haigh, s - migration & melancholia, (2006) 60 french studies 232

MIGRATION AND MELANCHOLIA: FROM KRISTEVASDEPRESSION NATIONALE TO PINEAUS MALADIE DELEXIL

SAM HAIGH

Abstract

In her recent Contre la depression nationale, Kristeva argues that France is currentlysuffering from a national depression that is similar in character to the individualdepression of the patient seeking psychoanalysis. Having never recovered itsnational self-esteem after the Second World War, France has, according toKristeva, become isolated and inward-looking and, like the depressed analysand,is in need of a restored self-image. Openness to the other, the foreigner, theimmigrant is one way in which France can rescue itself from depression and,building on its post-revolutionary, Enlightenment tradition of hospitality, beginto thrive and evolve once more. What is striking, of course, is that theimmigrant him- or herself disappears as subject, and instead remains simply ameans through which the French subject may be healed. Through an analysis ofthe dynamics of melancholia, this essay examines both Kristevas notion ofnational depression and what Chinese-American theorist Anne Anlin Cheng hasrecently termed the racial melancholia of the migrant subject elided byKristeva. More specically, and taking Gise`le Pineaus LExil selon Julia as anexample, it examines the maladie de lexil of the French Caribbean migrantsubject who has been left out by almost all studies of immigration in France butwho can be seen to have functioned as Frances primary melancholic object.

In a recent article inLe Figaro, Maurice Druon, former secretary general of theAcademie Francaise, laments both la degradation progressive du francais enFrance and the chronic underfunding that prevents the Academie Francaisefrom carrying out its role: [de] nettoyer la langue des ordures quelle avaitcontractees, ou dans la bouche du peuple, ou dans la foule du Palais, oudans les impuretes de la chicane. He mourns the passing of French as lalangue universelle, celle [de] toute personne cultivee [. . .] la languedEurope and informs us that la disparition de notre empire colonial afavorise lapparition dun bas-francais. He then goes on to diagnose themalaise behind the symptoms of impurity and contamination that he has ident-ied, saying that language is the best indicator of the general mentality of apeople and that, in his opinion, the French no longer respect their languageparce quils ne sont plus ers deux-memes ni de leur pays. Ils ne saimentplus, et ne saimant plus, ils naiment plus ce qui etait loutil de leur gloire. 1

# The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for FrenchStudies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

1 Non-assistance a` la langue en danger, Le Figaro, 24 February 2004, p. 1.

French Studies, Vol. LX, No. 2, 232250doi:10.1093/fs/knl078

Aweek later, Le Figaro published a response to Druons article by BernardPivot, whose television show, Les Dicos dor, Druon had attacked as anexample of the degradation of the French language. Pivot takes exceptionto Druons snobbery and elitism, and his refusal to recognize that Frenchis also un langage populaire, un parler des metiers.2 More than this, andpicking up on Druons lament for the passing of empire, Pivot linksDruons conservatism, his fear of contamination and impurity and his callfor a renewal of national pride to a mistrust not only of the popular butalso, implicitly, of the immigrant, of the threat of the other within:

Avec leurs qualites et leurs defauts, Le Petit Larousse et Le Petit Robert jouent un role capitaldans la connaissance et lamour de la langue. Mais, pour M. Druon, ils sont diriges par dessauvageons de banlieue qui ne cherchent qua` saccager et a` denaturer le francais en yintroduisant des mots sans-papiers doublement sans-papiers puisquils sont nes de loral etque lAcademie francaise ne leur a pas accorde leur permis de sejour.3

According to Pivot, Druon sees French as une langue immobile, drapee[. . .], [enfermee] pour le soustraire aux mauvaises inuences venues delinterieur et de lexterieur, while he himself calls for evolution,openness, and attention a` la nouveaute comme au patrimoine.4

This very French debate over language is itself, I would suggest, anindicator of the mentality of a people and of a malaise that Druon andPivot are by no means the rst to recognize. In 1997, Ian Jack, in anissue of Granta entitled France the Outsider, also took as his starting pointthe idea of le malaise francais and, like Druon, linked it to the passingof Frances role as the global model of civilization and of French as thetriumphant world language.5 More than this, he dened the prevailingmoods in France as sinistrose, morosite and nostalgia nostalgia forla France profonde, for the France that gave birth to modern ideas andmodern politics, for the France of liberte, egalite, fraternite, for Francethe universal nation.6 As France the Outsider is devoted more specicallyto providing an overview of new French writing, Jack goes on toidentify nineteenth-century realism as the literary apogee of Francesnational condence in its place in the world and notes that what hassucceeded it are various forms of experimental writing characterized bysolitude, introspection and a sense of meaninglessness, a turning inwardsaway from the world. This, he argues, has made French literature of thelast hundred years deeply unpopular abroad, thus exacerbating introspectivetendencies and the lack of global self-assurance. Unlike Druon, however,and more like Pivot, Jack sees a way forward for French writing, and by

2 Maurice Druon, vous allez trop loin! Le Figaro, 1 March 2004, p. 13.3 Maurice Druon, vous allez trop loin! p. 13.4 Maurice Druon, vous allez trop loin! p. 13.5 Editorial, Granta, 59: France the Outsider (1997), p. 8.6 Editorial, p. 9.

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU 233

implication France, precisely in nouveaute, in the younger generations ofmore outward-looking writers writers whom he identies as cominglargely from present or former French territories outside Europe [. . .],[or] the children of migrants from these places.7

This identication of a general psychological malaise in France bears astriking resemblance to that examined also in a short text by JuliaKristeva, Contre la depression nationale8 a text that has received relativelylittle critical attention. Here, Kristeva develops ideas on national identityfrom two of her earlier works, Etrangers a` nous-memes9 and Lettre ouverte a`Harlem Desir.10 Going further than Jack, she argues that France is notsimply morose, gloomy or temporarily introspective, but is sufferingfrom a full-blown national depression that is similar in character to theindividual depression of a patient seeking psychoanalysis. Throughouther work, and especially since the 1980s, Kristeva has analysed the relation-ship between individual psychological problems and social problems, andhas employed a psychoanalytic framework to examine wider, social issues.Here it is depression and melancholia that provide this framework,phenomena that she had previously examined in Soleil noir11 andLes Nouvelles Maladies de lame,12 texts that she wrote as a response to thehuge increase in depression that she began to see among her patientsfrom the late 1980s onwards.In Soleil noir, Kristeva deliberately blurs the border between melancholia

and depression, and draws on insights from a variety of psychoanalyticschools. She takes as her starting point Freuds observation in Mourningand Melancholia that melancholia is a pathological form of mourning,whereby grief at loss does not resolve itself.13 As Freud pointed out, forthe subject caught up in mourning, the lost object is consciously knownand missed; for the subject caught up in melancholia, the lost object isalmost always elusive, withdrawn from consciousness, and thus cannotbe missed and mourned in the same way.14 Supplementing Freuds sugges-tions about melancholia and the constitution of the ego with MelanieKleins object-relations theories, Kristeva locates the melancholicsubjects imprecise sense of loss in a failed separation from the maternalobject and an inability to resolve the ambivalence that characterizes earlyego development into healthy primary narcissism. She explains that, as

7 Editorial, p. 11.8Contre la depression nationale: entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris, Textuel, 1998). Subsequent references

will be given in the text.9 Etrangers a` nous-memes (Paris, Fayard, 1988).10Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir (Paris, Rivages, 1990).11 Soleil noir: depression et melancolie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987).12Les Nouvelles Maladies de lame (Paris, Fayard 1993).13 Mourning and Melancholia (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works

of Sigmund Freud, XIV, ed. and tr. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 00000.14 Mourning and Melancholia, p. 000.

234 SAM HAIGH

we struggle, just before we enter language, between an impulse to continuedening ourselves by clinging to the maternal object that has until nowbeen vital for our survival and an impulse to separate, we oscillatebetween intense love and hate for the maternal object.15 For Kristeva asfor Klein, one means of coping with these ambivalent feelings is to usesplitting mechanisms, in which love is projected onto a fantasizedgood breast which provides nourishment, and hate or aggression isprojected onto a bad breast which, in the childs fantasy, has beenwithheld or withdrawn.16 Successful completion of this developmentalstage entails recognizing the maternal object as having both good andbad qualities, identifying ourselves as separate from the maternal objectand signifying our sadness at this separation through language.The subject prone to melancholia has never properly completed this stage

of separation a stage identied by Klein as the depressive position and it is this haunting, half-remembered nostalgia not for the motherherself, but for the lost feeling of omnipotence derived from primaryidentication or oneness with the mother17 that may be reactivated inlater life, and trigger depression. As Kristeva explains:

La blessure que je viens de subir [. . .] maintenant semble entrer en resonance, a` lexamen, avecdes traumas anciens dont je mapercois que je nai jamais su faire le deuil, de quelquun ou dequelque chose, que jai jadis aimes [. . .] [Cette] peine nest que lajournement de la haine ou dudesir demprise que je nourris pour celui ou pour celle qui mont trahie ou abandonnee. Ladepression me signale que je ne sais pas perdre: peut-etre nai-je pas su trouver unecontrepartie valable a` la perte? Il sensuit que toute perte entrane la perte de mon etre.18

For both Freud and Kristeva, melancholia is an abnormal way of digestingloss,19 and is rooted in ambivalent feelings towards the maternal object thatare transformed into ambivalent feelings about the self. Melancholicsidentify narcissistically with the lost, loved object, introjecting it, incorpor-ating it into themselves in order not to lose it entirely. Once this hasoccurred, however, the part of the ego that is now identied with theobject is judged harshly, reviled by the other part of the ego; the conictbetween the ego and the loved object has been transformed into acleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered byidentication.20 The depressive subject is therefore fundamentally canniba-listic [. . .] it nourishes the self by destroying the other,21 and this manifests

15 Soleil noir, pp. 2021, 2223.16David Macey, Melanie Klein, in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London, Penguin, 2000),

p. 214. See also Soleil noir, p. 28.17 Lawrence Kritzman, Melancholia Becomes the Subject: Kristevas Invisible Thing and the

Making of Culture, Paragraph, 14 (1991), 14450 (p. 145).18 Soleil noir, pp. 1315.19 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2001), p. 8.20 Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, p. 000.21Kritzman, Melancholia Becomes the Subject, p. 145.


itself in the loss of self-esteem and self-hatred that alternate, or coexist, withthe overwhelming sadness of melancholia.It is this model of depression that Kristeva extends to describe the current

malaise of the French nation in Contre la depression nationale. As Freud himselfpoints out, melancholia may be a reaction to the loss not only of a personbut, instead, of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, suchas ones country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.22 Like Druon and Jack,Kristeva feels that France is suffering from depression at the momentbecause its idea of itself as a nation, its self-esteem, is struggling; Franceno longer feels powerful (Contre la depression nationale, p. 66). She tracesthis recent phase of national depression back to the humiliations of theSecond World War, humiliations or losses that rekindled the moreancient loss central to melancholia, as we shall see. After the temporary,post-war respite of les trente glorieuses, France began the descent intodepression once again with the events of May 1968 and now lacks clearhopes and ideals for the future. Just as the depressed individualwithdraws into himself and is unable to speak, so French people havewithdrawn from community life and from politics; France has lost itsvoice in the world both within Europe and in relation to America and French has lost its status as a world language. Just as the depressedperson has a tyrannical super ego that demands perfection and makes thedepression worse, so the French, according to Kristeva, have a sense ofcultural superiority, of belonging to a prestigious civilization, that theywill not give up in the face of globalization, and which is thus makingtheir sense of isolation worse (Contre la depression nationale, p. 64).Kristeva goes on to suggest that, rst, the nation needs to have its

self-image restored, and this, she feels, can be achieved by evoking, remem-bering and revaluing the nations cultural heritage its aesthetic, technicaland scientic capabilities. Then, just as the depressed person needs a means,such as psychoanalysis, of working through his/her depression towards anew ego ideal, so the nation needs something similar, a means of creatinga new ideal of nationhood and national identity. Of course, working ondepression itself entails understanding and putting into language anambivalent relationship with a lost object that is unable to be mournedor given up, and which is at the root of the sadness and apparent self-hatredthat characterize melancholia. What, then, is Frances lost object? What hasprovoked this, and previous, bouts of national depression? Kristeva herselfnever directly asks such questions, but an answer may be found in the factthat (perhaps rather surprisingly) she, like Druon, explicitly links Francesnational depression to its status as a post-colonial nation, and especially toles ux migratoires and the feelings of insecurity, even persecution, that

22 Mourning and Melancholia, p. 000.

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they have brought (Contre la depression nationale, p. 67). Just as themelancholic feels nostalgia for a lost sense of wholeness or omnipotence,so France feels nostalgia for the lost ideal of lunite nationale an idealthat she feels has been elevated to the status of cult or myth in France(Contre la depression nationale, p. 59). And for Kristeva, as for Druon, Jack,and Pivot, this lost ideal is somehow, obscurely, linked to Francescolonial past, of which contemporary immigration is the constantreminder, like the residue of a traumatic memory.Unlike Druon, Kristeva is quite clear that restoring national condence is

not the same as national arrogance and she warns against promoting theFront Nationals brand of nationalism (Contre la depression nationale, p. 63).In fact, she sees this as a sign of a failure to treat depression, a fallinginto mania, which Freud also associated, along with suicide, withuntreated, chronic melancholia.23 Rather, like Jack and Pivot, Kristevasees immigrants and foreigners as part of the cure for Frances depression,and it is here that her psychoanalytic model also becomes explicit. For thedepressed analysand, psychoanalysis entails un apprentissage de lalterite(Contre la depression nationale, p. 41): the transference relationship betweenanalyst and analysand at last gives the latter an other in relation to whoma sense of self can be built. At the national level, des activites qui develop-pent le souci pour lautre: le soin, lamour. . . le service public (Contre ladepression nationale, pp. 7374), participation in la vie associative (p. 70) areall [des] antidepresseur[s] puissant[s] (p. 74). A relationship with theimmigrant as other thus becomes, for Kristeva, a privileged meansthrough which a national sense of self can begin to be re-established inFrance, and through which, eventually, a new relationship with Europe,the USA and the world can be built.She imagines this new nation as une federation detrangetes, une

entente entre des etres polyphoniques, respectueux de leurs etrangetes reci-proques (Contre la depression nationale, p. 77). She repeatedly evokes Montes-quieus esprit general, which she calls ce commun denominateur qui fait lesol de la Republique et qui [. . .] est notre antidepresseur symbolique(p. 99).The work of Montesquieu, along with the European, Enlightenment idealsof cosmopolitanism and hospitality in general, also forms the basis ofEtrangers a` nous-memes. Here, and then again in Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir,Kristeva argues that these are specically French ideals, and that Francemust return to them in search of a new, more open and more tolerantversion of the nation. This is the cultural heritage that must be rehabilitatedin the quest to treat Frances national depression; this is Frances lost object,the key to restoring a sense of national self-esteem and wholeness.

23 See Kristeva, Contre la depression nationale, pp. 6869 and Freud, Mourning and Melancholia,pp. 26263.


Kristeva is by no means alone in her interest in the Enlightenment originsof contemporary notions of hospitality in France. Mireille Rosellos Post-colonial Hospitality is one of several recent examinations of the subject, butshe, unlike Kristeva, is concerned not simply with returning to theseorigins, but with showing how the Republics self-presentation as a hospi-table nation has always been marred by ominous ambiguities.24 As Rosellopoints out, the French tendency to idealize the notion of hospitality as aspecically French value is highly problematic. This is not only because hos-pitality is not necessarily a French value, but also because it may not reallybe a value at all. Hospitality can be generous, but it can also be motivated byselshness, by the desire for power or domination on the part of the host, sothat hospitable and powerful hosts [. . .] constantly [threaten] to swallowtheir guests, to absorb or incorporate them, to strip them of theiridentity.25 In the French context, the most obvious example of this darkside of hospitality, as Rosello points out, is Frances colonial policy ofassimilation, and the immigration policy of integration to which it led. Ofcourse, discourses of assimilation of la mission civilisatrice emerged precisely during the Enlightenment. It may thus be suggestednot simply that France is suffering from a bout of national depressionbut, more fundamentally, that French national identity itself is melancholic.The nation is founded on a sense of loss, unresolved grief, and an ambiva-lent relationship to what has been lost; what is more, as Anne Anlin Chenghas pointed out in relation to the USA, this loss, this nostalgia for a sense ofwholeness or unite nationale, is one that is deeply racialized.For Cheng, the USA has been constituted through ideals of freedom and

liberty that it has continually betrayed in practice, starting with the Declara-tion of Independence, which demanded freedom from enslavement toEngland for a new nation built on slavery.26 National melancholia isthus, more specically, racial melancholia: a desire both to introject theracial other, to welcome it and hold it within, yet also to devour anddestroy it. In France, it was with the declaration of Les Droits delHomme et du Citoyen modelled, of course, on the American Declara-tion of Independence that Enlightenment ideals were simultaneouslydeclared and betrayed. The proposition that les hommes naissent etdemeurent libres et egaux en droits was asserted at the height of Francesinvolvement in the slave trade, as Enlightenment discourses of hospitalitywere in the process of being converted into colonial discourses of assimila-tion. And nowhere have these discourses of assimilation and hospitalitybeen more obviously played out than in relation to the inhabitants ofFrances oldest colonies, the present departements doutre-mer, founded on

24Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant As Guest (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 3.25Postcolonial Hospitality, pp. 32, 31.26The Melancholy of Race, p. 10.

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slavery: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion and Guyane. As we shall see,these are the colonized subjects perhaps most directly implicated in themelancholia of French national identity.The French Revolution and its accompanying ideals, in all their ambiva-

lent melancholia, may be seen to have had a particular impact on the inhabi-tants of the Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, for it was there, in 1794, thatslavery was suddenly abolished, apparently in the revolutionary spirit ofliberty, equality, fraternity. In reality, of course, this abolition wasmotivated by a desire to recruit freed slaves into the French army inorder to ght the invading British, and once the invasion had been success-fully put down, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in 1804. This is an example,precisely, of Frances racially melancholic relationship to its oldest colonizedsubjects its desire at once to welcome and reject and it is a relationshipthat has continued to be melancholic ever since. Even before abolition in1848 and then departmentalization in 1946, the inhabitants of Guadeloupeand Martinique were constructed as model colonial subjects. Theirhistory of transplantation through slavery rendered them particularly sus-ceptible to discourses of assimilation and therefore, for the French, theybecame perfect examples of what could be achieved by the nation aspurveyor of universal culture, as civilizer and assimilator, as generoushost. However, although guaranteeing French national identity, the assimi-lated French Caribbean subject also presents a threat to the mythied unityof that identity, to the idea of Frenchness itself. If it is possible to be cul-turally, linguistically and legally French but also to be black, to speakCreole, and to reside thousands of kilometres from the mainland, thenwhat does it mean to be French? And what happens when the Francaisde souche are forced to confront these contradictions in the FrenchCaribbean subject who resides within the borders of metropolitan France?Just as they have been posited as model colonial subjects, so Antilleans

may also be seen as model migrants. In the US context, Cheng positionsAsian-Americans as model migrants, and she feels that the racializationof Asian-Americans is in some ways more apparently melancholic thanthat of African-Americans, who are the predominant, non-dominantracial category, because they shuttle between black and white, assimilateand then euphorically sing the praises of the American way.27 The FrenchCaribbean subject occupies a similar position, this time in relation to theArab or beur, who is the most visible minority group in France, and themain focus of immigration-related fear and insecurity. As Muslims theyare seen largely as unassimilable, whereas people of French Caribbeanorigin, visibly different because for the most part, black, are Frenchcitizens, culturally and linguistically assimilated before setting foot in

27The Melancholy of Race, p. 23.


metropolitan France. They may thus be located somewhere between theabsolute other that is the Arab immigrant and the dominant, whiteFrancais de souche. The French Caribbean persons difference may thereforebe experienced as a threat by the French person but also seen as proof as long as he/she remains euphoric about assimilation of Francessuperior civilization and hospitality.Such dominant, racial melancholia is well illustrated in the novel LExil

selon Julia by the Guadeloupean author Gise`le Pineaua novel to which weshall return in more detail later, and which tells the story of a family of Gua-deloupean migrants living in France. Marechal, the narrators father, is asoldier in the French army and, in a key scene, his mother Julia absentmind-edly throws on her sons army greatcoat in order to go and collect hergrandchildren from school in the rain. When she arrives at the school,she is instantly met with the horried, collective gaze of the other, whiteparents who immediately read her attire as a deliberate attempt on herpart to disrespect France itself:

Les Blancs [. . .] portaient des mines contrites comme si la France venait detre envahie par unde ses sempiternels ennemis, comme si lhonneur de la Patrie etait pietine, la`, devant leursyeux, comme si la guerre etait deja` entree dans le village et quils doivent a` leur tour sortirleur petoire de derrie`re les fagots, brandir leurs fourches pour que le sang impie abreuveles sillons.28

As she is roughly treated by two policemen, what is revealed is the contra-diction inherent in a Republic ofcially proud of its hospitality and thereforehappy to allow some of its assimilated, colonized subjects to become itsrepresentatives, but whose very national anthem is based on notions ofpurity and impurity, on the confrontation and expulsion of undesirable,foreign elements as threats to the honour of the nation.The confusion of white French people when they are forced to come face

to face with what it means to belong to an hospitable, assimilatory nationis, as we shall see, matched by that of the actual objects of French racialmelancholia themselves and it is here that a crucial gap in Kristevasmodel of national depression becomes evident. Indeed, what distinguishesChengs study from both that of Freud and that of Kristeva is her question:what is the subjectivity of the melancholic object?29 Of Kristevas obser-vations in Contre la depression nationalewe might similarly ask: if the foreigneris to teach us about our own, intrinsic foreignness and enable us toreconnect with Enlightenment ideals of hospitality so as to construct anew model of the nation, what happens to that foreigner him or herself?What is his or her place in a nation built on his or her foreignness? InContre la depression nationale, the foreigners own melancholia is elided,

28LExil selon Julia (Paris, Stock, 1996), p. 72. Subsequent references will be given in the text.29The Melancholy of Race, p. 13.

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sacriced to the necessity of constructing a new model of French nationalidentity, while Chengs study is motivated by a desire to see what shecalls the racialized other as both a melancholic object and a melancholicsubject, both the one lost and the one losing.30 Her main concern, andone that will be shared by the remainder of this essay, is therefore withexploring this raced subjects melancholic responses to dominant racialmelancholia.31

In Etrangers a` nous-memeswhere, as we shall see later, she does attemptpartially to address the melancholia of the foreignerKristeva points tothe general problems with selfhood encountered by the immigrant whohas grown used to being a stranger in a foreign land:

Sans foyer, il propage. . . le paradoxe du comedien: multipliant les masques et les faux-selfs,il nest jamais tout a` fait vrai ni tout a` fait faux, sachant adapter aux amours et aux detestationsles antennes supercielles dun coeur de basalte. . . Cest dire quetabli en soi, letranger napas de soi. Tout juste une assurance vide, sans valeur, qui axe ses possibilites detreconstamment autre, au gre des autres et des circonstances. Je fais ce quon veut, mais cenest pas moi moi est ailleurs, moi nappartient a` personne, moi nappartient pas a`moi [. . .], moi existe-t-il ?32

This description of the false selves necessarily adopted by the foreignerwho must make him or herself constantly agreeable to those in the hostcountry bears a striking resemblance to the work of the Swiss psychoanalystAlice Miller on child development. Miller echoes Kristevas observationthat la depression est le visage cache de Narcisse,33 that it stems fromthe failed emergence of primary narcissism. Drawing, like Kristeva, onobject-relations theories, she examines the narcissistic disturbance of thechild brought up by a depressed parent. For her, as for Freud andKristeva, the depressed person is haunted by a sense of loss, a longingfor a positive, mirroring relationship with the maternal object that didnot occur at the appropriate developmental stage. For Miller, once thisperson becomes a parent she will tend to assuage her own narcissisticneeds through her child, that is, she cathects him narcissistically.34

Insecure and lacking in self-esteem, she projects her own introjects ontothe child35 and the child, having introjected the needs of the parent,becomes estranged from her own needs, repressing them to the extentthat she becomes unaware of them. Acutely attuned to what the parentwants and needs her to be, this child, like Kristevas foreigner, adopts aseries of false selves and is always good. As a melancholic or narcissis-tically disturbed adult, she, too, will be haunted by a sense of loss and,

30The Melancholy of Race, p. 17.31The Melancholy of Race, p. 21.32 Etrangers a` nous-memes, pp. 1819.33 Soleil noir, p. 15.34The Drama of Being a Child, tr. by Ruth Ward (London, Virago, 1987), p. 52.35The Drama of Being a Child, p. 49.


having unsuccessfully individuated herself, will remain dependent on othersfor a sense of who she is, perpetually seeking it in the reassurance andapproval of those around her.This model can usefully be applied to the relationship between France

and its Caribbean colonies, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Not only haveMartinique and Guadeloupe always been seen as model colonies but, inthe paternalistic language of colonialism, they have also always been seenas Frances children and specically as Frances good children,rewarded for their relative lack of rebelliousness with departmentalization.Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the racially melancholic relationshipbetween France and these colonies reached its peak with departmentaliza-tion. As Kristeva has pointed out in Contre la depression nationale, thecurrent phase of Frances national depression can be traced back to theSecond World War. Coming as it did in 1946, departmentalization was ameans for France to hold on to the vestiges of empire, and thus also toboost its agging self-esteem to assuage its narcissistic needs. For theirpart, the inhabitants of Martinique and Guadeloupe manifested their ownnarcissistic disturbance by continuing to be model, colonial children;lacking the self-condence to rebel, they instead sought furtherapproval unable to individuate themselves, they instead sought furtherassimilation.The narcissistic disturbance of Millers child is thus comparable to the

racial melancholia of Chengs raced subject, who introjects the racismof dominant culture, in all its hostility, and then experiences it as anambivalent combination of aspiration and rejection, identication and self-denigration, desire and shame. For Cheng, this then manifests itself asracial grief sadness as a kind of ambulatory despair or maniceuphoria.36 It is this other side of Frances national depression that canbe traced in Pineaus LExil selon Julia. Although dominant, French racialmelancholia can certainly be glimpsed in this novel, as we have seen, it isprimarily a working-through of the racial grief of three generations ofGuadeloupeans living in France, and it is the narrators father, Marechal,whose racial melancholia most closely resembles manifests itself as the type of narcissistic disturbance outlined above. Indeed, he swingsbetween the manic euphoria described by Cheng and Freud as oneextreme of untreated melancholia, and the ambulatory despair of classicdepression.First, Marechals decision to move his family from Guadeloupe to France

is conditioned precisely by the euphoric relationship to assimilation thatCheng identies in Asian-American immigrants. In his case, it takes theform of an extreme idealization of France and, in particular, of its

36The Melancholy of Race, pp. 2324.

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representative, General de Gaulle. As has been well documented, and asKristeva points out in Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir, de Gaulle became,during and after the Second World War, and especially with the foundingof the Fifth Republic, the saviour of the French nation who restorednational pride, however briey, after the humiliations of occupation andcollaboration. In Kristevas terms, he proposed des objectifs hautains quipermettent, contre la depression, une personnalite nationale.37 From thestart, de Gaulles post-war and presidential roles were bound up withempire. It was he who, during his provisional regime of 194446, soughtto assuage Frances narcissistic needs by renaming the empire the FrenchUnion and introducing departmentalization. By 1958, presiding over deco-lonization became the means by which he could enable France to see itselfonce again as a universal, civilizing nation; the generous, hospitabledefender of the oppressed.38 In relation to the DOM, it was de Gaullewho nally upheld the promises of departmentalization, which as late as1958 had still not been kept. His actions brought about signicantchanges in the living conditions of ordinary Domiens and Marechals gener-ation, in particular, remained grateful to him for rescuing them frompost-war deprivation and conferring upon them the full benets ofFrench citizenship.This is the context of Marechals relationship with de Gaulle, and it leads

him, during the Second World War, to join the resistance, via Dominica, asa dissident, and then to serve in the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeriaand the projects of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa. In each case he hasa strong sense of owing a particular loyalty, as a Guadeloupean, to thenation as it has been conceived and rebuilt by de Gaulle. And when thelatter resigns as president, following the events of May 1968, Marechalsinks into a deep depression:

Papa ne part pas travailler le matin. Depuis la demission du General, il marche en tricot decorps et pyjama dans lappartement [. . .] Il ne parle pas [. . .] La France nest plus tout a`fait la meme sans le General. Papa nest plus le meme non plus. Une partie de lui a perdufoi en larmee, en la France, en la vie, en lhonneur [. . .] La France sest deshonoree. Il nepeut pas rester dans un pays sans honneur. Il a honte pour la France. (LExil, p. 163)

This is the other side of the raced subjects racial melancholia. Marechalseuphoric relationship with France is suddenly transformed into ambulat-ory despair a despair born precisely out of the narcissistic disturbancedescribed by Miller and which characterizes the raced subjects relationshipwith dominant culture.For Miller, the narcissistically disturbed child will, as an adult, tend to

idealize the parent who was in fact emotionally unavailable or manipulative

37Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir, p. 48.38David Howarth and Giorgios Varouxakis, Contemporary France: An Introduction to French Politics and

Society (London, Arnold, 2003), pp. 11213.


as she cathected her child narcissistically39 and Marechals idealization ofde Gaulle is clearly reminiscent of this. Like Victor Schoelcher beforehim, de Gaulle came to be seen by Marechals generation both as asaviour and as representative of the French nation as a whole; what waselided in each case, of course, was the fact that it was France itself, likeMillers depressed parent, who had imposed the conditions from whichGuadeloupe and Martinique needed to be saved. When the French peoplereject de Gaulle, in the referendum of 1969, Marechal is no longer able tosustain his fantasy that de Gaulle and France are one and the same. Hisreaction and this, of course, recalls Kleins idea of infantile splittingmechanisms, on which Millers theories also draw is to split theminto good (de Gaulle) and bad (France). This enables him as hadhis idealization of de Gaulle to protect himself against the ambivalencethat he really feels, and has always felt, towards France as maternalobject. Now he comes face to face with it, with his shame and hostilitytowards the very French values that he has enthusiastically introjected.Like the child who continues to idealize her parents, Marechal continuesto shield himself from his ambivalence; consequently, his melancholia, hisnarcissistic disturbance, remains unrecognized and unresolved.Marechals experience of racial melancholia is also linked to his actual

family situation, because his mother is living with the family in Franceonly because he has brought her there, against her will. In doing so, hesees himself as her saviour, rescuing her from his abusive father,Asdrubal, and he compares himself explicitly to de Gaulle, imagining hismother as une Marianne whom he must liberate, as de Gaulle liberatedFrance (LExil, p. 32). Julia herself (whom the family affectionately callMan Ya), has no desire to be rescued and, from the start, she cannot com-prehend why she has been brought to France and experiences it as un paysde desolation (LExil, p. 55). Her experience of racial melancholia is quiteliteral her feelings of claustrophobia and isolation in France are recog-nized by her granddaughter precisely as melancolie and hers takesthe form not of euphoria or mania but only of sadness and despair. Fromthe start, she experiences her exile as le manque de pays as a lack, aloss, a wound, and as the prospect of returning to Guadeloupe graduallyfades, she sinks into full-blown depression, becomes physically ill, andrefuses to leave her bed, suffering from what her family names [la]maladie de lexil (LExil, p. 129).Julias melancholia is a sense of exile as nostalgia that closely resembles

that described by Kristeva in Etrangers a` nous-memes. Here, before focusingonce more on what the foreigners difference can bring to the Frenchnation, she recognizes that immigrants in France may experience their

39The Drama of Being a Child, pp. 1922.

244 SAM HAIGH

exile precisely as depression or melancholia, gripped as they are by thenostalgic yearning for the very motherland and mother tongue that, inchoosing exile, they have repudiated:

On connat letranger qui survit tourne vers le pays perdu de ses larmes. Amoureuxmelancolique de lespace perdu, il ne se console pas, en fait, davoir abandonne un temps.Le paradis perdu est un mirage du passe quil ne saura jamais retrouver. Il le sait dunsavoir desole qui retourne sa rage a` legard des autres [. . .] contre lui-meme [. . .]Letranger est un reveur qui fait lamour avec labsence, un deprime exquis.40

This is exactly how Julia, unlike Marechal, experiences France, and sheseeks in memories of home precisely a lost sense of wholeness and self-certainty, a solution to her panic attacks and son incapacite a` dominer lecours des choses (LExil, p. 129):

Elle veut une seule chose, retourner sur sa terre de Guadeloupe [. . .] Meme sil est vrai quecette terre maudite ensorcelle, amarre les destinees. Elle ne philosophe pas sur le pourquoi etle comment de lattachement a` sa terre. La raison saffaisse devant les sauts du cur. Il ny apas de mots, seulement le manque qui aveugle et etourdit [. . .] La terre, comme une me`re, quienfante, nourrit et recueille (LExil, p. 137).

Like melancholy as it is described by Freud or Kristeva, the sense of lossand yearning experienced by Julia is inarticulable, it is beyond words; unsoleil noir that blinds and stuns. It is also associated with the maternalobject; it is precisely the lost feeling of omnipotence derived fromprimary identication or oneness with the mother identied byKritzman. Equally, it is a loss shot through with ambivalence; as we shallsee, the dreamed-of land, like the maternal object, is restricting andconning as well as nourishing and holding.Crucially, too, Julias sense of loss is connected to something much more

archaic than the literal, known loss (exile in France) that has triggered it. Itis much more diffuse, much less straightforward than literal homesicknessbecause, unlike the nostalgia of Kristevas foreigner for the land he/shehas left behind, Julias nostalgia for Guadeloupe is rooted in the fact thather exile has been imposed against her will. Indeed, the way Julia isbrought to France by her son has strong parallels with the way slaveswere captured in Africa and transported, by ship, to the Caribbean. Sinceshe is illiterate, Marechal obtains a French identity card for her by askingher to mark the relevant papers with a cross, instead of a signature.When she is in the depths of her depression, she remembers this incidentand wonders:

Elle a fait une croix sur sa carte didentite francaise.Elle a signe pour combien de temps ?Pour quelle mission ?Juste une croix qui la enchanee (LExil, p. 125).

40 Etrangers a` nous-memes, pp. 2021.


Like her slave ancestors, she nds herself in a country with which she feelsno connection and she goes on to idealize Guadeloupe in the same way thatslaves idealized Africa and dreamed of returning there.Julia is of a different generation to her son, and her relationship with

France is thus not one of gratitude towards, and idealization of, a benevo-lent parent. Rather, it is conditioned almost entirely by an archaic sense ofloss associated with slavery. Marechals generation trapped as they are inthe euphoric stage of racial melancholia and thus desperate to assimilateand prove themselves to be Frenchnd slavery shameful and humiliatingand repress the memory of it. Julia, however, is too old to be tempted by theidealization of de Gaulle, and too young to remember Schoelcher andabolition with gratitude. Having grown up with stories of slavery andabolition, she is well aware of her slave ancestry and passes on thesestories to her grandchildren. And it is here that the ambivalence of Juliasrelationship with Guadeloupe, and with her personal and collectivehistory, becomes evident. Despite her longing for Guadeloupe, whatJulia has left behind there is a violent, abusive relationship that, as sheherself recognizes, is reminiscent of indeed repeats that of a masterand his slave. Paler skinned, and manager of the plantation on which sheworked as a cane cutter, Asdrubal, Julia says, a cherche la plus laide desnegresses noires pour faire offense et bailler de la honte a` son papa. Ilma jamais aimee ou si mal, dune bien laide facon. Jetais comme unaffront, un outrage [. . .] son esclave (LExil, p. 95). This is a role forwhich Julia has been prepared since childhood, and she recalls hermother telling her: une negresse noire, laide, a` cheveux graines, doitmeriter, plus que tout autre, sa place au ciel (LExil, p. 73). Just like aslave, she sees the pain inicted upon her by Asdrubal and, later, thepain of exile in France as something to be borne with religious faith,in the expectation of rewards in heaven.Such attitudes, handed down from generation to generation, must clearly

be set within the context of the narcissistically disturbed relationshipbetween France and Guadeloupe, in which the latter, as a colony,resembles les ailes cassees dun oiseau qui ne prendra jamais son envolee(LExil, p. 26). This is a relationship based on violence and hierarchy, inwhich those with paler skin expect total submission and obedience fromthose with darker skin just as adults, in the work of Miller, expecttotal submission and obedience from their children. Brought up to expectnothing more, Julia nds her relationship with Asdrubal familiar, comfort-ing, even safe, and is thus compelled to to return to it again and again, toseek it out and repeat it just as her son is compelled to repeat his own sub-missive relationship to France in his idealization and adoration of de Gaulle.As both Freud and Miller point out, the compulsion to repeat past experi-ences, however painful, because they are familiar prevents these experiences

246 SAM HAIGH

from being fully understood andworked through.41 Julia, in her desperationto return home to her husband, is potentially trapped in just such acompulsion to repeat. However, when she does return to Guadeloupe,we are told that she does not allow Asdrubal to resume abusing her.Having at last been able to glimpse, if not work through, the ancientorigins of her racial melancholia when it was triggered by her exile inFrance, Julia would seem, at last, to have attained some measure offreedom from old patterns of behaviour.The narrator, too, has her own experience of racial melancholiaand it is

that of the second-generation migrant who has no concrete sense of home.It is the narrator who encounters overt racism on a regular basis, in the formof racist bullying at school, most frequently at the hands of her teachers. Thespecic sense of loss that this precipitates in her, as a black child in 1960sFrance, is one that does not afict either her parents or grandmothers gen-eration. In her study, Cheng examines what she calls the racial grief ofAfrican-Americans and Asian-Americans subjected to precisely the racisthumiliation that Pineaus narrator suffers at school. For Cheng, self-denigration is the most common response to dominant racial melancholia,and it manifests itself in a sense of yearning and mourning, the imaginativeloss of a never possible perfection that of an idealized, white body that,melancholically, has been introjected.42 This is certainly familiar in FrenchCaribbean writing, too in the work of Frantz Fanon, for example, orin that of the Guadeloupean Miche`le Lacrosil, whose rst two novels,Sapotille et le serin dargile and Cajou, like Pineaus novel, were set, andindeed written, in the 1960s and describe racism and bullying at school ofwhich the narrators experiences in LExil are extremely reminiscent.43

Lacrosils characters, like those examined by Cheng, are so profoundlymarked by their experiences of racism that they become consumed by adesire to be white. In Pineaus novel, however, the narrators racial griefdoes not take this form and she feels condent, from the start, that shecan survive without the approval of the white teachers around her: jenai pas besoin de [leur] regard pour vivre et grandir (LExil, p. 63).Her racial grief instead takes the form of a desire to nd wholeness and

perfection elsewhere, and she experiences a sense of loss that resembles thenostalgia of her grandmother, but without the specic geographicallocation, Guadeloupe, to which it can be attached. For her, it is an ill-dened sense of homelessness44 and she attaches it, at different times, to

41 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, ed. and tr. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 5,2123, and Miller, The Drama of Being a Child, pp. 9598; pp. 10708.42The Melancholy of Race, p. 18.43 For a more detailed analysis of these two novels, see Sam Haigh, Mapping a Tradition: Francophone

Womens Writing from Guadeloupe (Leeds, Maney, 2000), pp. 1854.44Miller, The Drama of Being a Child, p. 14.


various geographical locations in her search for a concrete place with whichto identify it. This feeling began, we learn, when her father was posted toAfrica several years earlier, and the entire family lived there briey.Although the family was never accepted in Africa, despite their skincolour, the experience of having lived there leaves the narrator with lesentiment davoir perdu quelque chose [. . .] Jai nourri en moi cetteperte, pesante comme un deuil, manque sans denition [. . .] Une faimquon ne peut envisager (LExil, pp. 2021). This is, once again, a senseof loss, lack and longing that resembles but is not mourning, andfor the narrator it worsens once Julia has returned to Guadeloupe, whena sense of abandonment is added to it. The racist taunts (retournez dansvotre pays: LExil, p. 139), once again send the narrator imaginatively insearch of what she feels she has lost: je veux bien retourner dans monpays. Mais quel pays? (pp. 13940). LAfrique du temps darmee depapa (p. 140) is no longer a comforting image for Julia; instead, imagescome to her from her grandmothers Creole tales, and she begins toreturn to Guadeloupe in her imagination, creating her own versions ofthe tales in which she herself is the heroine.Thus it is as her ill-dened sense of loss gradually becomes more focused

on the Caribbean that her family nally decides to return there. The narratoris immediately lled with a sense of urgency and becomes determined toward off adulthood for as long as possible in order to arrive in theCaribbean before her childhood is over. For her, it becomes important togain a sense of having grown up in the Caribbean and not solely inFrance (LExil, p. 172). When they arrive in Martinique, she feels immedi-ately that ce pays, comme la Guadeloupe, a toujours hante ton coeur(p. 184) and these feelings intensify once the family nally returns to Gua-deloupe itself where, again, tout [. . .] est inconnu et pourtant reconnu(p. 177). The Creole language is a vital part of all that is familiar yet unfa-miliar for the narrator and she at last feels enabled to ramener au jour leparler que Man Ya a depose en nous-memes (p. 198). The sense oflonging la faim that has always been with her at last hassomething concrete to which to attach itself.It may thus at rst appear that the narrator has fullled the melancholic

fantasy of recapturing the lost sense of wholeness that should ensue from anarcissistically healthy childhood that she has escaped lasting racial mel-ancholia by identifying her lost object as both the maternal space of Guade-loupe and what, after Kristeva, we might term the semiotic tongue ofCreole. Such an interpretation, however, would be to oversimplifyPineaus text and its exploration of racial melancholia. Here, as forKristeva and Miller, the melancholics desire for a half-remembered senseof wholeness is one that will always remain unfullled, because the timefor that wholeness has passed and can never be recreated. The narrator

248 SAM HAIGH

was not, after all, born in Guadeloupe. This is un retour au pays pas natal(LExil, p. 193); everything is not quite familiar, she does not quite belong,her Creole is imperfect and heavily accented with French. Her journey hasbeen more than a simple return; it has been a series of departures fromFrance, to Africa, to France again, to Martinique, to Guadeloupe. What ismore, these departures are experienced as losses, and as she comments whenthey nally leave for Guadeloupe, dans chaque depart on abandonnetoujours un peu de soi (LExil, p. 211). This time it is her childhoodthat she is nally giving up; her arrival in Guadeloupe coincides, shefeels, with her entrance into adulthood. This is signicant, as it signalsher ability to recognize what she has lost the racial grief that she hassuffered through having her childhood in France and being forced tolive a condensed version of it in Martinique. Crucially, she recognizes thisloss, mourns it, and moves forward into adulthood aware that what she isleaving behind cannot be regained. This is vitally different from the mel-ancholia of the narcissistically disturbed child described by Miller who,like the narrators father, constantly seeks what she has lost, convincedthat it exists while remaining totally unaware of what it might be.Thus the narrator is able to effect successful individuation and to move

into adulthood having acknowledged her loss having integrated it, inFreuds terms, through mourning as opposed to melancholia.45 She istherefore able to move on from melancholia in a way that neither her grand-mother nor her father ever are. What is more, by the end of her narrative shehas shifted all her ill-dened feelings of loss, abandonment, and grief awayfrom a maternal object that she has gured geographically as Africa,Martinique, Guadeloupe and on to her grandmother. When her grand-mother dies, Julia is able to manifest the resolution of her melancholiathrough literal and successful mourning. As she explains at the endof the novel: [Man Ya] nest jamais partie, jamais sortie de mon cur.Elle peut aller et virer a` nimporte quel moment dans mon esprit [. . .]Elle est la`, dans le temps daujourdhui, vivante (LExil, p. 218).Thus we see how the narrator, her father and her grandmother negotiate

the racial grief of those migrant subjects who, historically, have always func-tioned as Frances melancholic objects a repository for the nationsambivalent sense of loss, a constant reminder of both the glory and threatof the ideal of hospitality. The work of younger generations of what Jackidenties as outward looking writers, like Pineau, from those parts ofthe French nation that are at once geographically peripheral and psycholo-gically central, does indeed speak volumes about Frances nationaldepression. For Druon, these writers like Julia in her sons armygreatcoat represent the threat of contamination and impurity that is at

45 Mourning and Melancholia, pp. 000.


the root of this depression. For him, the solution lies in the redoubling ofthe efforts of institutions like the Academie Francaise, institutions withwhose very existence Kristeva takes issue in Contre la depression nationale.For her, the Academie Francaise is symptomatic of a specically Frenchtendency to enracin[er] leur image identitaire dans la langue (p. 71), atendency that is always exacerbated during periods of national depressionand their attending repli identitaire (p. 71). Indeed, as if with Druonhimself in mind, she deplores having to read, during such periods, tel jour-naliste digne successeur de Verdurin qui vous sert les stereotypes du protec-tionnisme stylistique et philosophique (p. 72).For Kristeva, it is the existence of institutions such as the Academie

Francaise that makes France particularly inhospitable to the foreignwriter, who must be kept out of the temple of the French languageprecisely because it fears the metissage that such openness may bring(Contre la depression nationale, p. 72). In this she echoes Pivot, who also, aswe have seen, views the Academie Francaise as xenophobic in its protection-ism, inhospitable to external inuence, unwilling to grant [un] permis desejour to elements that it considers to be irresolvably sans-papiers.However, as we have also seen, it is not enough simply to declare oneselfhospitable and open to the other without rst examining the implicationsof these ideals, and ones motives for embracing them. To look to writerslike Pineau, as does Jack, primarily as a means of rescuing French literaturefrom solitude and introspection or, as does Kristeva, because of what theymay teach us about national depression, is to miss what Cheng callsthe history of disarticulated grief.46 It is to miss the history, that is, ofracial melancholia viewed from the perspective of the melancholic objectas raced subject.47

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

46The Melancholy of Race, p. 29.47 I should like to thank Maureen Haynes for all of her help during the writing of this article, and also

for drawing my attention to the work of Alice Miller.

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haigh, s - migration & melancholia, (2006) 60 french studies 232

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