Oralituraines and Caribbean diasporic identities in Gisèle Pineau’s "L’Exil Selon Julia" and "L’Ame prêtée aux Oiseaux"

In her autobiographical novel L’Exil Selon Julia the Guadeloupean writer Gisèle Pineau links her grandmother Julia or Man Ya’s exile in the stark métropole with her own “exil par procuration”(a symbolic exile/by proxy) as a victim of extreme racism in her school in France during the sixties. In L’Ame prêtée aux Oiseaux Sibylle, a Guadeloupénne who is adopted first by Coraline in Guadeloupe and then (along with her son Marcello) by a seventy year-old Parisienne, Lila, in France, is caught up in the interstices of an identity crisis. The destinies of Julia and Gisèle are linked in an intergenerational solidarity as are those of Lila and Sybille in Oiseaux. The older “oralituraines” are what I call “poetic mothers” who seem to replace the biological mothers (incapable or unwilling to speak of the past or afford any emotional support to their daughters) and postcolonial “griottes, female storytellers who weave memory, history and positive lessons in their hybrid narratives and help heal the fractured diasporic identities. In the context of patriarchal and Afro-caribbean myths of "motherhood”, Pineau proposes new Caribbean female identities and family configurations: a mother/daughter dyad based on poetic rather than biological ties, substituting the "literary" mother for the "nurturing" one. Gisèle Pineau herself belongs to a lineage of postcolonial female Caribbean writers such as Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Paule Marshall in her practice of “scripted storytelling” recording various female occulted histories (in Oiseaux we hear Jenny, the Anglophone Caribbean slave, Guadeloupean Néhémie and Clothilde, the interpreters of dreams along with Lila the aging white actress), as the author engages with general theories of Créolité, feminism and and post-modernism to articulate what Adlai Murdoch would call a “a creolized, feminocentric post-colonial voice”.