He strutted around in front of them, playing opera records on the record player, The Magic Flute or Madame Butterfly. Never a beguine, never a mazurka. At dinner, I couldn’t find anything to say to the metropolitan types sitting next to me and wondered if they were alive, if it was blood running under their skin, if they weren’t just big white masks, without sexuality or sensitivity.
Dodose Pélagie, Travesía del manglar
Even when I don’t want to, the roads always end up taking me in the same direction. Every sea, every river, every expanse of water—or the absence of it—has its beginning and end there, in the Caribbean, a space where ideas, even those that seem to oppose each other, find their place. So, without looking for it, a podcast that I put on almost at random in the late afternoon reveals to me the most intense musical experience I’ve had since listening to Keith Jarrett’s concert album in Cologne, Germany: Big Sun (2015), by Chassol, a French composer and multi-instrumentalist of Martinican origin. Thanks to this podcast, I learn that Chassol’s parents died in my country, Venezuela, in a plane crash on their way to Martinique in 2005. Years later, Chassol decided to visit the island to record the sound and visual landscape that would later become the dense and luminous work he ended up composing.
Big Sun should be listened to in order, as if it were a carefully crafted novel. It is through the organic development of its sounds, the tension and overlapping layers that mix words, rhythms, the thick Martinican Creole, birdsong, the noises of a market or a game of dominoes, animals complaining about something or other, that we manage to penetrate a place that does not exist—like the wonderful literary villages of Rulfo or García Márquez—and that, like those, traces a vanishing point that points to Martinique, but ends up transforming into the many territories of the entire Caribbean.
I bought Travesía del manglar (Elefanta, 2020), by Maryse Condé, on the last day of my trip to Puerto Rico in the winter of 2024. I am still haunted by the memory of Yo, Tituba, bruja negra de Salem (Monte Ávila Editores, French Embassy in Venezuela, 2014), which I brought back from Venezuela in 2015, the same year and in the same territory where Chassol’s parents died. Almost two decades between one book and the other. I realize that mentioning these places, building bridges between them as I think about them, measuring the distance that separates or brings them closer together in years, is not, or not only, due to my obsession with cataloguing everything that happens, like a storekeeper who records the products that stock his warehouse, but rather to ward off oblivion by organizing life into what happens between the arrival of one book and another. It’s strange, but I know that I bought Travesía del manglar when I was leaving Puerto Rico with the intention of reading it in Puerto Rico, almost like a talisman that would ensure my return to that island that does not belong to me and is the home I lost, to which I hope to return whenever the world is suspended, in those rare moments of rest or reverie.
The walk I took that afternoon here in Denton, Texas, was so long that I was able to listen to the entire podcast and Chassol’s album, with the huge sun in front of me and a heat of 34 degrees Celsius baking my skin. That same night, with my heart in Martinique, I decided to break the promises I had made in silence and sail north to Rivière au Sel, in Guadeloupe. Then, without meaning to, Travesía del manglar sounded like Chassol’s Big Sun, as if the two had appeared to find each other, to find me.
Travesía del manglar tells the story of Francis Sancher, a man who arrives in the small town of Rivière au Sel for no apparent reason to play the unfortunate role of a stranger in a small town, always suspected of something. One day, Sancher is found dead, and at his funeral, those who bid him farewell begin to remember the Sancher they each knew. These memories not only provide more details about the mysterious stranger, but also describe both the type of relationship and idiosyncrasies of the characters linked to him, as well as the suffocating sociocultural and political dynamics of the town that Maryse Condé constructs for us.
As if it were a reverse journey, Travesía del manglar works differently from Big Sun: while the latter must be listened to in its entirety and in order, the narrative autonomy of the novel means that it can be read almost like a book of short stories whose unity revolves around its protagonists: Francis Sancher and Rivière au Sel. The novel is organized into three chapters: El sereno, La noche, and El antedía. The first and last serve as introduction and conclusion to the story, but La noche, the longest section, is divided into twenty parts that give voice to the characters. However, beyond its chapters, Travesía del manglar could be seen more as a diptych composed of the inner world of the characters in dialogue with their memories, and the real world that brings them together around Sancher.
Elefanta’s edition is extraordinary and deserves a special mention. The book is beautiful, full of graphic details, delightful to hold in your hands and, most importantly, Ana Inés Fernández’s prologue and translation are reading companions that illuminate every step of the journey. Among her reflections, she highlights how the logic of territorial organization makes French Guiana more connected to Paris than to Manaus, reminding me of that frustrated attempt to visit the French-speaking Caribbean from Venezuela: it was easier and cheaper to fly to Europe than to the neighboring islands. Other comments address the power relations between Guadeloupe and the metropolis, as well as the dilemmas surrounding an independence that never came to be, and was replaced by an integration pact with France.
Fernández also explores the situation of Creole and its speakers in relation to the French shared with other colonies. He writes:
As an unofficial and largely oral language, Creole did not have a well-established spelling system or monolingual or bilingual dictionaries until the last decades of the 20th century, which makes it difficult to find and even identify many of its terms in texts such as this one.
The characteristics mentioned above represent a problem even for French Caribbean authors who want to publish and be read. To begin with, most write in French and not in their mother tongue, because the audience that speaks Creole is still very small. And since their French is not the French spoken in France and their texts necessarily include Creole expressions, many of them use resources such as prologues, notes, glossaries, etc., to accommodate non-Caribbean readers and to ensure that publishers in the metropolis will accept them for publication. It is sometimes said that their writing is already a form of translation: from a Creole culture to an imposed Western language.
If we remember that the first monolingual Spanish dictionary was published in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias, we can understand the extent of this still-resilient oral tradition. This perspective further enriches my reading with sound through the musical landscape created by Chassol in neighboring Martinique, which shapes my approach to Travesía del manglar. I am thinking, for example, of Organe phonatoire, where a repetitive male voice dialogues with the ensemble and reveals, in just a few seconds, the tension and sonic beauty shared between French and Creole, both heirs to forms of communication that emerged from the trauma of slavery.
Ana Inés Fernández says that her desire to translate this novel arose from the need to share the emotion she felt when reading it. I am grateful to her for the gift of this translation, and to Elefanta Editorial for daring to take on a work like this. I am left with a sense of loss, knowing that I cannot approach Rivière au Sel in the original form given to it by the author, just as the Martinican Creole of Big Sun is as evocative as it is elusive to me.
Perhaps that is the nature of the Caribbean: something you only have in parts, never whole. Like Martinique, Guadeloupe, Venezuela, or Puerto Rico: territories intertwined by music, mourning, their languages, and memory, but also separated by imposed histories that we are still trying to rewrite from the intimate, from the sonorous, from the written word.
“Nothing is more dangerous than a man trying to understand,” we hear Rosa, one of the characters in Condé’s novel, say, and I think she’s right.
