Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon As a Noir Novel
A noir genre analysis of Heremakhonon explains the confusion, sensuality, red herrings, and flashbacks that permeate the novel, as well as the primacy of an investigation to the plot. Upon arriving in a newly independent West African country, protagonist Veronica witnesses the arrest of a political activist who opposed the ruling elite. When she investigates his disappearance, Veronica realizes that she is complicit with the elite perpetrators.
Noir Sensibility and the Mystical East in Amir Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” of Amir Muhammad’s KL Noir: Red
This paper examines Amir Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever”, one noir story taken from Amir Muhammad’s KL Noir: Red (2013), a noir anthology published in Malaysia. Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” is a self-claimed noir work contained by noir sensibility with portrayals of postcolonial experiences written from the perspective of contemporary-postcolonial Malaysian society. Both its noir sensibility and postcolonial experiences constitute the darkness and alienation which are commonly associated with noir fiction. Consequently, this paper looks into noir sensibility or noir parameters that construct Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” and, simultaneously, the inclusion of subversion of the West and East as a fragment of the postcolonial experiences that can also function as noir sensibility. The finding shows that the noir sensibility is manifested, firstly, by the noir theme comprising issues of mysticism and violence and, secondly, by the noir protagonist who is doomed and alienated. Additionally, the mystical East represented by the figure of Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of the Sea, has drowned the characters into darkness, chaos and, most importantly, subversion of the West and the East binary. Thus, they impressively shape this story to be a noir narrative with postcolonial issue.  Keywords: noir sensibility; mysticism; subversion; postcolonialism
Creolist Mystification: Oral Writing in the Works of Patrick Chamoiseau and Simone Schwarz-Bart
L’éloge de la créolité truly marks a decisive moment in the Caribbean literary movement. But beyond obscuring its discretely prescriptive, indeed unifying tone, the richness and profundity of that document can also suppress certain latent contradictions. In analyzing it, there is indeed the fear that the voluntarist manifesto might be in fact the actualization of what it would denounce: “un retour à l’ordre totalitaire de l’ancien monde, rigidifié par la tentation de l’un et du définitif” (53)/ “returning to the totalitarian order of the old world, fixed by the temptation of the unified and definitive” (114).1 From a theoretical perspective, authoritative studies—especially the reflections of Jacky Dahomay, Ama Mazama, Roger Toumson, Michel Giraud, and Raphaël Lucas—shed light on the macoutist bent of several Creolist claims. Indeed, not only do the Creolists implicitly refute their own stance in declaring that the Antilles are “encore dans un état de prélittérature” (14)/“still in a state of preliterature,” but a mythical monopolizing of the glory of origins insinuates that this “quête douloureuse d’une pensée plus fertile” and “d’une expression authentique” (13)/“painful quest for a more fertile thought” (75) and “a more precise expression” is born of their approach to writing. Furthermore, they make Creoleness and orality the “voie royale vers un authentique étouffé en eux-mêmes” (45)/“the best chance for their repressed authenticity”(106) that is claimed to have been definitely absent in their predecessors, who foundered in a “suicide esthétique” (45)/“aesthetic suicide” (106). That totalizing discourse locks literature within a quite imprecise concept that is paradoxically linked to a “diversalité” ‘diversality.’ It also reduces the plural archipelago to a cultural and linguistic unity. Finally, it announces an esthetic itinerary that privileges one sole aspect of orality (diglossia and the symbolic implication of a storyteller) as the forme majeure of orality that must be rescued from oblivion. Immediate literary history reveals, however, that the Creolist propositions are not immune from analysis. In the words of Michel Foucault, their method seeks to reduce writing to “un rituel [qui] définit les gestes, les comportements, les circonstances, et tout l’ensemble de signes qui doivent accompagner le discours” (Foucault 41)/“a ritual [which] lays down gestures to be made, behaviour, circumstances and a whole range of signs that must accompany a discourse” (225), indeed to a “système d’assujetissement” (47)/ “form of subjection” (227). Following on previously developed theoretical analyses, this article will shift the focus of reflection to the field of the purely literary in order to discredit Creolist mystification and its totalitarian attempt. A comparative study of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’horizon revisits a number of