Solitude, a Woman With No Place

In 1972, André Schwarz-Bart published La Mulâtresse Solitude¹. The novel of a woman who is heroic not for her exploits, but for what she lives through. Holding on was resistance too.

Before the novel, a woman

In 1802, slavery was restored in Guadeloupe, eight years after it had been abolished. The island rose up. Among the insurgents was a pregnant woman. Arrested, sentenced, executed after giving birth. Her name was Solitude.

A hundred and seventy years later, André Schwarz-Bart gave her a whole life. A mother, a childhood, a voice. The novel made her a figure.

A novel that gets inside her head

What this book brings first is an inner life. Schwarz-Bart does not tell the story of a battle. He gets inside a woman's head. The scholar Catherine Rovera, who studied his manuscripts, shows that he left a historical fresco behind along the way, for an intimate story. She sees a heroine with a strong but reluctant will, and a vulnerability with no bottom. Odile Hamot, at the Université des Antilles, speaks of heroism in negative: Solitude is not a heroine for her exploits, but for what she endures. A tragic heroine, more than a heroine of the resistance.

It is also one of the few novels to tell Guadeloupe during the Revolution: abolition in 1794, then its reversal in 1802. For the Martinican historian Jessica Pierre-Louis, it is a very good book for understanding slavery in the French Caribbean, through its style, the psychology of its characters and the accuracy of its setting.

Belonging nowhere

This is what touched me most. Solitude is rejected because she is mixed, and not only by the masters. By her own people too, starting with her mother. The scholar Aaron Eastley, who studied the novel, reads her absence from herself as the price of that alienation. It is not a flaw in the character. It is what a place that exists nowhere does to a person.

I am mixed, and so are my children. What I have lived all my life is not the difficulty of finding my place. It is the feeling of never being in it. The novel already describes that feeling, in a woman of 1802.

This collection

The Nèg Mawon collection pays tribute to those who refused. Solitude belongs to it, for another kind of refusal: holding on, when you have no place anywhere.

We chose her for that. Not for an exploit. For what she carried.

¹ La Mulâtresse Solitude is a novel. To untangle what comes from the archives and what comes from the book, the historian Dominique Chathuant's piece, « La mulâtresse Solitude : de la fiction à l'histoire », is a good place to start.