Kreyol Intertextuality and Decolonizing Narrative in Veillées noires

• Published in: Dalhousie French studies no. 116; pp. 19 - 28
• Main Author: Meehan, Kevin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of French, Dalhousie University 2020
• ISSN: 0711-8813; 2562-8704
• DOI: 10.7202/1071041ar

This essay identifies three levels of intertextuality in the short story, “Echec et mat” by Léon-Gontran Damas. Incorporating folkloric tales, lyrics from popular music, and 19th Century satiric writing in Kreyol, “Echec et mat” offers a microcosm of the intertextual techniques employed throughout the entire collection, Veillées noires. In particular, I analyze Damas’s embedding of a satire written and published in Kreyol by Guadeloupean author Paul Baudot. While this Kreyol satire—written by a white béké author from the mid-19th Century—is ambiguous politically, and must be determined by musical and folkloric references, Damas nevertheless signals the importance of earlier Caribbean writing in Kreyol. Such writing co-exists with other forms of cultural production and is part of the reservoir from which Damas draws to assemble his complex anti-colonial discourse. These intertextual traces reveal a cultural identity that is plural as well as anti-colonial.