The Belle Créole

Abstract

Toward the end of Windward Heights, Maryse Condé’s richly textured 1995 Caribbean retelling of Wuthering Heights, a dejected Razyé, her Heathcliff character, gazes over the “listless immensity” of the sea and wonders if he should “swim out with a calm stroke” and then, “with eyes closed and fists clenched, rolled up in a ball like a foetus in its element ... lower himself further and further to the very bottom of the body of the ocean.” Razyé chooses not to return to the womb of the sea (la mer in French, impossible for the ear to distinguish from la mère, the mother), though the sea’s alluring embrace encircles Windward Heights as it does The Belle Créole, Condé’s 2001 novel recently published in an engaging English translation by Nicole Simek. Like the earlier novel, The Belle Créole takes place on Guadeloupe, Condé’s “small, fitful, and remote” island homeland, where the sun goes down in “a daily orgy of blood.” But unlike Windward Heights, The Belle Créole is set in a familiar and disturbing turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury present. The Belle Créole’s central character, Dieudonné Sabrina, is as drawn to the sea as to a lover, “always quick to wrap herself around his body and greet him with the moist kiss of her mouth.” He swims in it alone for an hour every morning; his happiest memories are of childhood jaunts on La Belle Créole, the sailboat owned by the Cohen family for whom his mother worked; and in the end, the sea remains his “only friend,” the only “one who had always stayed faithful ... offering him the caress of her belly, opening for him the sticky depths of her pubis, crowned with kelp.” It is no accident that Dieudonné’s dark-skinned Black mother, abandoned by her well-to-do lighter-skinned lover (ironically named “Vertueux”) when she becomes pregnant, is named “Marine.” Dieudonné, a sensitive and sickly only child, clings to her with unabashedly Oedipal desire. Ten years old when Marine is paralyzed by a fall, Dieudonné spends the next five years “spoon-feeding her meals to her, bathing her, rubbing her down, dressing her, getting her to do her business without disgust.” Marine’s death, a relief to her family, leaves the boy “all alone in this world.” Rejected by his grandmother and godmother, he moves into the Cohens’ abandoned yacht, spending hours