The Fire Now by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786993823
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2018-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

13 | UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT THROUGH THE PAST: STRUGGLES AGAINST RACISM

Moussa Traoré

Introduction

History, Sociology, Literature, Postcolonial Studies and so many areas in the academy have at one moment or another been concerned with anti-racism. This chapter will draw on Black Diasporic Literature where the fight against racism is both overt and subtle. African American works will be used to illustrate the author’s frustration with the unfortunate situation of ‘not belonging anywhere’: the socio-political rhetoric in today’s US especially will show how racism and anti-racism are relevant in this era. The following points are addressed in the paper: anti-racism in the context of the fight for freedom during slavery; Pan-Africanist movements which were associated with maronnage in most cases; subtle female anti-racist struggle by a black female Caribbean protagonist; some examples of tension between blacks and whites in Jim Crow America; and the anti-racist protests against the US National Anthem and flag.

The Fight against Racism and the Open Resistance to Eurocentrism

This section is based on a case of open, violent and determined opposition to white domination, slavery and racism: it focuses on Nègre Marron’s protagonist, Simeon Louis Jerome, and the marronage process as one form of anti-racism. Raphaël Confiant’s Nègre Marron (2006) presents some exceptional thematic and narrative features that do not appear in Francophone Caribbean slave narratives; these themes include resistance against slave masters on plantations, the search for identity by slaves and at times, the return to Africa. The novel follows a transhistorical ‘collective’ protagonist who doesn’t accept enslavement or assimilation and who never stops resisting. He is a symbolic nègre marron or maroon Negro who resists exploitation and white hegemony in all its forms. The nègre marron’s resistance begins as a reaction to the inhuman treatment and exploitation within the Caribbean plantations, and transforms into other forms of resistance like trade unionism, revolutionary socialist oppositions and the fight against corruption and racism. The novel unfolds along various terrains which correspond to specific periods in the history and contemporary situation of the Francophone Caribbean (and the world in general). It addresses how the social contradictions and injustices of each of those periods and eras are bravely combatted by the nègre marron and his allies. The book is par excellence, a critical engagement of anti-racism.

The first pages of Nègre Marron evoke a nostalgic longing for the African lands of the nègre marron’s ancestors: the ‘Pays Guinée’ or ‘Pays d’Avant’. One of the most striking and anti-Eurocentric features of the novel is the composite protagonist’s burning desire to return to Africa. That feature distinguishes Confiant’s novel from most of the Francophone Caribbean works, except Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon (2000), where the protagonist completely relocates to Africa in her search for freedom.

It is necessary to place the study of marronage in a general context from which that novel emerges as it speaks to how specific Confiant’s treatment of marronage is. He engages slave rebellion and links it to Pan-Africanism – considering the maroon negro’s burning desire to return to his roots in Africa –

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