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Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun:
Disrupting the Tides
of History and Memory
Leanna Thomas

In 2020 and 2021, protestors and activists in many parts of the world brought attention to the
ever-present power of colonialism by toppling or defacing monuments commemorating colonial
political and military figures. In the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique,
demonstrators toppled statues of three individuals that to them proved representative of
their struggles with enslavement and racism in their colonial past, including those of Victor
Schoelcher, Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, and Joséphine de Beauharnais.1 Reasons for destroy-
ing the d’Esnambuc and de Beauharnais statues are readily apparent, as d’Esnambuc was
a French colonizer who led in violently taking possession of the island, killing and displacing
Indigenous Kalinagos, and importing enslaved Africans.2 De Beauharnais, whose statue was
previously decapitated in 1991, came from a family of béké elite who enslaved over one hundred
Africans, and she was Napoléon Bonaparte’s wife when he reinstituted enslavement on the

1 “How Statues Are Falling around the World, ” New York Times, 24 June 2020; “Martinique: Deux statues détruites le jour de
la commémoration de l’abolition de l’esclavage,” Le Figaro, 23 May 2020; “Un buste de Victor Schoelcher découpé et volé
en Guadeloupe,” AFP Infos Françaises, 26 July 2020; “Deux statues de l’abolitionniste Victor Schoelcher brisées par des
manifestants en Martinique,” Ouest-France, 23 May 2020; “En Martinique, l’impératrice Joséphine, fille du pays devenue
symbole de l’esclavage,” Le Figaro, 25 May 2021.
2 Philip Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2008), 69, 112–15, 154.

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70 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

island in 1802.3 These acts of destruction have apparent cause, but the toppling of two Victor
Schoelcher statues has raised debate among activists and French and Antillean social and
political leaders, as Schoelcher was an abolitionist often still lauded for bringing emancipation
to the French colonies. Some activists now claim, “Schoelcher is not our savior,” and they call

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for remembrance of local participants in the fight for abolition rather than the commemoration
of a French politician.4 This contention that is making current headlines is not new, however,
as forty years ago Guadeloupean author Daniel Maximin wrestled with problems of colonial
history, and provided a literary work intended to deconstruct the idolization of not only Victor
Schoelcher but also Louis Delgrès, who led the formerly enslaved in Guadeloupe in a stand
against Bonaparte’s reinstitution of slavery.
Maximin’s book Lone Sun (L’isolé soleil) was published in 1981, the same year as Édouard
Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (Le discours antillais), which grants agency to literary authors
in bringing to the surface “histories and the voice of peoples” in order to upset the singular
colonial “History.”5 Maximin proves himself such an agent as he recounts the generational
past of protagonist Marie-Gabriel, a young writer who is struggling to compose a narrative of
her people’s history. The apex of Maximin’s novel features a letter Marie-Gabriel sends to her
friend Adrien in France, to thank him for finding archival documents she could not obtain in
Guadeloupe. As she claims, France is “still confiscating our past in the hopes of dominating
our future.”6 In facing the constraints of archival and masculine dominance, Marie-Gabriel
finally abandons telling an epic tale of a male enslaved ancestor who fought alongside Delgrès.
Instead, she turns her focus to her mother’s diary, which includes stories of struggle, sacrifice,
and endurance as she experienced living in France and Guadeloupe during the mid-twentieth
century.
This drastic alteration of Marie-Gabriel’s aims results from her irreconcilable questions
about her ancestral past. The archives prove empty, and her incapacity to tell this part of her
history underscores Maximin’s implications of the debilitating power of the colonial archives.
To fight against this perpetuated power, Maximin extracts portions from the archives and
weaves them into his own narrative. In doing so, he proves to be an “interdisciplinary actor”
who participates in “entangling and disentangling varying narratives and tempos and hues
that, together, invent and reinvent knowledge.”7 In Lone Sun, Maximin constructs an imagined
past by wrenching archival sources out of their domain and context, and selectively situating
them in a narrative replete with cultural and oral traditions. Through such methods, Maximin
remembers those who go unaccounted for and counters the commodification of select heroes

3 Kylie Sago, “Beyond the Headless Empress: Gabriel Vital Dubray’s Statues of Josephine, Édouard Glissant’s Tout-Monde,
and Contested Monuments of French Empire,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 41, no. 5 (2019): 501, 503, doi:10.1080
/08905495.2019.1674579; “En Martinique, l’impératrice Joséphine, fille du pays devenue symbole de l’esclavage.”
4 “Martinique: Deux statues détruites.”
5 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1989), 77; see also 70–71, 93.
6 Daniel Maximin, Lone Sun, trans. Clarisse Zimra (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 102.
7 Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 71

by giving voice to the voiceless and by minimizing the iconization of Schoelcher and Delgrès.
Ironically, through later political actions Maximin contributes to getting Delgrès’s name writ-
ten on a wall in the Panthéon, and while his actions appear contradictory on the surface, this
essay will argue that they may be interpreted as complementary to his literature.

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The Undercurrent’s Tow
Until the late twentieth century, scholars of Caribbean history primarily used colonial or plan-
tation archival records to research historical events of this region, but these primary sources
narrated history from the perspectives of the colonizers, and largely silenced the voices of
Indigenous Lokonos, Kalinagos, and enslaved people of African descent.8 The lack of Black
and Indigenous presence in the archives not only stemmed from these societies’ oral traditions,
but also from the nature of the archives that Europeans created to document and historicize
their colonial orders, empires, and experiences. Europeans used their record-keeping and
written communications with family, trade associates, and political and military figures to
establish and maintain colonial authority, and their archives became institutions with holdings
that reflected and reproduced colonial historical knowledge.9 Through these institutions, selec-
tive preservation and deliberate categorization were further means to enforce and perpetuate
colonial power.10
Caribbean literature gives voice to Caribbean history in ways that archival documents
simply cannot provide, particularly when such archival sources are studied in isolation from
Black and Indigenous perspectives on the past. Colonial archives are by nature imperial and
state institutions, created and maintained to supervise, document, and dominate Black and
Indigenous populations. French Caribbean authors Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon confronted
many atrocities of colonial domination in powerful ways in their written works published
during the mid-twentieth century. Césaire provocatively argued in his Discourse on Colonial-
ism that “colonization . . . dehumanizes even the most civilized man,” and in The Wretched

8 Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Basse-Terre: Société historique de la Guade-
loupe, 1974); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986);
Philip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992); Anne Pérotin-Dumon and Serge Mam-Lam-Fouck, “Historiography of the French Antilles and French
Guyana,” in B. W. Higman, ed., Methodology and Historiography of the Caribbean, vol. 6 of General History of the Carib-
bean (London: UNESCO Publishing, 1999), 644.
9 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Daniel R. Headrick, “Communicating Information: Postal and Telegraphic Systems,” in When Infor-
mation Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 181–216; Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic,
1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 5, 219–20; Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives
and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter:
Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
10 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 52; Ann Laura
Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form,” in Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G.
Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007), 267; Alana Kumbier, Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (Sacramento, CA:
Litwin, 2014), 44; Jordanna Bailkin, “Where Did the Empire Go? Archives and Decolonization in Britain,” American Histori-
cal Review 120, no. 3 (June 2015): 884–99.
72 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

of the Earth Fanon declared that colonialism “turns to the past of the oppressed people, and
distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”11 Together Césaire and Fanon’s statements emphasize
how colonial empires objectified peoples, and part of this dehumanization included violently
altering and erasing their histories.

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As a consequence of erasure and the perpetuation of colonial power, historian Michel-
Rolph Trouillot underscored the problems with the production of history in Silencing the Past,
when portrayals of “truth” and of “reality” can be faulty or skewed for many reasons, includ-
ing the absence of voices, the authoritative preservation and codification of documents, and
selective remembrance given current social, cultural, and political climates.12 These insights
are critical for societies that have past experiences of diaspora and colonial subjecthood.
Such societies have extremely fragmented archival histories, and their historical narratives are
produced largely based on primary sources created and categorized by colonial authorities,
as well as secondary sources constructed under methodologies formulated by theoreticians
grounded in the sweep of European Enlightenment.13 These sources and methodologies create
a powerful current that forcefully carries historians and archivists, even when they attempt to
move against it. This current carries into the literary field as well, where authors of colonized
peoples confronting the knowledge of their pasts often find themselves moved by the informa-
tion produced and the language enforced by colonial powers. Nonetheless, it is often through
literature from these societies that undercurrents develop.
This metaphor of undercurrent, as a natural creation with significant force rather than a
limiting form of defined and imposed spatiality, does not fall under the scope of metaphor that
renders Black people as “unliving,” as Katherine McKittrick describes.14 Black literature has
contributed to literary undercurrents whose effects in the historical milieu have been either
subtly or powerfully felt, and have forced historians to take new directions and find new ways
of navigating the dominant current. “Instantiated imagined records, then, challenge official
archives and fill silences in official archives,” argues archivist James Lowry. “They help us read
official records more critically by reminding us that other stories exist.”15 This has occurred in
the study of colonial history as a result of works by French Caribbean authors such as Aimé
Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant. As contemporary literary and historical studies
of Daniel Maximin’s writing show, he deserves inclusion in this list.16 Maximin employs “actual

11 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 41; Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 210.
12 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 6–10, 26–30.
13 Louis K. Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2004), 202–10; Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism
and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8–10, 16–17.
14 McKittrick, Dear Science, 10–11.
15 James Lowry, “Radical Empathy, the Imaginary, and Affect in (Post)Colonial Records: How to Break Out of International
Stalemates on Displaced Archives,” Archival Science, no. 19 (May 2019): 195, doi:10.1007/s10502-019-09305-z.
16 Mireille Rosello, Littérature et identité créole aux Antilles (Paris: Karthala, 1992), 15, 52–53; Chris Bongie, “The (Un)
Exploded Volcano: Daniel Maximin’s Soufrières and the Apocalypse of Narrative,” in Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identi-
ties of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 356–57; H. Adlai Murdoch, Creole Identity
in the French Caribbean Novel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 105–6, 112–16; Nick Nesbitt, “Dreaming
of the Masters: Jazz and Memory in Daniel Maximin’s L’isolé soleil and L’île et une nuit,” in Voicing Memory: History and
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 73

and imagined records”17 in his novels to confront faults of conceptualized “true” pasts created
through colonial archives, historical narrative production, and selective commemoration.

Overcoming Silences

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In Lone Sun, Maximin exposes colonial archival voids, including the silences that exist due
to the lack of written records from the enslaved society and the vacuums created when colo-
nial archival records get selectively exploited to promote particular parts of history. Maximin
addresses voids regarding the abolition of slavery, local traditions of cultural heritage, enslaved
women’s acts of resistance, and the story of hero Louis Delgrès. In France, commemorations
of slavery’s abolition celebrate the altruism of men like Victor Schoelcher, with little consid-
eration of potential factors affecting abolitionists’ mindsets such as colonial economy, acts
of resistance by the enslaved, and the islands’ natural environment. In Guadeloupe’s history,
slavery was briefly abolished through the French Revolution in 1794 and then reinstituted
by Napoléon’s government in 1802. Slavery remained on the island until 1848, when Victor
Schoelcher signed a decree that ended slavery in all of France’s colonies.18 Since that event,
Schoelcher has been memorialized for bringing the end of slavery through what is perceived
as his “generous act on the part of the French metropole.”19 In his narrative, Maximin shat-
ters this constructed truth by telling how Schoelcher contributed to ending slavery, yet also
perpetuated colonial power through the “progression” of the formerly enslaved as workers and
consumers in a capitalist system that continued to benefit White, French society.20 In contrast
to the idealization of Schoelcher that is reflected through the French-constructed monuments
and street names in Guadeloupe, Maximin links Schoelcher’s honored actions to his colonial-
ist economic desires. Maximin writes that at a celebration for abolition, Schoelcher told how
the “former slaves . . . went back to work calmly, for the greater good of the colonies,” thus
reflecting his priorities: securing yet another form of labor for France’s benefit.21 Maximin upsets
assumptions that all White abolitionists had only moral motivations for ending slavery and he
begins to “démythifier” Schoelcher’s applauded role.22

Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 145–48; Laurent Dubois,
A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004), 13–14; Laurent Dubois, “Maroons in the Archives: The Uses of the Past in the French Carib-
bean,” in Blouin Jr. and Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, 297; Kathleen Gyssels,
“Prévisions et divagations batoutesques face aux dérélictions du Tout-monde: Daniel Maximin et Édouard Glissant comme
Guerriers des (dés)astres antillais,” in Kathleen Gyssels and Bénédicte Ledent, eds., The Caribbean Writer as Warrior of the
Imaginary / L’Ecrivain caribéen, guerrier de l’imaginaire (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 249–52.
17 Anne J. Gilliland and Michelle Caswell, “Records and Their Imaginaries: Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the
Imagined,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (2016): 71.
18 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 421–22.
19 Ibid., 429.
20 See John D. Erickson, “Maximin’s L’isolé soleil and Caliban’s Curse,” Callaloo 15, no. 1 (1992): 124; Daniel Maximin,
quoted in Thomas Mpoyi-Buatu, “Entretien avec Daniel Maximin: À propos de son roman; L’isolé soleil,” Nouvelles du Sud
3 (1986): 43–44.
21 Maximin, Lone Sun, 71.
22 “Demythify”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu, “Entretien avec Daniel Maximin,” 44. Unless otherwise indicated, all transla-
tions are mine.
74 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

To further disrupt this image of abolition coming solely through a romanticized White hero,
Maximin tells stories of the Black community’s acts of resistance that made them participants
in the movement for abolition in 1848. In granting them agency, Maximin upsets archival
evidence often situated in ways to portray the French government as being benevolent in

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granting abolition. In contrast, Maximin describes a resistant Black population strengthened
through spiritual ties to their natural environment. He recounts how growing fears of revolt by
the enslaved on the islands became intertwined with natural disasters, in particular the 1843
earthquake that devastated Pointe-à-Pitre and killed thousands. At the time, sea captain John
Dillingham wrote to his wife, “The day before we arrived there was a dreadful earthquake tore
the whole city down and then it caught on fire and burned the ruins. . . . It is impossible to give
you an idea of the scene that I witnessed the day that I arrived of the wounded and dead.”23
This devastating earthquake serves as a tremor in Maximin’s story, followed by physical
and social turmoil that continues to escalate until five years later France issues a statement
promising emancipation.24
Through delays in abolition laws being passed and implemented, Maximin recounts
how France’s unfulfilled promise became “the signal for generalized revolt.” In the narrative,
violence and destruction ensued in 1848, and rather than freedom from slavery being kindly
and gradually gifted by the French government, the “blacks of the colonies had imposed on the
governor the immediate proclamation of liberation.”25 Maximin’s juxtaposition of the enslaved
themselves “impos[ing]” freedom unsettles the reader and upsets conventional portrayals
of the benevolence of White leaders. Maximin’s narrative has received validation through
contemporary historians such as Nelly Schmidt and Laurent Dubois. Through his research
Dubois contends that “once word of imminent emancipation had arrived in the French Carib-
bean, the slaves rose up and precipitated the application of the decree before it was officially
promulgated on the islands.”26 Through describing the acts of resistance by the enslaved and
the power of natural disasters, Maximin fractures the archival narrative by underscoring the
weaknesses of White society, including the owners of the enslaved. The institution of slavery
did not come undone solely through changes in White colonial discourse and economy but
also in the midst of actions by the enslaved in an untamable natural environment that did not
grant exemptions based on skin color or social class.27
The colonial archives are also limited when it comes to the history of cultural heritage that
contributed to the formation of community and “networks” among the enslaved, in turn further

23 John Dillingham, “Letter about Guadeloupe Earthquake,” personal correspondence, 12 February 1843, collection 153, box
1/2, Maine Historical Society, John G. Dillingham Papers, www.mainememory.net/artifact/20959.
24 Maximin, Lone Sun, 64, 66–69.
25 Ibid., 67, 69.
26 Laurent Dubois, “Solitude’s Statue: Confronting the Past in the French Caribbean,” Outre-Mers 93, nos. 350–51 (2006): 30,
doi:10.3406/outre.2006.4187; see also Nelly Schmidt, “Schoelchérisme et assimilation dans la politique coloniale française:
De la théorie à la pratique aux Caraïbes entre 1848 et les années 1880,” in “Des Européens dans l’Amérique coloniale et
aux Caraïbes, XVIe–XIXe siècles,” special issue, ed. Frédéric Mauro, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 35, no. 2
(1988): 318–19.
27 Maximin, Lone Sun, 61–62, 64.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 75

enabling their resistance.28 Maximin’s work reflects how the enslaved in Guadeloupe saved
themselves as a people through the remembrance and emergence of cultural traditions. For
centuries Black Guadeloupeans did not document their culture in the same way as those in
European societies (with books of literature, religion, etiquette, and philosophy), yet that did not

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mean that the enslaved and their descendants were culturally silent. As Maximin observes in
an interview, “On a trop souvent mis en avant l’image que les esclaves sont arrivés les mains
vides. On oublie que même si on n’a pas les statues et les totems, on a quand même, dans
la tête, l’imaginaire.”29 By claiming that the “imagination” carried from Africa was shaped on
the islands, Maximin portrays Guadeloupean spiritual rites and beliefs in the supernatural
by incorporating prayers to African gods and Creole folk songs in his story.30 As was later
underscored by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant in their declara-
tion about the significance of orality within the plantation system and in the development of
creole culture—“L’oralité est notre intelligence, elle est notre lecture de ce monde”—Maximin
emphasizes the importance of oral tradition found in music, poems, proverbs, folklore, and
legends that could not be fully reconstituted through colonial archives.31 In his chapter on
“Jonathan’s Notebook,” twelve Creole proverbs are interwoven with the narrative of Delgrès’s
suicide, reflecting how wisdom exists and is handed down orally in an illiterate Black society.32
Maximin shows how preserving cultural traditions of storytelling, musicality, and spirituality
proved a means of resistance that in essence “[les] a sauvés” by enabling the enslaved to come
together: “Elles ont fabriqué une communauté, fabriqué un peuple, fabriqué des coutumes,
fabriqué des rituels, fabriqué quelque chose qui fait qu’elles sont une autre société, qu’elles
ont une identité.”33 By emphasizing the evolution of cultural cohesion and by granting author-
ity over nature to Yoruba, Woyengi, and Vodou gods, Maximin further upsets the perceived
supremacy of the colonizer as constituted through the archives.34
Resistance is also manifested through the voices and actions of Black women protagonists
who represent those who are the most silent in French colonial records.35 Maximin recounts
that following Delgrès’s death the French governor of Guadeloupe, Antoine Richepance, died
due not only to an illness (Richepance indeed died of yellow fever) but also to the actions of a
Black woman named Miss Béa, who “served her prestigious patient passionflower preserves

28 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 30–31, 60.

29 “We have too often put forth the image that slaves arrived with empty hands. One forgets that even without statues or
totems, we nonetheless have, in our mind, imagination”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu, “Entretien avec Daniel Maxi-
min,” 39.
30 Ibid., 50; see Erickson, “Maximin’s L’isolé soleil and Caliban’s Curse,” 122.
31 “Orality is our intelligence, it is our reading of this world”; Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge
de la créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 33.
32 Maximin, Lone Sun, 45–48.
33 “Saved [them]”; “They fabricated a community, fabricated a people, fabricated customs, fabricated rituals, fabricated
something that makes them another society, that makes them have an identity”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu,
“Entretien avec Daniel Maximin,” 39.
34 See Maximin, Lone Sun, 30, 50–58, 61, 71.
35 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2016), 2; Doris Y. Kadish, “Guadeloupean Women Remember Slavery,” in “Le monde francophone,” special
issue, French Review 77, no. 6 (2004): 1183.
76 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

washed down with a brew perfumed with the sap of the fruit’s poisonous roots.”36 While Miss
Béa and her actions are not documented in the colonial archives, this story symbolically
shows that the agency of enslaved women should not be undervalued. It topples the colonial
narrative by bringing to the surface the potential power of the presumed “weakest” over the

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life and the death of the perceived “strongest.” In her 2004 book Plants and Empire, Londa
Schiebinger substantiates this portrayal of enslaved women’s power in life and death by study-
ing how women in the Caribbean used the peacock flower for abortion “as a form of political
resistance.”37 Miss Béa represents all enslaved women who used natural resources to defy the
hegemony of White masculine society, radically upsetting the dominant discourse as she gets
positioned alongside those sovereign gods who reign using the resources of the natural world.
Miss Béa is the matriarch whose family line traced primarily through female descendants
leads to Maximin’s narrator, Marie-Gabriel. Cast as a contemporary emerging author writing
about Guadeloupean history, Marie-Gabriel provocatively describes the vacancies in French
colonial archival “History” for Black women: “Another thing that holds me back is that I feel
more and more strongly that history is nothing but men’s lies” and that “reading our history
as it is written up to now is making a visit against nature inside the paternal womb.”38 In other
words, she feels bound by fictional historical narratives that are unnatural and binding, and
that fail to give sustenance, growth, and life due to the absence of motherhood through the
paternalistic power of the empire. This is not only found in the production of history. Maryse
Condé emphasizes the minimization and marginalization of women in Antillean literature as
well: “We have been fed upon triumphant portrayals of messianic heroes coming back home
to revolutionize their societies.”39 Through shaping a family tree around women and by shift-
ing Marie-Gabriel’s narrative so that it is built on her mother’s diary, Maximin attributes power
to women descended from the enslaved. No longer aiming to “bring back to life the fathers
vanquished from our history,” Marie-Gabriel instead explores women’s power as “the roots” that
“bear the fruit” of humanity and history.40 She expresses her anger with being forced to be part
of a history that “is a trap set by our fathers” (meaning colonial France with its commemoration
of select male heroes), and through exploring her mother’s journal, she poeticizes, “I listen to
your silence, I listen to all the fervor held in a dream of woman, I know all the justice glowing
in a memory of woman.”41 In learning to “listen” to the silences of her mother’s dreams and
memories, and by writing her mother’s story, Marie-Gabriel stands against the legacy of “the
tragic permanency of historical silence and erasure” for many Black women of the Caribbean.42

36 Maximin, Lone Sun, 59. Concerning Richepance’s death, see Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 408.
37 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004), 18, 107, 128–42, 153.
38 Maximin, Lone Sun, 105.
39 Maryse Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” Yale French Studies, no. 97 (2000): 133, doi:10
.2307/2903218.
40 Maximin, Lone Sun, 7, 249.
41 Ibid., 105, 251.
42 Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 144; Erickson, “Maximin’s L’isolé soleil and Caliban’s Curse,” 127–28.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 77

In broadening Marie-Gabriel’s lament that “the only function of black women is to give
birth to our heroes,” another archival void that Maximin confronts concerns the martyrdom of
mixed-race military officer Louis Delgrès.43 Delgrès is a cultural hero remembered for issuing
a proclamation for liberty prior to committing suicide in resistance to France’s reinstatement

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of slavery in 1802. Early in the story Maximin tells readers how Marie-Gabriel first attempts
to reconstruct her past by writing a heroic epic of one of her ancestors tied to Delgrès. She
intends to base the story on evidence she found in her ancestor’s journal that told of partici-
pating with Delgrès in the stand against Richepance and his French military. In wrestling with
the validity and the value of Delgrès’s story, Marie-Gabriel ultimately proves unable to resolve
her own quest for identity through exploring her colonial past. By weaving Delgrès’s history
into a fictional “archival” source and into Marie-Gabriel’s personal life story, Maximin exposes
readers to two tiers of colonial archival disruption: he questions the legitimacy of memorial-
izing Delgrès’s sacrificial story that is only constructed through documentation by the White
colonial elite, and to counter this memorialization of Delgrès, he asserts a narrative to “essaie
de lutter contre . . . cet oubli du peuple . . . , cet oubli du quotidien” in Guadeloupean history.44
Maximin alters the traditional accounts of Delgrès’s actions by pulling his story from
works by White men written in 1848 and 1858 and weaving it into the journal of Miss Béa’s
son Jonathan, where primary and secondary colonial sources get framed in the discourse
of a Black man and his family. This framing of Guadeloupe’s history in Jonathan’s journal
shifts attention to Delgrès and his supporters who fought against the French military that
arrived to overturn abolition in 1802, rather than focusing on France’s kindness in granting
abolition in 1848. Yet at another level, Marie-Gabriel goes a step further in also questioning
the value of memorializing Delgrès’s sacrificial story. After accusing France of “still confiscat-
ing our past in the hopes of dominating our future” she determines that she is “bothered by
Delgrès’s heroism,” and she writes, “I don’t know what kind of believable lie I can create to
stand beside the fictional truth of his sacrifice, the only event in our history that we all know,
along with Christopher Columbus’ discovery and Schoelcher’s abolition.”45 In wrestling with
the memory of Delgrès and the representation it provides of Guadeloupean history, where a
hero commits suicide, Marie-Gabriel feels bound by the emptiness and hopelessness in the
histories of those descended from slavery in the French Caribbean. She resists this memory
of death, seemingly conscious that, as McKittrick argues, “the dead spaces are inextricably
linked to the dehumanizing scripts.”46 Marie-Gabriel voices her frustration that an “eruption of
heroism” like that of Delgrès’s silences so many who endured and whose stories go untold.47

43 Maximin, Lone Sun, 105. See Nesbitt, “The Vicissitudes of Memory: Representations of Louis Delgrès,” in Voicing Memory,
50; and Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 119, 354, 398–400.
44 “Try to fight against . . . this forgetting of the people . . . , this forgetting of the everyday”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu,
“Entretien avec Daniel Maximin,” 38.
45 Maximin, Lone Sun, 102, 104.
46 McKittrick, Dear Science, 11.
47 Maximin, Lone Sun, 104.
78 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

In an interview, Maximin states that the memorialization of Delgrès furthers a certain notion of
Guadeloupeans: “[Que nous] n’avons jamais rien fait, qu’on nous avait tout donné, que nous
étions un peuple soumis [avec seulement] quelques rares héros . . . qui étaient là pour sauver
notre dignité.”48 To confront this, Maximin tells how Marie-Gabriel sets aside this story of epic

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sacrifice. Edward Baugh describes a similar “quarrel with history” by Caribbean author Derek
Walcott, who “gave up his search for history as a saga of heroes and a sequence of grand
events as a way of meeting the threat of historylessness.”49 Marie-Gabriel, in her “quarrel,”
looks beyond Jonathan’s journal, turning instead to her mother’s diary as a source for histori-
cal inspiration.
Maximin argues that Guadeloupe has an “histoire d’une soumission populaire” given
the idealization of Schoelcher abolishing slavery and the popularization of Delgrès commit-
ting suicide.50 He observes in another interview that “because our historians have long been
outsiders, we run the risk of not knowing the truth about ourselves, of becoming prisoners
of an absent history; hence, of becoming as well prisoners of an overconfident belief in our
rewriting of history.”51 Consequently, instead of retelling one of these famous Schoelcher or
Delgrès tales, Marie-Gabriel turns to the diary of her mother, Siméa, who becomes representa-
tive of resistant voices that go unheard in the archives. Scholar Arlette Farge critiques literary
authors who take archival history out of context by making “heroes” rather than “historical
subject[s],” yet Maximin’s work opposes this critique.52 Rather than using his fictional narrative
to make a “hero,” Maximin is deconstructing heroisms fashioned through the use of colonial
archives.53 In this regard, Maximin’s novel combats two ways archival power can be used:
the first, which I have already explored, is the silencing in colonial archives. The second is the
commemoration and commodification of a selected memory.

Countering Commodification
Rather than only considering what is missing from the archives, scholars also need to reflect on
how control of the archives continues to be a means for securing power in former metropoles.
Contemporary studies of the colonial empires are confronting this perpetuation of colonial
authority. In Ann Stoler’s theoretical studies of archival institutions and how archives should
be examined not just for “knowledge retrieval” but also to reveal “knowledge production,”

48 “[That we] never did anything, that all was given to us, that we were a submissive people [with only] a few rare heroes . . .
who were there to save our dignity”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu, “Entretien avec Daniel Maximin,” 38.
49 Edward Baugh, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” Small Axe, no. 38 (July 2012): 60, 69; originally
published in Tapia in 1977.
50 “History of popular submission”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu, “Entretien avec Daniel Maximin,” 38.
51 Clarisse Zimra, “An Interview with Daniel Maximin,” in Lone Sun, xxvii.
52 Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 76–77.
53 Methods of vocal plurality and hypertextuality are also seen in Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (London: Bloomsbury,
1993), and David Dabydeen, The Counting House (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2005). See Bénédicte Ledent, “Caryl Phillips’s
Crossing the River and the Chorus of Archival Memory,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 40, no. 1 (2017): para. 2;
Najnin Islam, “Racial Capitalism and Racial Intimacies: Post-emancipation British Guiana in David Dabydeen’s The Count-
ing House,” Interventions, April 2021, 4–5, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2021.1892516.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 79

she declares that archives have functioned as “intricate technologies of rule in themselves.”54
Librarian and academic Alana Kumbier posits that archival processes are shaped by “dominant
discourses, values, and ideologies” and have proven “instrumental in widespread, ongoing,
systemic abuses of power.”55 These scholars’ insights reveal a heightened sensitivity among

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scholars regarding the perpetuation of imperial power due to the silences of archival records
and the design of archival institutions.
In her essay “Where Did the Empire Go?,” Jordanna Bailkin more directly emphasizes
that it is important not only to consider what silences exist in colonial archives but also to be
aware of the continuance of imperial power in the creation and organization of the archives
during decolonization. She maintains that following the world wars Britain may have granted
the appearance of an increased availability of archival resources, but in fact new forms of
suppression emerged. Government documents in the archives are now more accessible, yet
personal documents have become protected, which “may hide ways of seeing the state as
well.”56 She declares that “the state, it seems, is still making its own call about where we can
locate its presence” through new forms of secrecy and “archival suppression.”57 James Lowry
contends that Britain’s possession of the Migrated Archives out of Kenya “parallels the violence
of colonialism” as it is a continued means of holding the archives in captivity, thus preventing
peoples’ research and knowledge.58 Similarly, in his article “Maroons in the Archives,” Dubois
describes a continuing colonial hierarchy in the Guadeloupean archival institution. First estab-
lished on the island in 1946, as of Dubois’s visits the archive’s staff in Guadeloupe still included
directors and administrative assistants from France, with its conference room decorated with
portraits of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century White, French governors.59 Dubois observes
that while the local Guadeloupean archives are “richer” than those held in Aix-en-Provence
and contain documents that cannot be found in France, their “richness is in fact hidden by
official inventories in the metropole” that “make it seem that the local archives do not contain
anything that is not in the metropolitan archives.”60 These observations by Bailkin, Lowry, and
Dubois indicate that archival power has been secured by former empires through decoloniza-
tion or departmentalization, and into the present.
This archival power can be used to hide or to suppress information, or to reveal and
promote particular parts of colonial history, and there can be a shift from suppression to
promotion over time. In Voicing Memory, literary scholar Nick Nesbitt recounts how stories of
Delgrès’s resistance and suicide were handed down orally among the enslaved in Guadeloupe
despite imperialist attempts to suppress his memory once France regained control of the

54 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science, no. 2 (2002): 87, 90–91.
55 Kumbier, Ephemeral Material, 44.
56 Bailkin, “Where Did the Empire Go?,” 895, 896–97.
57 Ibid., 897, 895.
58 Lowry, “Radical Empathy,” 193–94.
59 Dubois, “Maroons in the Archives,” 293, 295.
60 Ibid., 293.
80 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

island.61 Nesbitt examines civil records that reveal the popularity of the name Louis after 1802,
and he contrasts this with the scant writings by early historians that provide either brief mention
or criticism of Delgrès despite his military service to Revolutionary France.62 In 1855 Auguste
Lacour became “the first historian to speak positively of Delgrès’s actions,” while the major-

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ity of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications discussing the end of slavery
in Guadeloupe either made no mention of Delgrès or centered praise on Victor Schoelcher.63
According to Nesbitt, this changed coming out of World War II, as many Black Guade-
loupeans felt a heightened resentment toward France after fighting in Europe and Africa, and
they began searching for their own history. Following Guadeloupe’s departmentalization in
1946, the communist and anticolonial movement grew, and in 1948 islanders placed a plaque
to honor Delgrès in Matouba. Guadeloupean communists memorialized him in the 1950s and
the early 1960s, portraying Delgrès as a hero for the exploited and “attempt[ing] to rewrite a
history they judged to be unfairly Francocentric.” Delgrès became a “martyr,” with his name
featured more often in news articles regarding Guadeloupe’s history of slavery, resistance, and
abolition.64 In the early 1960s, Delgrès’s sacrificial actions were honored in poems by Aimé
Césaire and the Guadeloupean Sonny Rupaire.65
As time passed, by the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Nesbitt provides evidence that the
Delgrès narrative began fading from journalists’ news articles and quickly entered the domain of
newspaper advertising. Delgrès soon became a commodified memory in a growing consumer
culture.66 Despite Guadeloupe’s resentment toward France and the growing quest for autonomy
coming out of the war, the island quickly found itself economically bound “into West European
consumer society.”67 Delgrès’s story, no longer under “repression,” began being promoted in
French advertising and tourist markets to appeal to local and international consumers, and
money from tourism that appeared to be going to Guadeloupe ultimately benefited France. As
Robert Aldrich and John Connell state concerning French departments, “Tourism is classically
an industry where profits filter back from small-country destinations to metropolitan nations.”68
A search on the internet today reveals several sites for tourism and sales marketing that feature
Delgrès.69 Tourist companies located in France provide advertisements displaying the former

61 Nesbitt, “Vicissitudes of Memory,” 51–54.

62 Ibid., 56, 58.
63 Ibid., 57, 62.
64 Ibid., 66, 66–67.
65 Aimé Césaire, “Mémorial de Louis Delgrès,” Présence Africaine, n.s., no. 23 (January 1958): 69–72; Sonny Rupaire, Cette
igname brisée qu’est ma terre natale; ou, Gran parade, ti cou-baton (Paris: Parabole, 1971), 41–43.
66 See Nesbitt, “Vicissitudes of Memory,” 69–72.
67 Ibid., 70.
68 Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier: Départements et territoires d’outre-mer (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), 152. See also Nesbitt, “Vicissitudes of Memory,” 50–51, 72, and “Introduction: Aesthetic
Construction and Postcolonial Subjectivity,” in Voicing Memory, 7–9.
69 See “Mémorial du sacrifice de Delgrès,” Guadeloupe Tourisme, 2012, fr.guadeloupe-tourisme.com/145/memorial-du
-sacrifice-de-delgres-les-abymes/; “France—Circa 2002: A Stamp Printed in France Shows Louis Delgrès,” 123RF,
www.123rf.com/photo_14137196_france—circa-2002–-a-stamp-printed-in-france-shows-louis-delgres-leader-
by-napoleonic-france-circa-.html; “Photos de Guadeloupe,” Tourisme en Guadeloupe, www.photos-antilles-
guadeloupe.com/tourisme/basse-terre/fort-louis-delgres; and “Visiter le Fort Louis Delgrès à Basse-Terre,” Jumbo Car,
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 81

French imperial fort now renamed Fort Delgrès and a monument dedicated to his memory.70
Just as Glissant countered the authority of colonial “History,” so too has Patrick Chamoiseau
confronted the problems of “Memory” where colonial structures such as monuments—even
those of dissidents—are selectively joined with History so that they “magnifient, ou exaltent (du

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haut de leur majuscule), le crime que la Chronique coloniale a légitimé.”71 Delgrès, who stood
in opposition to French power and its colonial history of slavery, has become a romanticized
memory used to benefit France’s economy. Maximin’s archival disruptions concerning Delgrès
counter Black Guadeloupean conformity to this popular history and memory that has become
commodified by France under the guise of being economically beneficial for Guadeloupe.
At the same time, it might appear that in the coming decades Maximin himself fell prey
to this very idealization of the Delgrès narrative. In 1989, he served as the regional director of
cultural affairs in Guadeloupe and “spearheaded an initiative” that included the memorialization
of heroes Delgrès and Solitude. Maximin collaborated with other administrators in Basse-Terre
to have the fort once named after French general Richepance changed to Fort Delgrès. Almost
a decade later, for the 150th anniversary of slavery’s 1848 abolition, Maximin “joined others
in requesting that Louis Delgrès and Toussaint Louverture be commemorated in the French
Pantheon, the temples of French heroes in Paris.”72 France met this request, and there are
now inscriptions to Delgrès and Louverture in a hallway leading to Victor Schoelcher’s grave.73
On the surface, this may appear as a kind act of acquiescence on France’s part, but Laurent
Dubois theorizes that despite appearing to memorialize these sacrificial heroes for the benefit
of French Caribbean islanders’ memories, “the placement of Delgrès and Louverture in the
Pantheon can be seen as an appropriation of these two figures into a broader official French
project.” According to Dubois, these figures’ entry into the Panthéon brings celebration of
French republicanism while at the same time trying to “cover up the continuing failure of the
French state to address the profound economic, social and political problems that beset the
French Caribbean departments.”74 This draws attention to the contrast between Maximin’s
literary work and his political actions. It raises the question of whether he has fallen victim to
the French nation-state that lauds a historical representation in order to pacify Guadeloupean
society and maintain economic and political control.

2020, www.jumbocar-guadeloupe.com/tourisme-en-guadeloupe/decouverte/fort-louis-delgres-a-basse-terre (all accessed

9 November 2020).
70 See Anabell Guerrero, “Mémorial du sacrifice de Louis Delgrès,” Canopé, www.reseau-canope.fr/art-des-caraibes
-ameriques/oeuvres/memorial-du-sacrifice-de-louis-delgres.html; “Basse-Terre: Guide tourisme, vacances, et week-end
en Guadeloupe,” France-Voyage, www.france-voyage.com/tourisme/basse-terre-2385.htm; and “Fort Louis-Delgrès,”
Bourse des voyages, www.bourse-des-voyages.com/guadeloupe/guide-culture-lieux-fort-louis-delgres.php (all accessed 9
November 2020).
71 “History, Memory, and the Monument magnify, or exalt (from the top of their capital letter) the crime that the colonial
Chronicle legitimized”; Patrick Chamoiseau, Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne (Paris: Caisse Nationale des Monuments
historiques et des Sites, 1994), 14.
72 Dubois, “Solitude’s Statue,” 34.
73 Laurent Dubois, “Haunting Delgrès,” Radical History Review, no. 78 (Fall 2000): 174.
74 Ibid., 174–75.
82 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

As an author, Maximin certainly faces the dangers of duality, where due to his educa-
tion in France and the power of the French economy, he finds himself grappling with looking
through the eyes of another. In his study The Black Atlantic, which addresses such dangers,
Paul Gilroy nonetheless attributes value to artistic expression among Black societies because

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it proves “the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.” Gilroy
observes that poetry, novels, and music “have overflowed from the containers that the modern
nation state provides for them.”75 Maximin’s novel serves as an example of this “overflow”
from the nationally imposed “container,” yet his actions reveal that this “overflow” does not
bring entire detachment, as French systems of education and economy still have some hold
on him. Maximin pushes against the container’s restraints with his literary contribution, but
as an individual he still exists inside a system established by the French empire and in many
ways sustained by the imperial nation-state through to the present.
In existing within this system, Maximin’s actions to commemorate Delgrès appear to
show his entrapment in a France that is “appropriating” this memory.76 However, looking
from another angle, there is evidence that despite the seeming opposition between his novel
and his actions, both are Maximin’s means to push against the surrounding limitations of the
French national “container.” In his recent study Freedom Time, Gary Wilder examines how
Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor hoped to shape their societies’ relationship with France
coming out of World War II. Concerning Césaire, Wilder challenges common assumptions
that Césaire’s written works, such as Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Discours sur le
colonialisme, in many ways stood in opposition to his political actions for departmentalization
and later cooperative federalism. According to Wilder, Césaire’s poetry and politics were tightly
interwoven, with his poetry “saturated by political sensibility” and his politics “shaped by poetic
knowledge.”77 This theory allows Wilder to challenge readers to look for the complexities in
Césaire’s actions in bringing departmentalization, arguing that for Césaire it was “a creative
anticolonial act.” According to Wilder, the leaders who called for departmentalization coming
out of the war “were not simply demanding that overseas peoples be fully integrated within
the existing national state but proposing a type of integration that would reconstitute France
itself, by quietly exploding the existing national state from within.”78 Regarding Maximin,
the idea of causing an “exploding . . . from within” gives space to reexamine his role in the
memorialization of Delgrès.
Indeed, perhaps Maximin’s contribution in memorializing Delgrès in France can also
be framed as a “creative anticolonial act” for the purpose of bringing an “exploding . . .

75 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993),
40.
76 Dubois, “Haunting Delgrès,” 174.
77 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015), 107.
78 Ibid., 21, 2.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 83

from within.” With his actions that result in Delgrès’s story being written on the walls of the
Panthéon, he is challenging French national history by finding another written means to push
against the limitations of the “container” established and maintained by the modern nation-
state. He is taking part of the nation’s history that has been silenced and later commodified

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and is placing it in France’s most holy space—its sacred “temple to the gods.” His actions
that appear to contradict messages in his novel suggest the need to find different ways to
fight against enduring remnants of the old colonial order. He points to the importance of
understanding what the dominant society might be most willing and able to accept given
its context of space and time. Rather than making the same mistakes as those he critiques
in memorializing Delgrès, Maximin’s actions prove a measured form of resistance to the
continuing power of the dominant society through his insight into what that society is able to
see and to hear. Dubois’s contention that the commemoration of Delgrès serves as a form of
appropriation for France’s benefit seems justified, but for those in the French Caribbean this
commemoration can be interpreted differently. The literal “writing on the wall” reveals that the
French nation has in some ways become entrapped by commodifying the Delgrès narrative,
as a resistance leader for the enslaved now occupies its most hallowed ground and alters
its national historical narrative.
Over the last forty years, the definition of an “archive” has evolved to the point that
monuments are being identified as archival as well. In this regard, Maximin disrupts not only
France’s archives of colonial documents but also an archival site commemorating heroes of
French history. Charles Forsdick asserts that this form of archival disruption is gaining trac-
tion in France with the inauguration of memorial sites resistant to produced narratives and
selective remembrances. Examples include the Mémorial de l’abolition de l’esclavage de
Nantes (2012), memorials in Sarcelles and Saint-Denis erected by the Comité Marche du 23
mai 1998 (CM98; 2013), and the statue to be erected (promised in 2020) in a Parisian garden
recently renamed for Guadeloupean resistance heroine Solitude.79 The memorials built by
CM98 render visible individual names of the enslaved identified through a genealogical web
project, and Forsdick observes that by removing anonymity through these monuments “the
CM98 adopts and subverts a practice central to many modern forms of commemoration.”80
The theoretical discourse of these “emerging archival practices” points to the possibility that
rather than accepting memory’s being “conditioned and constrained,” Maximin’s actions
to secure Delgrès’s presence in the Panthéon added to his literature as a form of archival
disruption.81

79 See Charles Forsdick, “Monuments, Memorials, Museums: Slavery Commemoration and the Search for Alternative Archival
Spaces,” Francosphères 3, no. 1 (2014): 95; and “ ‘Solitude,’ héroïne de la résistance des esclaves, a son jardin à Paris,” La
Croix, 26 September 2020, www.la-croix.com/Solitude-heroine-resistance-esclaves-jardin-Paris-2020-09-26-1301116158.
80 Forsdick, “Monuments, Memorials, Museums,” 95.
81 Ibid., 98, 88.
84 [ Leanna Thomas ] Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun

“If the Master Has a Gun”

Although Maximin’s acts of resistance with his fiction and in the memorialization of Delgrès
appear to diverge on the surface, both center on changing people’s understanding of French
Caribbean history and on breaking the continuity of French colonial power. In the novel, Marie-

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Gabriel reads an entry in her mother’s journal where Siméa recounts her trauma of abortion.
Siméa goes to a bar in Paris where she laments that she only wants to feel the music and not
hear words that are written and spoken by men prey to the power of White, French society.
She declares, “Tonight I close my ears to Oscar’s bolero. Only the vibrations of conga and
bass can touch me. My eyes follow Oscar’s hands so I can forget the words coming from his
mouth.”82 Maximin’s implication here, as in Gilroy’s allusion to the “container,” or my allusion
to the current, is the continued oppression experienced by those in former colonial France, in
this case as the French language is used to secure imperial and national power. Siméa feels
desperately trapped and inhibited by the language. Maximin fights this sense of entrapment
by turning the “master’s” language against him: “Si le maître a un fusil, il faut qu’on apprenne
à tirer au fusil pour être à égalité.”83 Maximin’s use of the weapon of language to dismantle the
colonial archives’ institutional power is reflected in both his fiction and in Delgrès’s memorial
written in the Panthéon.
Maximin’s novel opposes histories oriented solely by the French colonial archives, whose
silences are often deafening regarding abolition, the culture and resistance of the enslaved,
and Black women’s roles in the French Caribbean. In addition, it counters the popular and
commodified Delgrès discourse that has been constructed through the selective intertwining
of colonial archives with a proclamation documented by elite French men. Fighting silences
and vacuums designed and implemented by the French colonial archival system, Maxi-
min helps alter academic methodologies, confront archival voids, and combat the selective
commodification of individuals and events in French Caribbean history. Maximin became a
participant in strengthening the power of an undercurrent that disrupts the powerful tides of
produced histories and selective remembrances. Through such literature, understandings
and interpretations of empire, nation, and liberty become powerfully contested. The recent
construction of new memorials and destruction of old ones reveals the presence not only of
this undercurrent but also of countercurrents that undoubtedly will continue to alter historical
narratives by combatting the authority of the French colonial archival system.

Acknowledgments
Thank you to the reviewers whose comments helped me tremendously, as well as to my advisors Dr. Erin
Morton, Dr. Chantal Richard, and Dr. Robert Whitney at the University of New Brunswick.

82 Maximin, Lone Sun, 133.

83 “If the master has a gun, it is necessary to learn to shoot one in order to gain equality”; Maximin, quoted in Mpoyi-Buatu,
“Entretien avec Daniel Maximin,” 41.