At the heart of the turbulence of the Antilles, with Gisèle Pineau
Audio 03:39
Guadeloupe, Gisèle Pineau is the author of "La Grande Drive des spirits", "Chair Piment" and "Cent vies et des dusières".
© Stéphane Haskell_0
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
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Video by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
11 min
Editions Philippe Rey has just published, from the pen of novelist Gisèle Pineau, the fictionalized biography of Adrienne Fidelin, the West Indian muse of the great American photographer Man Ray.
Through the revisited life of this dancer and "top model", who with Ray was one of the mythical couples of Paris in the 1930s, the Guadeloupe novelist returns to the themes of identity and memory that she has been questioning since. his first novel, published some three decades ago.
Gisèle Pineau is one of the sure values of contemporary West Indian literature.
Publicity
“
I write to survive, to hold on.
I write so as not to get lost, not to disperse myself.
I write to exist, for the joy it gives me.
This is what keeps me alive.
So says Gisèle Pineau, novelist from Guadeloupe.
Born in Paris in 1956, to a military father, she lived in France, but also in Africa, before moving to Marie-Galante, this island of a hundred mills from which her family came, which has now become its home port and its land of inspiration.
It is here, in the solitude of her home, that this worthy heiress of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart puts her words on paper every morning, telling stories deeply rooted in the Caribbean experience.
Close to the Creole movement, the author of
La Grande drive des esprits
, a novel written in the vein of the magical realism that made her known, Gisèle Pineau has built a rich and diversified work, composed of novels and short stories for of youth and adults.
His stories are populated by men and women from here and elsewhere, damaged by the turbulence of History with a capital "
H
" and those of their own lives.
Muse and muse of Man Ray
"
Everything starts from a wound
", likes to say the novelist.
This is the case with the heroine of her new opus entitled
Ady, soleil noir
.
Disembarking from her native Guadeloupe in 1930, she was a dancer in Paris during the teeming period of the interwar years and lived a great passion in love with the American photographer Man Ray, who is one of the giants of the history of Western art of the twentieth century.
They had met at the “Colonial Ball”, a famous Parisian cabaret of the time.
The biography of Gisèle Pineau traces the exceptional life of the protagonist, passing from the suburbs of Guadeloupe swept by the winds of history and destructive cyclones… to the Parisian studio of her photographer lover.
“His
mother died
,” explains the author, “
during the passage of the 1928 cyclone which devastated Pointe-à-Pitre.
Then his father will pass away.
She is 15 years old.
At 15, she will embark on a transatlantic liner which will reach France.
She will land in Paris with this pain, this initial wound of loss.
But she doesn't want to be subjected to this pain.
She decides to live, to live fully, to laugh, to sing and to dance.
This is how she will fall into Man Ray's arms.
"
During the four years that lasted their complicity and their intense love, the divine Ady was a muse and dazzling muse of the artist, participating fully in the bohemian life that he led with his friends, whose name was Paul Eluard or again Pablo Picasso.
Excuse the little!
"
I fell in love with this woman, for her audacity, for her modernity
", confides Gisèle Pineau, who discovered her in the pages of
Self
-
portrait
by Man Ray, before throwing herself with curiosity and delight on the photo archives of this first Guadeloupe "top model".
Adrienne Fidelin was the first black woman to make the cover of the American magazine
Harper's Bazar
.
It was Man Ray who imposed it, with a text by Paul Eluard to accompany the photo.
In her book, Gisèle Pineau pays homage to the modernity of the young woman: a modernity which, according to the author, resided in her way of dressing, in her way of posing, of fixing the objective, without forgetting the freedom sexual and intellectual which she showed in Montparnasse as in Mougins where the couple met with their friends during the summer months.
Finally, if the life and loves of Ady, who with her companion was one of the legendary couples of Paris in the 1930s, fascinates the novelist so much, it is because she represents an essential dimension of West Indian life. whose writer has focused on telling the shadows and lights from her very first novel.
The rich Creole imagination
Gisèle Pineau published her first novel at the age of 37, but her real beginnings in writing date back to the 1960s, when, as a little girl, she lived with her family in a Parisian suburb.
Tapped by the racism of her comrades in the city, little Gisèle soon felt the need to write.
To make friends and especially to also escape from this environment of gray buildings and coldness where the Guadeloupe was the only black girl, regularly victim of racist insults.
“
Writing saved me
,” she recalls.
She tells us how she made her first book, sewn with her hands
.
“
I told the story of a little black girl there who can be a good friend.
Then I copied it ten times so that all the children in the neighborhood could read it.
Writing this book was a way for me to relate to the children of the city who rejected me because they were simply stopped by the color of my skin.
"
France was the country of exile for the teenager growing up far from her native land.
Her great luck was to meet in the evening with her paternal grandmother who had followed her grandchildren to Paris, fleeing her violent husband who remained on the island.
The magical tales that Ma Yan told her, populated by creatures of the night, marigolds and evil spirits, will allow the teenager to take root in the rich Creole imagination, in which, having become a writer, she draws today inspiration for his novels.
This creolity that runs through his novels in French is also their success.
The most successful are titled:
The great derivative of the spirits
(1993),
The hope-macadam
(1995),
The exile according to Julia
(1996),
The soul loaned to the birds
(1998),
Fleur de Barbarie
(2005) , and more recently
Les voyages de Merry Sissal
(2015).
Gisèle Pineau's novels explore Caribbean historical and sociological peculiarities, telling through contemporary intrigues the violence bequeathed by slavery and colonization whose echoes persist to this day, even in the intimate relations between men and women in the West Indies. .
Women are at the heart of his novels.
Are they not the first victims of the turpitudes and abominations of a society adrift?
Resigned or rebellious prey, their names are Myrtha, Angela, Eliette, Man Ya or Merry Sissal.
Adrienne Fidelin is added to this gallery of female characters, often with tragic fates.
But Mademoiselle is different.
Its modernity, its determination not to let itself be defined by bad luck, suggests the possibility for the victims to transcend the tragic and to become agents of their own history.
Ady had "
clouds in her hands,
" said Paul Eluard of her, recalls Gisèle Pineau.
Ady, soleil noir
, by Gisèle Pineau.
Editions Philippe Rey, 301 pages, 19.50 euros.
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