Masquereading Léon Damas' Mine de riens

Auteurs-es

  • Kathleen Gyssels

Résumé

En Guyane, le « macoumé » est le terme injurieux pour désigner l‘homosexuel, supposé ou prouvé. Dans un long passage de Black-Label, le poète faisait rimer dans un portrait de lui en « Bel enfant de choeur » les roses « miraculées, immaculées, matriculées » (BL 38). J‘y ai toujours entendu le terme mis entre guillemets : « macoumé ». Partant de Masquereading (Marie-Hélène Bourcier) et de l‘homotextualité (Jean-Pierre Rocchi), je propose une nouvelle approche de la poésie impudente et immoraliste (Gide lança Damas, après tout). Il aura été un « maskilili », diablotin amérindien qui n‘est jamais là  où on l‘attend, déjouant les attentes et surtout chaussé de travers.

In French Guiana, “macoumé” is the offensive term for the supposedly or proven homosexual. In a long passage from Black-Label, the poet rhymed, in a self-portrait as the “Beautiful Choir Child”, the roses “miraculées, immaculées, immatriculées” (BL 38). I have always heard the term put in quotation marks: “macoumé.” Starting from the concepts of “Masquereading” (Marie-Hélène Bourcier) and “homotextuality” (Jean-Pierre Rocchi), I propose a new approach to this impudent and immoralist (Gide launched Damas, after all) poetry. He will have been a “maskilili”, a Native American devil who is never where he is expected to be, defying expectations and above all putting his right shoe on his left foot.

Biographie de l'auteur-e

Kathleen Gyssels

Kathleen Gyssels is Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Literature and Culture at Antwerp University, where she teaches classes on authors from the African and Jewish diasporas. Her publications are principally concerned with African American, Caribbean and Francophone authors and subjects from a broad, comparative perspective. Her current research has extended her reach to include conflictual issues, such as the Memory Laws and the Memory Wars in the French Republic and postcolonial countries. A new research project deals with the Jews and the Chinese presence in the Caribbean literatures and with the transfer from metahistorical fiction to art (sculptures) and museums. She also investigates the archives and posthumous publications of André Schwarz-Bart and has organized seminars on female postcolonial or postmemory authors such as Hélène Cixous, Régine Robin and Simone Schwarz-Bart.

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Publié-e

2020-07-31

Numéro

No. 116 (2020): Dossier spécial Léon-Gontran Damas

Rubrique

Articles