Fragments of a return: the Saint-Césaire of Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes

Abstract

The multiple references to the works of Aimé Césaire in André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s novel Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967) suggest a (sometimes implicit) dialogue between the narrator-protagonist Mariotte and her Martinican compatriot. This dialogical intertext is reflected in the composition of the seven Notebooks of Mariotte in which she explains to her readers her struggle to reconstitute the memory of her native land in conditions determined by a racist, oppressive, and dehumanizing social system of the mid-twentieth century. Two figures from Césaire’s work stand out in Mayotte’s notebooks: the Rebel that she associates with a man she knew as a child, the “old black man in the tramway”, a character of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). But before taking on these two roles herself, Mariotte addresses a prayer to “Saint-Césaire,” asking him to join her in her memorial song. In a series of notes placed at the end of the novel, the authors seem to say that Mariotte quoted Césaire in a rather cavalier way, and this injects a certain degree of ambiguity into the intertextual relationship.