangrove when she states:

Je chercherai le soleil et lFair et la lumiere pour ce qui me reste d'annees a vivre.

Ou les trouverai-je? Je n'en sais encore rien. Ce que je sais, crest que je les chercherai! (116) [I will seek the sun, air, and light for the remainder of my days.

Where will I find them? I don't yet know. What I do know is that I will seek them!]

One place the sun and the air and the light will not be found is in isolation. All the characters struggling to cross the mangrove are drowning in loneliness; the individual resolves of those who succeed in freeing themselves entail moving beyond their sol- itary prisons, clearing the fences and barriers from their hearts as well as their dis- criminatory society. Having experienced an empathic relationship with Francis Sancher, the characters beginning anew become self-affirming and capable of extending themselves to others.

Mira Lameaulnes, one of the two young women who tries to escape rejection by offering herself to Francis Sancher, is motivated by an intense desire to know who he really was: "il me fallait trouver qui il etait" [I had to know who he was] (62). After experiencing a lifetime of cruel remarks and envious disdain, she better than anyone knows how little a person's thick and impenetrable external appearance might cor- respond to their inner needs and feelings. The protective layers mask the inner reality. Desinor, the Haitian gardener who politely conforms externally to the disadvantaged inferior status conferred on him by the other inhabitants, lives in rage and despair. He poignantly depicts the injustice of this contemporary version of slavery and the marginalization of the outsider when he muses that "Pour une fois qu'il etait de plain- pied avec les gens de Riviere au Sel, il aurait aime les insulter, les choquer, leur faire savoir qui etait reellement ce Desinor Decimus qu'ils confondaient avec un miserable jardinier haltien" [Now that he was on an equal footing with the people from Riviere au Sel, he would have liked to insult them, shock them, make them know who Desinor Decimus really was, this man whom they confused with a miserable Haitian gardener] (208).

The inner life of another person seldom corresponds to the person we perceive in social intercourse. Not one of the individuals in Traverse'e de la mangrove is transparent to the larger community. The continuous flow of inner experiences and the fluidity of intersubjective experiences in the novel reproduces in all its complexity the process that happens constantly in human interaction. Translating that experience into fiction,

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immersing the reader in the character's spoken and unspoken feelings, juxtaposing the character's inner life with his or her impressions of the other characters in the novel, moving back and forth from first person to third-person self-effacing narration in which the character's thoughts and feelings are privileged-Maryse Conde accom- plishes no less in this novel. The reader recreates these relationships, weaving together all the threads in this infinitely complex yet simple tapestry of the heart. "We," the narrator and the reader, become empathically attuned to all the characters, including the omnipresent Francis Sancher. We think and feel our way into their inner lives as we read the book that Emile Etienne, l'Historien, speaks of writing, and that Maryse Conde has written:

- . .. une histoire de ce pays qui serait uniquement basee sur les souvenirs gardes au creux des memoires, au creux des coeurs. Ce que les peres ont dit aux fils, ce que les meres ont dit aux filles. Je voudrais aller du Nord au Sud, de l'Est a l'Ouest recueillir toutes ces paroles qu'on n'a jamais ecoutes ...

Francis Sancher approuvait. (251) [a story of this country that would be based solely on the memories buried in the depths of one's consciousness, in the depths of one's heart. What fathers have told their sons, what mothers have told their daughters. I would like to go from North to South, from East to West, to gather all these words that have never been listened to ...

Francis Sancher approved.]

These are the unspoken words we have read and heard, the map we have been given to navigate toward the light.

Notes

1. For an excellent book-length study that considers the self-psychological approach in relation to other authors and works, see Judith Kegan Gardiner, Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989).

Works Cited

Cond6, Maryse. Travers6e de la mangrove. Paris: Mercure de France, 1989. Lang, Joan A. "Self Psychology and the Understanding and Treatment of Women." Review of Psychi-

atry. Ed. Allan Tasman, et al. Vol. 9. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric P, 1990. 384-99. Ornstein, Anna, and Paul H. Ornstein. "The Process of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Self-Psy-

chological Perspective." Review of Psychiatry. Ed. Allan Tasman, et al. Vol. 9. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric P, 1990. 323-40.

Ornstein, Paul H., and Jerald Kay. "Development of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology: A Historical Conceptual Overview." Review of Psychiatry. Ed. Allan Tasman, et al. Vol. 9. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric P. 1990. 303-22.

Rowe, Crayton E., Jr., and David S. Mac Isaac. Empathic Attunement: The "Technique" of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1989.

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Issue Table of ContentsCallaloo, Vol. 15, No. 1, The Literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-316Front MatterIntroduction [p. 1](Re)Figuring Colonialism: Narratological and Ideological Resistance [pp. 2-11]A Shift Toward the Inner Voice and Crolit in the French Caribbean Novel [pp. 12-29]Inscriptions of Exile: The Body's Knowledge and the Myth of Authenticity [pp. 30-40]Edouard Glissant: Towards a Literature of Orality [pp. 41-48]Reading and Writing the Body of the Ngresse in Franoise Ega's Lettres Une Noire [pp. 49-65]Feminism, Race, and Difference in the Works of Mayotte Capcia, Michle Lacrosil, and Jacqueline Manicom [pp. 66-74]"Our Ancestors the Gauls...": Schools and Schooling in Two Caribbean Novels [pp. 75-89]A Woman's Voice: Perspectives on Marie-Magdeleine Carbet [pp. 90-97]Rafayl Confiant, or the Exile of the Flayed [pp. 98-103]Antillean Authors and Their Models: Daniel Maximin and Raphal Confiant [pp. 104-118]Maximin's L'Isol Soleil and Caliban's Curse [pp. 119-130]Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnifique: From the Escheat of Speech to the Emergence of Language [pp. 131-137]A Question of Questions Through a Mangrove Wood [pp. 138-146]Narrative and Discursive Strategies in Maryse Cond's Traverse de la Mangrove [pp. 147-155]Mapping the Mangrove: Empathy and Survival in Traverse de la Mangrove [pp. 156-166]Literature Extracted: A Poetic of Daily Life [pp. 167-178]History and Memory in un Plat de Porc Aux Bananes Vertes and Pluie et Vent Sur Telumee Miracle [pp. 179-189]A Summary Overview of Antillean Literature in Creole: Martinique and Guadeloupe (1960-1980) [pp. 190-198]Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography, 1990 [pp. 199-313]Back Matter [pp. 314-316]

Documents

Mapping the Mangrove Empathy and Survival in Traversée de La Mangrove