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A Woman's Voice: Perspectives on Marie-Magdeleine Carbet

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.2307/2931402

Authors

E. Anthony

Reported year

1992

Reported language

und

Source type

Article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:10:41.150673+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:10:41.150673+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

Marie-Magdeleine Carbet occupies a unique position in the literary history of Martinique of the twentieth century. Born in the first decade of the century, she has been writing and publishing consistently since the middle 1930s, before Cesaire, in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, children's stories, essays, as well as poetry. She has been a vocal activist against racism and anti-semitism, and has spoken out about the publication difficulties faced by francophone writers.' The sheer volume of her creative output can rival that of Cesaire or Glissant. And yet, she has received very little attention from anthologists, literary historians or critics,2 perhaps because she seems to have ignored significant major issues that are reflected in the voices of other French Caribbean writers of her generation, particularly Surrealism, Negritude, and the ongoing political struggles of the French Caribbean. It is undoubtedly true that Carbet is a 20th century French Caribbean woman writer who has chosen the kind of voice she finds most appropriate as a literary response to her situation. Evidently as a woman she finds some solace in the nineteenth century traditions of Romanticism and of Western European Christianity, which validated suffering, expressed her own perceived state of exile, and promoted female passivity. While writing within this dominant metropolitan tradition, however, Carbet develops and produces a voice that distinguishes her as essentially Caribbean. This study will illustrate, by an examination of poems from Point d'Orgue [Organ Stop] and Rose de ta grace [Rose of thy Grace], some of the modulations of Carbet's poetic voice. The nature of her response, in these collections, to the problematic of cultural identity confronting all French Caribbean poets, in terms both of the cultural model she adopts as a poet, and of the poetic choices she makes as a woman, provides further insight into the characteristics of an authentic French Caribbean literature. Carbet's Point d'Orgue,3 published in 1958, is a collection of thirty-four poems, eight of which are designated as "chansons" [songs]. These poems are in their form very "traditional" (from the perspective of metropolitan French literary practices) and present few direct indications, if any, of a specific Caribbean poetic presence. The landscape is generally non-tropical and the thematic orientation evokes memories of the poetry both of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in relation to the loving, passive poetic subject, to the primacy of suffering and to the representation of nature, and of Baudelaire, in the feelings of being exiled and in the longing for a tropical paradise. Even the identity of the poetic persona, often not clearly female, seems somehow masked or muted, lacking definition and precision. The title of the collection, Point d'Orgue, bears the double association of, on the one

Identifiers

DOI

10.2307/2931402

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::4436ba45184704577a8d630e37d6eaa9

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

Article

Natural entities mentioned

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Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE · Record 1

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.2307/2931402

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Relevance pending

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