Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian(ne): Apparitions in Houat's Les Marrons (1844)

Abstract:

“Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian Apparitions in Houat’s Les Marrons (1844),” examines two tableaux from Les Marrons, an abolitionist novel written by Réunion Island native Louis-Timagène Houat in 1844. Les Marrons marked a turning point in Réunion’s history: it was the first novel to be authored by a native, and the first written utterance of Reunionese political consciousness and imagination. The novel was conceived as an anti-slavery pamphlet, fueled by Republican ideals of social and racial reconciliation. It stages a colonial romance between a white woman and an African slave in Réunion, then a French colony, culminating in the birth of a métis child.

Through a close analysis of two tableaux from Les Marrons, this paper investigates the ideal of motherhood that emerges in the French colonial imagination. Marie, the novel’s only feminine figure is imagined as a white mother, in an apparent denial of the Black mothers of the island’s origins. The white mother is likened to the island itself, as both island and woman are perceived as porous liminal grounds—sites of potential racial pollution. Houat’s novel offers a prime perspective onto the ambivalence that characterized the colonial apprehension of the white woman, through its iconic evocation of the Virgin Mary and the Mother Nation. This paper also suggests that the figure of the white mother, identified as a significant point of convergence of metropolitan and Reunionese antislavery discourses, helped tie a symbolic knot between France and its insular colony, and produced France as the motherland.