Vénus Noire by Mitchell Robin;Newman Richard;Rael Patrick;Sinha Manisha;

Author:Mitchell, Robin;Newman, Richard;Rael, Patrick;Sinha, Manisha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

OTHER REPRESENTATIONS OF OURIKA

Literary representations of Ourika appeared in three poems: Delphine Gay’s “Ourika élégie” (Ourika Elegy; 1824); Pierre-Ange Vieillard’s “Ourika, stances élégiaques” (Ourika, Elegiac Stanzas; 1824); and Gaspard de Pons’s “Ourika, l’africaine” (Ourika, the African; 1825).48 All of the poems followed Duras’s basic premise: Ourika falls in love with her “brother” Charles, discovers her blackness, realizes that her race precludes a relationship with him, undergoes an existential crisis, and finally becomes ill and dies. All of her issues are connected to Charles. Gay’s and Pons’s renditions give much attention to Charles’s wife, who is somewhat peripheral for Duras. In so doing, these authors allow a black woman to speak of and reinforce white womanhood in the same way that they, through their own white subjectivity, speak of a degraded black womanhood.

Gay, a popular writer who read several times at Duras’s salon, positions Ourika (like Duras, to whom Gay dedicates the poem) as floundering under the realization of her difference. In her despair, she rejects Charles’s attempt at proper inclusion in his life: “The ingrate! He calls me his sister!” Although Ourika believes that her heart is pure and that there is “nobility” in her suffering, she ungratefully and rudely turns her back on the possibility of French familial bliss as Charles’s sister, choosing to exile herself and to die. Gay gives Anaïs a great deal of agency that she lacks in the novel. According to Ourika, Anaïs, unlike her rather clueless bridegroom, “had seen my tears and had understood them,” realizing that Ourika loves Charles. Demonstrating true Christian charity, Anaïs feels pity for Ourika rather than needless jealousy: Anaïs’s whiteness trumps Ourika’s blackness.49

The poem is structured around metaphors of seeing and blindness. Ourika’s ability to see her own blackness and her unsuitability for Charles sends her to the convent. Charles’s blindness prevents him from seeing Ourika or her love for him. And an ability to see and understand Ourika’s feelings for Charles allows Anaïs to be benevolent. Like Duras, Gay concerns herself with the dynamics of the love story while barely touching on the realities of Ourika’s enslavement. The poem is equally about Anaïs’s suitability as a mate for Charles. All the elements of proper French womanhood are here: Anaïs is kind, watchful, and demure; most important, she instinctively understands that Ourika’s blackness eliminates her from white feminine competition.

Pons knew of Gay’s poem and found it “charming,” yet his interpretation of Ourika’s story, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes, is steeped in the language of black female hypersexuality and rapid black degeneration.50 In Pons’s rendition, because Ourika can never have the love of Charles, her transformation into a cultured Frenchwoman is revealed as farce, mimicry. Ourika brazenly offers herself and a hundred other black women to Charles: “There, a hundred black beauties will come to lust after your choice; / It is I who will please you, as I am the most beautiful.’51 But he turns away, choosing the white Anaïs instead. His refusal both confounds and infuriates Ourika, causing her to berate him and then beseech his pardon.

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