Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture. Thank you so much for joining me on yet another Strictly Facts episode as we're exploring the many facets of Caribbean history, this time focusing on movements and activism, particularly in the French Caribbean and its diaspora. A critical aspect of our conversation today, much to the credit of my guest research, is the region's connection of Black activism across the world.

Speaker 1: 0:52

We've touched, you know, in past episodes on Pan-Africanist movements pertaining to you know, whether that's a civil rights movement or work of people from across the diaspora, in the UK specifically, and so I'm really excited, especially in today's episode, to be discussing the French Caribbean activism from people of the French Caribbean and also our connections across the Francophone Black world.

Speaker 1: 1:20

You know be that in France, but you know there are, of course, other places a part of that. So I think of, you know, french Guiana, of course, other places a part of that. So I think of French Guiana. In South America, countries like Senegal and Guinea in Africa, that are also part of that long legacy. And so joining me for this episode is Dr Senu Malira, a recent graduate of the African Diaspora History doctoral program at New York University, whose research looks at histories of feminism and anti-colonial activism in the Francophone Black Atlantic. So, sanyu, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. Let's begin with you telling us a bit about yourself, your connection to the region, of course, and what inspired your passion for studying Black Atlantic activism of the Francophone diaspora.

Speaker 2: 2:06

Thank you so much for having me. As you mentioned, I did recently graduate from New York University and I specifically chose that program because they had a specialization in the African diaspora and they had that separated out from African history and even African American history, and I always admired and loved the work of Michael Gomez, who was my advisor, who I read books and articles and things by him in college and undergrad and I wanted the freedom to look at the diaspora as a field and not have to be tied to national boundaries or continent or any of those typical ways of looking at histories, and also be able to look at people on the move and so folks who are also not tied to their land, but they carry their history and their perspectives and culture along with them and is shaped by their movement around the Atlantic. I don't actually have a direct connection to the Caribbean, interestingly, which a lot of people assume, especially since my mother's family name is a French name. So often people think that I'm from the French Caribbean, but I'm not. I'm just from California. But my mother's family is from the American South, mississippi in particular, and my father is an immigrant from East Africa, from Uganda, so I'm first generation on his side. He and my grandmother and other relatives came during the late 70s due to the Indian.

Speaker 2: 4:00

So in graduate school, my first round of graduate school, in my master's program, I realized that I didn't want to study an area or something that was very close to my own identity probably one of the only things I knew when I started graduate school and I didn't have a full-on reason why. But I wanted to really delve into somewhat unfamiliar territory in a sense. My mother is an African historian of West Africa, benin and Dahomey, and I always kind of liked Francophone things. I was interested in how French colonization created new cultures, creolized cultures, and for some reason I just got really into areas of the world that are not sovereign, and so it is very interesting and fun and somewhat seductive to look at successful liberation movements.

Speaker 2: 4:59

But there are so many places that were not successful or that even obtained some form of liberation, but the dream was never fulfilled, and so I got really into this idea of imagined alternatives, so how people imagine their future to be, and it doesn't work out that way, and I would say that Guadeloupe and Martinique are in some ways very extreme cases of that, because even becoming part of France was an imagined alternative that didn't work out, and so, then, trying to gain some sort of autonomy and or independence has never worked out either, but people still don't give up, which is always inspiring. Don't give up, which is always inspiring. So I got really deep into that, as I discovered the different waves of anti-colonial activity, or autonomy, or even women's movements, and how women deeply integrated what we would usually consider to be distinctly women's issues, but made them part of anti-colonial struggles, that women are fundamental to all sorts of liberation that you could ever imagine, and so we can't separate that out either.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I think that tremendously shapes our sort of understanding of the world, especially when we're thinking of the Caribbean. You know people often are like, oh okay, yeah, you know a lot of not, maybe not a lot, but there's obviously a decent portion of the region that is independent, that you know are and even within the last few years, right moving towards republic status for those who are of the, you know, former British colonies in particular. But I don't know how much we oftentimes sit with the fact of you know former British colonies in particular, but I don't know how much we oftentimes sit with the fact of you know the legacies of colonialism still being part of, like the actual governmental structures, right With places like Martinique and Guadeloupe being French departments. We've had episodes on Strictly Facts, also talking about the Dutch Caribbean in that situation as well, right, and then, of course, you know the US is also complicit via Puerto Rico, us Virgin Islands, etc. And Britain as well. So the stories in these histories are definitely multifaceted and still ongoing and I'm really glad to have you on this episode with us, just really helping to uncover pieces of our history in this way, right Beyond, I think, even the geographical situation that we've outlined in our conversation already.

Speaker 1: 7:36

There's through that, like early to mid 20th century period Right, when we think of, particularly for the Francophone world, that main piece is the negritude movement. Right, the ways in this period, primarily in the 1930s and 40s, of really developing out of that sort of Harlem Renaissance, of really developing out of that sort of Harlem Renaissance. And so I think, in some ways at least, how I felt like I was sort of like erroneously taught prior to college right is that Harlem Renaissance. What we did get briefly of it right was that massive droves of people, especially of course now I know you know people from across the African diaspora coming and situating in New York, writing, you know the cultural pieces and dynamics etc. And what I didn't learn until much after is the movement and travel piece that was also subsequently part of that Right, and so many of these writers and thinkers whose work are parts of the canon of that time Right, we're also traveling to France and networking with others there.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Right, and building what would then become the negritude movement and so definitely just wanted to situate that. So we have this understanding of Black diasporic creativity, thinking, intellectualism and activism in this early 20th century period, definitely helping to just galvanize the work that was being done. Of course, I think you know people, oftentimes, if they're aware of Negritude movement, they think of people like Amy Césaire, right from Martinique, who you know really becomes one of the staples of the movement. But there are so many others as we're going to point to definitely in a moment. But I don't know if you wanted to also speak to any other ways that you can sort of situate, whether that's the French Caribbean or just the Francophone world in general, how these territories, these colonies at the time, what they're really feeling and experiencing and how those people are uniting.

Speaker 2: 10:32

So throughout the 20th century, life was pretty stagnant for people in Guadalupe and Martinique, and so there were still agricultural economies where the descendants of slave owners, who are called beckys on the islands, had control over the economy. They were the primary landowners, business owners, they were involved in banks, all sorts of things, and so around the century after the abolition of slavery, the economy pretty much stayed the same, and many people lived in similar situations as they have during slavery, even to the extent of living on these plantations and paying rent, and so it could be seen as similar to like the sharecropping system also, which my family was part of, where you rent your home from the person who owns the land, so you're always in debt to them in some way, no matter how much you work. There was very little electricity. There's very little clean water, there weren't many schools, definitely not cars like someone having a car was a very big deal until the era of departmentalization and so you still had an ever so slightly growing small black and mixed race upper class who could be educated. They could be merchants, there were a few, you know, skilled workers, but, as I said, that class grew very slowly. They were also people who were known to kind of vacation in Paris and France, and so they were the only people who truly have access to the outside physically as well. But if people lived outside of the main cities of Santa Rita or Forte, france, they pretty much lived very rural lives, and so it's no surprise that people that we know of this era came from this upper middle class or upper class small group on these islands. Césaire, interestingly, was someone who kind of individually inserted himself into that world, but that's why they're also books and movies Le Rue Cass are well known, because it was rare for someone to push through from what they called as shanty towns then or rural areas, into an educated environment or into these schools, and so people like the Nardoles or Jérathia Chimède came from successful families.

Speaker 2: 13:22

So the Nardoles were some of the most educated people on the island of Martinique. Their father was an engineer and he was the first Black engineer on their island, gerald Yashimed. There's kind of like a myth of how her family became wealthy that some ancestor found a pot of money on land somewhere but her family owned bakeries. They were merchants, but her father was, his name was Saint Croix, he was a politician in a small rural area called Monalot, and he was the mayor of this town and he was a very staunch socialist as well, and so he believed that the upper class must be, or those who have financial means must be, in service, and it's their duty to be of service to others and to also widen availability of education, medical resources and help people not succumb to preventable diseases, and so her father was the mayor of this area from 1910 to 1946.

Speaker 2: 14:35

The Nardoles came from a more conservative and less politically charged environment.

Speaker 2: 14:40

They're very well educated and they believe that they had a duty to their communities, but this came from mostly a religious place. Even though the Archimedes were Catholic as well, I would say that their motivations were mostly political rather than coming from Christian values. But these were the environments on the islands, and so even to have people have access to ending up in Paris, whether they came for means or not, was a more of a rare experience than I think the negritude movement has us believe, and that's why the negritude movement was such a big deal is because you had people from all over the empire finally meeting each other. There wouldn't have been another situation unless someone became a colonial administrator from the Caribbean, where they would have contact with people from Dahomey or Senegal or any other part of the empire really, and so you really had people meeting the rest of the empire for the first time. But I think we take for granted that they were in that cosmopolitan environment and it makes it seem like it was more common than it was for them to be there.

Speaker 1: 16:03

That's a great point that I think you raise, even in sometimes how, like you know, sort of analogously, the Harlem Renaissance gets pointed right it. It appears as if it was this massive, you know, grouping of individuals and not taking away from their influence and impact in terms of culture and writing and scholarship, right, but I think, comparatively to the population in itself, right, it was definitely a smaller sector of the population. So thank you so much for raising that point. You got to my follow-up question a bit as you were talking about the Nadal sisters. For instance, um Césaire is definitely one of, as I said, those pinnacle figures in terms of thinking about the negritude movement, but there are so many others, right, and so, as a fellow women's historian yourself, what, um, in your view, are some of the historiographical challenges we can make about the movement when we consider, you know, some of the other figures who we're going to get to in a moment.

Speaker 2: 17:13

So what my goal is, with my focus on the Nardole sisters, is to kind of change the genealogy of the Negritude movement. There's another scholar who has centralized them, but their argument is not that they were the first to grapple with ideas of belonging, not belonging. How you could be Black and French and ostensibly also a woman, wondering if those facets of your identity are in conflict with each other or if they can coexist peacefully. Because a lot of times and one of the difficulties of teaching the Negritude movement I've even had this semester is highlighting that it was not an independence movement, it was not an outright denunciation of colonialism or of France engaging as they saw engaging with the rest of the world, but they wanted there to be equal appreciation for cultures, but they very much believed that it would be ideal to have these cultures in contact and to have them mixing together, them mixing together. And so the Nardole sisters and other women who, some of them it's even difficult to even try to recuperate their voices were thinking about how these facets of one's identity can coexist and not be in conflict, because they saw colonialism as it stood as forcing them to be in conflict, conflict that you must have a hierarchy and they wanted to take down that hierarchy, but they weren't telling France to, you know, hit the road by any means at all. Um, and so the Nardoles very much believed in a colonial project that they thought could be a better blending and mutual appreciation rather than, like I said, a hierarchy that is based in racism, obviously. And so sometimes it's that political outcomes that the members of the negritude movement presided over can sometimes seem a bit underwhelming because of the intense energy that they had during the movement. But when you really think about what their goals were, they don't seem in contradiction with their ideology. And for one example would be departmentalization, which the Nardal sisters were very much in agreement with and Aimé Césaire was very much involved with. It was very much an idealistic move on the part of those in the overseas colonies as they were then to become departments, and they thought that this could end up being, you know, tear down that hierarchy and allow for collaboration.

Speaker 2: 20:30

But going back to the importance of these women in the negritude movement, I read some of their early publications from the late 1920s. So black internationalism from 1928 that jane nardole published. She also published exotic puppets in that same year and these roll in the bishop. Again. Paulette nardole published a short story called On Exile and she also has this really great piece that highlights the interaction between members of the Harlem Renaissance and those of the Negritude movement, which is kind of a profile on the sculptor Augusta Savage, who studied a lot and visited Paris a lot in 1930. Lot and visited Paris a lot in 1930.

Speaker 2: 21:21

But it wasn't really an accident that they had access to members of the Harlem Renaissance, because their cousin taught at Howard University in the French department and he knew Alain Locke and so when people would go to Paris they had the Nardole sisters to welcome them, to invite them to their salon that they began hosting in 1929. So they had a direct link to the US and the intellectual sphere which Howard at that time especially was the mecca of Black intellectualism in the 20s and 30s and 40s. So they were truly a conduit for this global interaction. But I think ideologically their proclamations weren't as pronounced or intense as the men's were later. They truly were working through these issues first.

Speaker 2: 22:13

And so in the historiography of the Negritude movement people have really seen Le Tuguel Noir as the beginning text of the movement, which was published in 1935, because it was a single issue but the first journal that was produced out of the collaboration of Damas Cizel and Senghor Césaire-Alié Senghor, but it's not as groundbreaking as many people would say. I believe that you know the articles, like Black Internationalism, like I mentioned, awakening of Race Consciousness, exotic Puppets are much stronger Negritudist pieces than what appears in Le Tudia en Noir later in 1935.

Speaker 1: 23:00

I definitely have been meaning to have a negritude, just movement episode in itself, and so that is definitely one to come. But I think your point in terms of even the Nadarl sisters' connections to Howard, to Paris right, highlights this overarching point and you know, presence, even till this day, of migration and movement in terms of the region right and also the global Black diaspora, it's something that is very much so a part of our lives. Whether we identify singularly by our island territory etc. You're always going to have these connections across the world and they really shape and focus and help to sort of make us even understand the region, the diaspora, beyond our own sort of geographic measures and lines.

Speaker 2: 23:53

And interestingly, the journal Le Dépêche Africain, where these early articles were published, apparently it was the headquarters were in the same building as the Paris chapter of the UNIA, and so the French government felt that this was a conspiracy and they wanted to stop publication for a while. But because of that proximity, paulette Nardole was able to even meet Marcus Garvey in like the one trip he ever made to Paris. So these communities are very small, and when people travel to Paris, paris, the folks who they're told to meet are going to be these same people, and so that small community allows for so much cross-fertilization.

Speaker 1: 24:48

You highlighted, of course, a bit already about the Nadarl sisters, of which there are seven of, by the way I don't know if our listeners have gotten to understand that yet in this episode. So seven sisters of one family who are all in their own, you know, individual facets really tremendously contribute to the culture within Martinique and you know, of course, the Francophone diaspora, so they're from Martinique. You also mentioned Gertie Archimede, from Guadeloupe, and so could you, you know, again, and maybe even beyond what was mentioned earlier, share a bit about these women and their contributions to the sort of global history that we're painting in our episode.

Speaker 2: 25:32

So Paulette Nardole is the oldest of the seven sisters. So Paulette Nardole is the oldest of the seven sisters, and their father had no sons, and so he raised his daughters in a way that he would say would be analogous to raising sons, and so she was the first Black French woman to go to the Sorbonne. There had been only African-American women, oddly, at the Sorbonne before that. So she was the first Black French woman to go, and then her sisters were subsequently, say, like the second and third, the most famous, I would say, black French woman in France. In the last, say, 20 years, her legacy has gained a lot of traction. Uh, rightfully so, I believe, because when I first started traveling to Paris over 10 years ago by myself, I went, you know, as a teenager, but going by myself, with an interest of research. It's been a long time now, but, um, she wasn't as well known. Now there's, you know, the home that they lived in and had. The salon is a place that people frequent to look at. There's a little green square devoted to them. They've gotten a lot of visibility because before that, I think for decades, josephine Baker was probably the most famous Black woman in France, and she's American. So, you know, it felt a little odd that there are Black French women who could also have this visibility. Not any shade to Josephine Baker, of course, but that always felt uncomfortable in some ways.

Speaker 2: 27:13

But she is also a symbol of what you could call like French multiculturalism, because she is proudly Black and proudly French and, like I mentioned, she was somebody who really tried to promote people seeing those two as working together in someone's identity and not being in conflict. But she's also someone who was in many ways a conservative, in ways that benefit how we look at the history between the islands and France, and so she didn't believe in independence, she was anti-communist. There were certain ideas about secularism that she did not like at all as a Catholic, and so seeing her as someone who was so progressive in how she viewed the role of women, sometimes it can be a little contradictory, but that's who she was. She was a conservative woman at the end of the day, but interestingly she did advocate for decolonization in Africa, and most visibly that began with her opposition. And she traveled around Europe talking about the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia in 1935-36. And she wrote a piece which for some reason the title is escaping me and I'm sure I'll remember at the end of this um, but it was in a journal called Le Periscope Africain and it's interesting because she kind of does a dance of not fully denouncing colonization in general but denouncing this iteration of it, saying that it's not true colonialism because of its violence and because it's not a situation where Italy wants to bring any what she viewed which I would argue with, but what she viewed as positive elements of their culture to Ethiopians that it was purely about domination and that if Ethiopia is doing fine, that they are happy with Haile Selassie as a leader, then we should be on their side and oppose the Italian invasion.

Speaker 2: 29:30

But a few years later, or about 10 years later, maybe not a few she was a supporter of departmentalization and she even years later would say that she found the fight for independence or autonomy stupid, that Martinique and Guadeloupe were essentially created by France and so it would be very difficult to see them independently or view them as having any ability to stand alone. But on the island, when she returned to Martinique because of a shipwreck in 1939, at the beginning of World War II, she never went back to France actually after 1939, because it would be too difficult for her to do that long travel and get around. But she founded a women's organization, le Rassemblement Féminin, in 1944 in Martinique, which also had a corresponding journal, le Femme d'Honestité, which was published for about six years, and I liken the Résumé des Mères Féminines to kind of like the club women movement in America. So they kind of had an ethos of lifting as we climb or racial uplift. So they were progressive in the sense of, but they believed that in being of aid to working-class, vulnerable women, women in poverty, that they should be raising their status to liken their own, that somehow they had reached the place where all women should want to be, and so if we're going to help them we have to help them be like us, and so that takes out much needed element of collaboration between the community and those who are trying to help the community. It becomes more of a prescriptive version of activism and not a collaborative version.

Speaker 2: 31:39

La Femme dans la Cite is also interesting too because it's very clearly written for an audience of educated and upper-class women. It can be very intense sometimes because of her disappointment in their apathy, which is of course a big issue too. And women gained the right to vote in 1944, but still many women in Martinique who were literate and able to vote just didn't care, and so she's very serious with them about doing that, that they need to vote, that they need to be engaged in their communities outside of simply charity once or twice a year. But the journal also doesn't cover a lot of international events either, which I realized. They don't really cover much of what's going on in Africa. Sometimes you'll get tidbits of the other Caribbean islands, but it's pretty much focused on Martinique, parts of Europe and possibly the US.

Speaker 2: 32:41

So Gertiachy Med is from Guadeloupe and she, as I mentioned before, was the daughter of a mayor, came from a merchant, well-to-do family. She and her sisters were very well educated. She went to college, university. She is also a woman of firsts amongst Black women. She was the first woman to pass the bar and practice law in Guadalupe, which she did in 1939. The first woman to be elected to serve a full term in the National Assembly from 1946 to 51. Before that had been Eugenia Bouy, who had finished out a term of her husband who passed away before he could finish it. So she wasn't elected to a full term in the assembly but she was the first Black woman to be on it at all.

Speaker 2: 33:41

And Geltie also was a mayor of Bastow. She had many different city council positions and was one of the first women to do many of those different things. But she's often cited as being involved in authoring the law of departmentalization, which she very quickly would distance herself from in the few interviews that I've read with her because of the immediate failure, she would say, of departmentalization, and it also was written very early in her political career. So she was more of, she would say, a bystander than being completely involved was in serving as counsel for a case that's called the 16 of Basque Front, which were 16 agricultural workers who were accused of murdering a plantation overseer in 1948, guy de Fabrique, and there were some people on the plantation who had been working, who had been, you know, getting money for the plantation, and they were being evicted from their housing there and there was a big scuffle about it. Everyone was upset and within 36 hours the person who was overseeing this eviction was found hacked to death. Eviction was found hacked to death and so the 16 men who were involved with the plantation were accused of being involved in this murder or helping cover it up, and Jalti Ashived was in the group of lawyers who had them exonerated for it. Interestingly, people of that community knew who did it and knew that the people who did it were in that 16. But they wouldn't say who they were, because they felt that it was a sense of justice that the way that people had been treated the majority of people in Guadalupe and in Martinique worked in these agricultural situations and were vulnerable to the whims of the owners and the overseers and they felt that it was justice and it made a statement that they could not be taken advantage of so easily. So with that case she really gained, as I mentioned, the trust of her community which then influenced her going on to be in the National Assembly.

Speaker 2: 36:21

And so I'll just say a little, just very briefly, a little bit, about what departmentalization was, why people wanted it. So it was voted on in 1946, and then implemented in January of 1947. And so people wanted to become a department which is analogous to a state in America, because they wanted access to the French economic system Welfare benefits, retirement, minimum wage, hopefully increased infrastructure, medical schools could be built, all of these things that just sound wonderful, that should be included in becoming a full French citizen. But in December 1946, the central government decided on their own, without any input of anybody else, that most of the statutes that should be automatically given would have to be negotiated and voted on separately, and this is after everyone had signed off, and so there was nothing that could be done. And so, when Zsao-Tia-Shi-Med was in the National Assembly, she was one of the people who had to fight and justify for the implementation of all of these rights. She was not a delicate flower in any way. I read through you know what they would call like the minutes of their sessions, and she let them know every time that you know we shouldn't even have to be arguing over this, but we are because you chose to have us in this position. So here we go. She did make some advancements in terms of getting people's school funds, because at that time, to just tell rural people living in poverty that now your children will have a school, they needed pencils, they needed clothing, they needed shoes, and so they would get these school funds to help offset the costs of sending their children to school. She helped increase minimum wage, secure retirement benefits, medical coverage, but she was not successful in any way of getting these benefits to mirror what anybody received in Europe as a Pan-Africanist, which is often overlooked as a little kind of moment in her life.

Speaker 2: 38:49

In the early 1950s she had a romantic relationship with another deputy in the National Assembly who would go on to become the colonial government in the Ivory Coast.

Speaker 2: 39:11

Had charged leaders of the Résemblément démocratique africain, known as the RDA, with running a parallel government, was pleading with people to help, because folks were just, you know, their homes were being raided, they were being swept away into prisons, not knowing why when they would get out, and so after her term ended in 1951, gilles Thiers-Chimède went and spent about a little over a year in the Ivory Coast defending these anti-colonial activists, and actually Boynier proposed marriage to her and she turned him down because she said she didn't want to just be a first lady and she wanted to return to her island and be of service to her people, and so if she was obviously going to be the first lady of the Ivory Coast, that would effectively end the sort of career that she had seen for herself.

Speaker 2: 40:14

And she was a very staunch communist.

Speaker 2: 40:17

She helped create in 1948 a faction of the Union de Femmes Francaises in Guadeloupe, but the organization counts 1958 as their actual birth and that is the year that they severed ties with the European Union des Femmes Francaises and they wrote a letter stating that the material and moral conditions of Black women in Guadeloupe differ so greatly from women in Europe and France that there's no need for them to have this you know tie, that they need to continue on as an autonomous organization called the Union des Femmes Guadeloupiennes, and the first presidents were Huguette Danine and Georges Terrer, who worked with Gertie Archimède and along with Gertie as a real politician.

Speaker 2: 41:14

The women in the organization were all very well-established in their careers, so either as social workers, as nurses, midwives, but they were also some of the only women who were in the autonomous movement in the 1950s and 60s. So they participated in a lot of the conferences, rallies, you know, attempting to draft statements, those sorts of things. So the UFG, as they're called, were very influential and they're known for bringing the viewpoint of Black women into these political spaces.

Speaker 1: 41:56

Thank you so much for sharing these stories, particularly because I think, on one hand just based off, you know, linguistic barriers and things to that nature, right, we all have our own sort of pockets of awareness, in a sense, and we're not always as cross-regionally or intra-regionally aware. In a sense, and especially as a fellow women's historian, I'm always so interested to learn about women's histories on other islands and territories. But I think another point that, um, you were bringing up as you know you shared these stories with us is the fact that, while they definitely by they I mean that our sisters, um and sherti, are shamed, they definitely have similar upbringings, right, but definitely take different paths or have definitive, you know, perspectives in terms of race and class and departmentalism, as you know, right. And so, in your mind, despite these very similar upbringings, what do you think that their differences highlight about? You know, the diversity of French Caribbean womanhood at the time and just the different, differing landscapes that we may not always consider in terms of activism and Black women's history.

Speaker 2: 43:20

It's interesting because Gilles T Alchimed and the Nardole sisters are very much from the same generation, but the Nardole sisters seem to live much more in an insular environment, and so there would have been no way to be totally ignorant of their privilege compared to the rest of Martinique or, in Gertie's case, of Guadeloupe. But the way that they saw their role in remedying these issues, or even not to be negative on the Nardole sisters, of course, because I love them a but what the role is of the poor in their own poverty in some ways, and so in the way that I was comparing the Réserve des Morts Féminines to, say, the club women's movement, there still was that element of thinking that there are choices that people can make to change their material situations where, yes, but when you're living under colonialism, you can't completely make all the right choices out of that extreme poverty, because that extreme poverty is a function of your society, that it needs to have people living in those situations, and so simply learning to emulate the upper class is never going to remedy that. And so I do fault them in the sense that they very much believe that there were certain choices that could be made that could change some people's material situations. There are even articles in Les Femmes de la Cité that talks about how they should help train poor women to become maids, that that would be an ideal way for them to enter the work environment.

Speaker 2: 45:27

Whereas the Union des Femmes Guadeloupiennes and there was also a Union des Femmes de la Martinique in Martinique that I often, in my work, compare to the Réseau Véminin, but as communist movements they were very much dedicated to grassroots organizing and their first step was always to ask people what they needed. It wasn't to tell them what we think you need and then maybe, if that's wrong, then you'll correct us. The first step was always to start with what do you need us? The first step was always to start with what do you need? What is the primary issue that you see, or impediment to any sort of comfortability in your life? And they would work very hard to fill those holes, and so their approach was to be informed rather than guessing, and I think that the Nardole sisters came from that sort of privileged era of a lot of that guessing took place, and I would argue that's also why the Union de Femmes de la Martinique and the faction in Guadeloupe still exist today, because they were rooted in grassroots organizing literally going door to door, caravanning out to rural areas that most people wouldn't think of, but knowing that those were areas that needed them the most. Going and talking with women, letting them know you have the ability to vote. Would you be able to read the ballot? Do we need to then help people understand what would be on the ballot?

Speaker 2: 47:09

They did a lot of those sorts of things, and so Jati was very much dedicated to that grassroots sort of activism and I do think that it comes with also their dedication to communism, although that dedication to communism caused some problems for them during the Cold War era, especially for Jati, because you had a lot of younger organizations that began in the 1960s in both Martinique and Guadalupe, and I would say the repression of them is a period of history that I'm very much interested in now.

Speaker 2: 47:51

And the group in Guadeloupe-Gang, group d'Organisation Nationale de la Guadeloupe their leader was murdered during a protest in the middle of the day in May 1967. And the French government blamed Gerti Arshined. And they said verbatim in a telegram that is one of the few things that has been uncensored since then that these young people are seduced by people like Sekou Touré, fidel Castro and Gerti Arshined which it's interesting for her to be in that line of political leaders but that not only do we have to stop them from being able to reach the youth as easily, but we have to just effectively neutralize this organization, because at that time, in 1967, the French had just lost Algeria, they had just lost pretty much all of their colonies and there was no way that they were going to let go of these departments at that time.

Speaker 1: 49:01

I definitely have one question subsequently to your point there, but I think I'd be remiss, given you know the different ways you've outlined these women's stories as being very critical to the region, to the Francophone diaspora, and the ways that they've been memorialized through monuments, through, you know, squares and things being named after them. What are some of your favorite examples of how they've subsequently shown up in our popular culture today?

Speaker 2: 49:34

so when I was doing my dissertation research, I found one thing that I find kind of cute, um, uh, is the dedication to infusing people like Paulette Nardole and Jyoti Ashimed into elementary education in the islands, so that children are growing up knowing their names and they don't have the experience of you know earlier generations where they think how did I not know about this person, how did I not know all the things that they did there? There's even a school named after Zsaat Yashmed, and so I like that there have been efforts to make young people aware of these icons in their history because, as we know, in the US that obviously has a power to it, and there's a reason why so many school districts in America don't want young children to learn about these icons that look like them, because if it didn't give them strength and power, I don't think anyone would have a problem with them learning about them. Another way is one of pretty much the only text biography of Gerard Thierschmed was written by her kind of comrade, huguette Danine, who was the first president of the Union de Femmes de la Guadeloupe, so obviously they had a close relationship. But Huguette Danine is most well known by her pen name, so she was a social worker by trade, but she's also a novelist under the name um lucy julia. So she wrote a short and accessible because I assume she probably wanted younger people to be able to read it as well but accessible and very heartfelt biography of Gertie Alchimed. But it's still pretty much the only text that exists about her life beyond a published set of interviews that were published in the late 1970s right before her very abrupt passing in 1980.

Speaker 2: 51:51

But I kind of liken Lucy Julia and her texts about kind of quotidian life in rural Guadeloupe, because she's actually from the same hometown as Gertie as well, mon Allo, which is not, you know, a vacation destination on the island that her novels are trying to get at, what some, you know, male scholars of the Caribbean have seen as authentic, even though she's not necessarily invested in, say, like the Criolite movement that's trying to get at the true experience, creolization and inter-Caribbean movement and what life is like sort of on an everyday basis in books that Maurice Condé has written, like Crossing the Mangrove, that are more zoomed into life in the Caribbean, because a lot of her books are kind of these grand stories of people moving around, which is obviously what I love, which brought me to Maurice Condé, as people from Africa, from the Caribbean, going all around the world, but Crossing the Mangrove really zooms into the Caribbean and looks at how culture functions on an everyday level.

Speaker 2: 53:36

Sometimes culture that we can, which I would say movements like Riolite, kind of idealized and in some ways, as Conde say, over theorized. Uh, but we can get, I think, nice peeks into that life in the books of people like lucie julian, marie scondé definitely, thank you.

Speaker 1: 54:01

I think is, for one, really also helping to situate marie scondé in this story of, of, of course, french Caribbean womanhood, right, I think we've talked about her briefly on past episodes, but really also with her recent passing in early April, wanting to also showcase that she's another such person who's highlighted both as you've, you know, pointed out this creolization in literature which you know, if our listeners are unfamiliar. That's the sort of theory or um the, the process by which people were either writing books or just in general, um bringing different elements of cultures together and blending them together.

Speaker 2: 54:42

So, thinking through some of her work that has highlighted, you know, movements and migrations, but also, as you said, the work that has been done, really situating life and experiences in Guadeloupe, in Martinique, in particular, Also, when I was doing my dissertation research, I listened to a lot of recorded interviews in the Marie Scandé collection at Columbia, and an interesting thing that most people don't know about her is that she was a proud dues-paying card-carrying member of the autonomous movement and political parties in Guadeloupe movement and political parties in Guadeloupe. And so, although she also came from a privileged background and grew up similar to even though in a different generation Gertie Achimette and the Nardole sisters, her life experiences brought her to the point of believing that Guadeloupians deserved much more say in their government, their economy and their society.

Speaker 1: 55:53

I will close us off, I think, with a final question, just in general, about partially specific to these women's stories, but more in general, I think you know, first and foremost, as you point to, there definitely deserves greater recognition and it helps to shape our understandings of movements, of histories and of activism when we consider other people's perspectives who have traditionally been left out of certain narratives. But in addition to that, what do you think these women's stories highlight and teach us about Caribbean-ness, right, about Black womanhood in the 20th century and even all the isms that we've talked about right, colonialism, racism, sexism, and what lessons should we take away from, of course, their own very complicated characteristics and personalities?

Speaker 2: 56:51

I'll start with. What I take from their characteristics and personalities is that making fundamental changes is a long-term game and investment. And I think, especially right now in our American society we're really tired with certain institutions. But I worry that we want the changes to be easily pinpointed and say, well, if we do this, then we can get this result. But truly making these changes require failure, they require trial and error and they also require you to not give up. Because, goodness, if Martinicans and Guadalupeans have not given up since the 1600s when the first people were brought there in chains from West Africa, and they still do not have independence, they still do not have autonomy. But in those fights for those end goals, they have still made many changes that have benefited women, children and just their societies benefited women, children and just their societies positively. They are able to see those wins along the way, even though that larger end goal hasn't been achieved yet. Even last year the flags were changed. So now if you go into your emojis in your iPhone and you type in Martinique, the flag that comes up is their independence flag, which has the Pan-African colors on it. It's no longer the flag that is reminiscent of the French arriving in the 1600s. So those are changes along the way, even if that large goal hasn't been achieved.

Speaker 2: 58:49

One thing that is difficult, though, as being a historian of these areas, is to kind of pull them out of the shadow of departmentalization, because a lot of people kind of just think of them as oh well, they're French, so they're not the real Caribbean. They are the real Caribbean, very much so, very much so, and in all the wonderful ways that you want them to be the Caribbean. So I think, as scholars of those areas, we have to keep pushing them out of that shadow and kind of demanding that they be seen as part of the African diaspora rightly, and seen as places that have their own unique histories. They're not defined by France, and not only that, they fought that political definition by France tirelessly, and so it's really doing an injustice to them and their history to not see them that way and in that shadow of departmentalization.

Speaker 2: 59:58

I have not found a single text that's not kind of trapped in the era of slavery, that looks at women in these islands, and so you'll have a lot of literary sources, because literature, in the tradition of Edouard Grisson, has been the way that people who have been told they have no history, have emoted their history, and so literature is very, very large. But I do think, in addition to that literature, they do deserve histories to be written and to be documented for reference. And once you have that, it can be built upon. And so I see my role as planting them in the Caribbean, in the diaspora, outside of the shadow of departmentalization. But I'm doing that through the stories of women primarily.

Speaker 1: 1:00:58

I think that's a perfect point to end on. Thank you certainly for the work you're doing and thank you, of course, for sharing with me and our Strictly Facts family in terms of this, definitely you know necessary history and perspective that we all should really be aware of, especially when we point to the commonalities amongst ourselves, within the region and across the African diaspora. And so, again, thank you so much, senu, for joining me. I know we talked about a lot of text and articles and things in our episode today everyone, so I'll be sure to link as many of them as I can find, especially on our Strictly Facts syllabus, for you all to check out for further reading and until next time, look for more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit strictlyfactspodcastcom for more information from each episode. Follow us at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.