Intertextual Connections
Intertextual Connections
The Jewish Holocaust in French Caribbean Novels
Caribbean novels about immigration to France in the 1950s and 1960s often portray the immigrants’ experience as exile and incarceration, and this is sometimes explicitly linked to the Jewish Holocaust. Drawing on Kristeva's theorization of intertextuality, this chapter analyses Gisèle Pineau's L’Exil selon Julia and André and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes to show their extensive reference to the Jewish situation, while also arguing that their notion of the homeland is significantly different. Thus Pineau's autobiography is inspired by Anne Frank's diary, and the old people's home in Paris that is the setting for Un Plat de porc is compared to a concentration camp, invoking Elie Wiesel's Night and André Schwarz-Bart's own earlier novel Le Dernier des Justes. But both novels also display a marked ambivalence towards the Caribbean homeland, that contrasts with the idealized status of Zion in the European Jewish society of the period.
Keywords: intertextuality, immigration, Holocaust, Gisèle Pineau, André Schwarz-Bart, Simone Schwarz-Bart
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.