In her 2002 novel, Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? Maryse Condé uses a number of methods to rewrite history. History, as a narrative, is influenced not only by the perspective of the narrator or writer, but also by the intended audience of the narrative. The mainstream history of the late 19th and early 20th century in the French colonies of Africa, as nearly all the mainstream histories of the modern age, were written predominately by European historians for an audience of European academics or aristocrats. Those histories pretend to objectivity by citing first person accounts and documents relating to important events, but as with all narratives, the empty spaces between these purportedly objective accounts are filled in by the writer, whose goal in this case would have been to keep the current class order and economic structure firmly in place by presenting the European powers as superior and, though violent, in the end benignant influences on the cultures of Africa and the Caribbean. In Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat Condé presents a new version of history that, while not pretending to any sort of objective truth or clarity in the typical European sense, creates a narrative that may actually hew much closer to the true experience of its subjects.The most startling method Condé uses to subvert the traditional historical narrative is anachronism. With two characters specifically, Hakim and Papa Doc, she uses details, both pivotal and seemingly trivial, that do not chronologically agree with mainstream recorded history. In the first section of the book, which is dated by Condé as 1901-1906, Hakim is often shown operating an outboard motor on a small boat in Ivory Coast. The official history of the development of this technology states that the outboard motor was developed by a Yale engineer, and the very first functioning motor was not built until 1906, and was not produced commercially until well after 1907. Now, while this may not seem like a significant anachronistic detail, the coincidence of the closeness of the dates, and other more important moments later in the text show that Condé may be subverting the idea that such technology needed to be developed in an engineering lab in the United States, whereas the truth may be that existing motors were used in a more ad hoc, and not historically documented, manner in places where they could be put to good use. Hakim also dreams of riding a Motobecane bicycle in a city in Eastern Africa, but the Motobecane company did not start doing business under that name until 1923. Both of these anachronistic details involve technology and remind me, in a subtle way, of a sub-genre of science fiction, called steampunk. In steampunk fiction, most popularly seen in Alan Moore’s comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but also in more sophisticated novels like The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter, a Victorian setting and time period is influenced by advanced technologies that allow cultures to mingle in such a way that has only more recently become possible. Some steampunk fiction suffers from a weird form of orientalism, but often the heroes are often African or Asian and wield these advanced technologies against their oppressors, the corrupt British colonial powers. While Condé’s novel is certainly not steampunk, it hints at the same subversion.Later in the novel, when Papa Doc tells Hakim of his life in Grande-Anse, in his rapid fire description of his medical practice there, we find two more anachronistic details that conflict with recorded medical history. Papa Doc says, “I researched. I experimented. I had invented a cure for dengue fever. I had invented a way of replacing broken hips in older people with an artificial one.” (90) Unfortunately, for the 2.5 billion people that are currently at risk from dengue, according to the World Health Organization, to this day there has been no approved vaccine for dengue fever and treatment is still crude due to a lack of global interest in funding for medical research. But here the reader is told that a doctor in a small city in Gaudeloupe has developed a cure for this life-threatening illness. We can take Papa Doc’s words as brash boasting, but he does not otherwise show a need to bolster his reputation. Here Condé is making a statement about the power of a doctor who is both a researcher and a practitioner, dealing with the health problems of his community every day. This is a model that is completely foreign to modern health care, especially in the United States, where the medical industry is segmented into researchers and practitioners, not to mention drug companies, that have little to no interaction with one another, other than the exchange of money. Furthermore, the first recorded successful hip replacement, again in an American university, Johns Hopkins, was performed in 1940. Yet, the reader believes that someone like Papa Doc, successfully performed the same procedure more than 40 years before. Such is the power of anachronism to subvert recorded history.European histories of the Caribbean and African colonies tend to depict, albeit inaccurately, only the experiences of white subjects and the groups they came in contact with most frequently, such as slaves from Africa and indentured servants from Asia. However, Condé uses a form of historical extrapolation, or possibly just the recording of folk oral histories, to give a sort of historical account of other groups. The Wayana people of the Caribbean and French Guiana have almost no place in the mainstream historical record, but here Condé gives their culture life and meaning to a wider audience, particularly the audience that has been so influenced by the mainstream history that neglected groups like the Wayana for hundred of years and would not otherwise hear the oral accounts of their culture. In historical records, the Wayana people were said to be completely indigenous, to speak a Carib language and have no traceable roots in Africa. Condé uses the similarities of their culture, how they view the earth and personal property, to extrapolate an African origin for them that enriches her story and their relation to all other groups in the French-speaking Caribbean. She gives them a history as “runaway slaves who had fled the plantation and settled on the slopes of the Soufrière volcano. When the whites finally got round to abolishing slavery, the Wayanas stayed put.” (94) She also gives them a language that is from Africa called Kilonko and is not influenced by Creole. However, Condé refrains from glorifying the Wayana culture unconditionally, as can be seen late in the novel, when Matthieu’s wife Amarante goes back to live with the Wayana in the hills after being spurned by both her husband and Celanire. She rejects the Wayana’s sense of living only in the past, especially concerning marriage traditions, but embraces the attention they pay to the earth, to animals and plants, to the entire complex ecosystem that keeps them alive. Though by no means completely objective, Condé’s novel contains the most readily available account of the Wayana people for most readers and widens our understanding of them.Finally, Condé uses depictions of spirituality to subvert the mainstream narrative of history. European histories not only discount the power of spirituality, they also discount the power of stories or accounts of spirituality that diverge from a strict Judeo-Christian worldview of the “he drew strength from God” variety. This is a very important and effective method of suppressing varying cultures and discounting anything that diverges from the mainstream. We have seen that in much of Caribbean literature, spirituality creates a miraculous reality surrounding certain historical events, most notably in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, where the magic of Macandal is meant to be taken as fact, not fantasy. While Macandal was a historical figure and Celanire, on the other hand, is a fictional character, many of the events surrounding her life are imbued with a confidence in the power of spirits, so the reader believes that while these things may not have happened, they could have happened as such, or at the very least for many Western readers, these stories of spirits, if not the spirits themselves, have real power. Papa Doc’s resuscitation of little Celanire is the culmination of his obsession with a very European text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but it is performed in a way that contradicts European medicine, using chicken blood for a transfusion, not to mention practically reattaching an infant’s head to its body. Later, those who had wronged Celanire, and contributed to her attempted murder, have a sort of revenge enacted upon them. Each of these instances of revenge can either be attributed to Celanire’s own power or the power of the spirit of Celanire’s story. It is almost a moot point whether Celanire actually morphs into a black bird or a black horse or a caiman and kills those who have wronged her. The important thing is that those victims and the people who know Celanire’s story believe she has caused these deaths and that they were deserved in a karmic sense. So whether the spirits are acting through fate or through will, Condé has given them a place in a believable narrative that is more history than fantasy, even if it is told as fiction.
Do You like book Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? (2005)?
