POETICS OF THE HOLD ***SOLD***

Fabienne Kanor

(Éditions Payot-Rivages, 432 pages, 2022)

 Recipient of the 2023 Albertine Translation Fund

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

If the earth can speak of the dead, the ocean simply engulfs them without leaving a trace. A century and a half after the passage of the last slave ship, the ship’s hold still haunts Fabienne Kanor, an award-winning writer and filmmaker born in France to Caribbean parents. Sailor’s logbooks, maps, and other written and physical traces documenting the history of slave ships and their human cargo only tell so much. In order to conceive what African captives endured in the womb of the slave ship, what remains is art: The imagination.

Traveling from Benin to the United States, from the French Caribbean Islands to France, Kanor delves into the written, visual and musical works of African and Afro-descendant artists who, like herself, have attempted to contend with the legacy of the Middle Passage: among them, Nina Simone’s 1976 Montreux impromptu dance performance; the docufiction of the Martinique filmmaker Guy Deslauriers; the reworking of the 1789 image of the slave ship Brookes by Yoruba artist Romuald Hazoumè, or Vessels, a seven-women ritual performance that explores singing as a survival tool in the terrifying confinement of a slave ship. With the specter of the hold as its starting point, Kanor examines the protective, emancipatory and curative powers of art. Faced with a memory deficit and the lack of existing records on the history of the slave trade as it was experienced by the captives, the artists she considers put the ship hold at the heart of their concerns and their artistic productions. Ghostly, fantastical or realistic, the hold is an important motif in their work, and a motor, ultimately, with which to transcend pain and to substitute more personal images for the visions fueled by collective memory.

In this powerful essay in the lineage, as the title indicates, of the great Edouard Glissant, Kanor brings her considerable talent as a writer to explain how these various artists have taken on the challenge to convert the enclosed, torturing, traumatic space of the slave ship’s hold into an energetic and fertile place where poetry, politics and poetic justice arise to instruct, alert and/or cure.  At once intimate yet far-reaching, Kanor launches into a brilliant reflection on the potential limits of art in the face of history, the process of mourning, and the duty of remembrance.

Fabienne Kanor currently teaches French and Francophone Literature and Cinema at Penn State University. An award-winning writer and filmmaker, she is the author of numerous works of fiction and drama, including the novel Faire l’aventure (JC Lattès, 2014), which received the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe du Tout-Monde for the best literary work in French or French Creole from the Caribbean and the Americas. Her other novels include D'eaux douces (Gallimard, 2004), Je ne suis pas un homme qui pleure (JC Lattès, 2016), and Louisiana (Rivages, 2020). Humus (Gallimard, 2006) was translated by the University of Virginia Press in 2020.