I Am a Martinican Woman (French: Je suis Martiniquaise) is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Lucette Céranus (1916–1955), under the pseudonym Mayotte Capécia, in the mid-twentieth century.
[1] It tells the story of Mayotte's childhood and young adulthood, including her relationship with a white officer who ultimately abandons her in Martinique with their son.
When examined for Confirmation, Mayotte fails and is obliged to take classes with the village priest, a handsome white man with whom she falls in love.
Against the backdrop of her father's tumultuous relationship with her new stepmother, Mayotte explores love and sex with her boyfriend, Horace, a black man that she describes as "the most handsome specimen of what is considered Martinican."
She then goes back to describe her separation from Horace, which she explains by saying: "Memories of my father caused me to spurn what my heart craved - physical love."
For example, the depiction of nuclear family life in the novel is fictitious - Ceranus' parents were not married and her father did not acknowledge her or her twin sister until shortly before his death.
Additionally, she had three children whose fathers are unknown, and she left them behind in Martinique when she went to Paris, only coming back to fetch them after earning money through the publication of her novel.
Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley reports that: "In response to Lucette’s unanswered requests for child support, he sent her a small sum and, in 1944, a copy of the memoirs of his stay in Martinique.
[7] For Tinsley, the number of authors involved in creating the text is significant, because it undercuts the title's claim to be the words of a Martinican woman.
Fanon writes: "For me, all circumlocution is impossible: Je suis Martiniquaise is cut-rate merchandise, a sermon in praise of corruption."
Because of this, Fanon believes that Mayotte, like all Martinican women, is working deliberately for the dilution of the black race through sexual relations with white men.
[8] Gwen Bergner argues that Black Skin, White Masks only considers women in terms of their sexual relationships with men.
Thus, Bergner writes that Fanon "sees women’s economic and sexual choices as emanating from some psychic dimension of the erotic that is disconnected from material reality.
At the same time, she argues that Capécia intended the novel's politics to be retrogressive, in order to mirror the jolt experienced by Mayotte in the novel, as her mixed race status and sexual relationship with a white man, formerly indicators of a successful life, suddenly became liabilities in the changing atmosphere of the postwar era, amid the rising public commitment to Negritude.
[11] Maryse Condé claims that Capécia's work is invaluable from a feminist perspective, because it provides "a precious written testimony, the only one that we possess, of the mentality of a West Indian girl in those days.
[6] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues that the focus on race in traditional readings of Capécia's work has served to "obscure those aspects of the text that which place [her] at the forefront of the development of feminist literature in Guadalupe and Martinique.”[12] For Paravisni-Gebert, one such aspect is Capécia's expressed desire for economic independence, which manifests itself both in her running of a successful laundering business and her determination to only form romantic attachments with men who can support her.
[7] According to Tinsley, the homosexual desires latent in the text were disguised to make the novel more palatable, since Capécia needed the money to become reunited with her children.
[13] E. Anthony Hurley argues that the novel ultimately argues that "transcultural love is unsatisfying and unsatisfactory," because Mayotte's adolescent relationship with Horace, a black Martinican, is described in extremely positive terms, whereas the sexual aspects of her relationship with Andre are described in part as unsatisfactory and all her encounters with him end with a question.
[12] Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Kevin Meehan speculate that Lacrosil, in particular, deliberately mirrors the plot of I Am a Martinican Woman in her novel Sapotille and the Clay Canary, in order to respond to Fanon's critique by showing that there are no opportunities for Caribbean women in the thirties other than the life choices that bothered Fanon in Capécia's work.
[15] In Maryse Condé's novel Heremakhonon (1976), the protagonist, Veronica, thinks about the fact that she has never had a sexual relationship with a black man, but protests in her internal monologue that "[she is] no Mayotte Capécia.
"[16] On the other hand, Eileen Ketchum McEwan considers Veronica and Mayotte to be the same type of protagonist, because they are both engaged in a "narcissistic quest" to fall in love with men that reflect the self-image they would like to have of themselves.