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SUMMER 2005
In Black & White
by Kathleen Cason

Ourika’s story began in Africa in 1788. A two-year-old orphan, she probably had been imprisoned in a special children’s cell on Senegal’s Gorée Island for months. On this day Ourika would have emerged from a dark cell and passed through the “door of no return” into blinding tropical sun that seared her eyes.

Waves would have slapped the hull of a docked frigate as the ship was readied to stow human cargo. A rhythmic ka-chink ka-chink echoed off the walls of the House of Slaves at the sea’s edge as African men, women and children shuffled single-file down the palm-wood wharf toward the ship, their arms, legs and necks shackled and chained. This cargo — a fraction of the millions of African people shipped to the New World as slaves during a 350-year period — was likely meant for a Caribbean sugar plantation. Ourika began to sob, and that act changed her life.

Senegal’s French governor noticed the weeping child and pitied her. He decided that she would be a nice gift for his aunt back home in France. (He also bought a parakeet for the queen; and a horse, sultan hen and ostrich for other aristocrats.) The aunt raised the girl like her own daughter, with the same education and privileges as any upper-class young Frenchwoman around the time of the French Revolution.

Ourika’s life captured the imagination of 19th-century French author Claire de Duras, who recast the story in a novel. The fictional Ourika enjoyed every advantage of aristocratic French life — painting, dance lessons, fancy dresses and parties. But one day she overheard a marquise tell her benefactress that marriage would be unthinkable for Ourika because no man would want black children. From that moment, she realized the falseness of her life and wondered whether she might have been better off as a slave.

Ourika was a bestseller in 1823, and it inspired plays, poems and other books about the African girl. The story also sparked discussions in Parisian parlors because it exposed the aristocracy’s deep-seated racial prejudice at a time when France viewed itself as the world leader in freedom and equality.

In the 1970s, the story influenced British author John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. By the 1990s, it was among the works that caused Doris Kadish, professor of French and women’s studies at the University of Georgia, to embark on a study of writings by 19th- century French women that dealt with race and slavery.

Revolution and Abolition
Through years of studying and teaching French literature, Kadish became drawn to works by women, like Claire de Duras, who wrote in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This period in French history was marked by political upheaval — the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy. The period also was marked by social upheaval, when the ideals of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” clashed with the savage treatment of slaves in France’s Caribbean colonies.

Novels such as Ourika provided insight into the social attitudes and political alliances of the time, Kadish said. Moreover, Duras’ book described, for the first time in the French language, the effects of colonialism, racism and slavery from a black person’s perspective.

“Ourika was a radical work that uncovered the foundations of the racist prejudices of the aristocracy,” wrote Françoise Massardier-Kenney, a professor of French at Kent State University, in the book Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823, which she co-edited with Kadish.

The story of slavery in the French colonies is vastly different from the one people know in the United States, Kadish said. “Americans see slavery as our thing, but it wasn’t just our thing.” Only six percent of the slaves taken from Africa landed in the United States; two-fifths ended up in the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Domingue (Haiti), largely to provide labor for sugar plantations.

“Slavery was particularly brutal in the French colonies,” she said. “Sugar is a horrible, punishing product to grow. The plants are huge and they’re rat-infested and it’s grueling work.”

But sugar made France rich.

Sugar production on Guadeloupe was so valuable that France relinquished all of New France (Canada) at the 1763 Treaty of Paris in exchange for keeping ownership of that single island. By the year of the French Revolution, “Saint-Domingue was arguably the most profitable colony of the Western world, with world production records for both sugar and coffee,” wrote anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in the NACLA Report on the Americas (Jan/Feb 1994). “It was also the worst place in the world to be black.”

Reports of inhumane conditions and cruelties under slavery kindled the abolitionist ideas that flourished in French literature at the end of the 18th century. “Leading up to the French Revolution of 1789, talk of freedom was widespread,” Kadish said. “Abolitionism flourished for a while, with well-intentioned people promoting every kind of freedom.” These ideas caught fire in the colonies, where slaves tried to seize freedom for themselves. During the ups and downs of French politics over the next few decades — slaves revolted in the colonies, the French Assembly outlawed slavery, then Napoleon restored it, and finally Haiti gained independence — abolitionist sentiments were censored.

When Napoleon’s government was replaced by a new monarchy, former planters and colonists viewed the change in power as another opportunity to reinvade Haiti and reclaim their property. “That brought the abolitionists back to the surface,” Kadish said.

Other events contributed to renewed efforts to free slaves. The 1815 Congress of Vienna condemned slavery, although with little immediate effect. A year later, when the French frigate Medusa ran aground off the West African coast en route to Senegal, the captain saved himself and privileged passengers but left 150 people, most of whom were soldiers, adrift on a hastily constructed raft. The incident outraged French society, especially when the Paris Salon of 1819 featured Géricault’s 16-by-23-foot painting The Raft of the Medusa, which portrayed the tragic shipwreck. (See page 22).

“Starting in the early 1820s, a flood of literature — poems, plays, novels, essays, newspaper writings — just hundreds of pieces were written about blacks,” Kadish said. “Some are well-known, such as Bug Jargal by Victor Hugo.”

This new wave of French abolitionist literature included many works by women. Unlike American and English women, Kadish said, French women enjoyed influence in the public sphere — but only regarding certain topics. “Anything that had to do with women, children and the plight of the poor and the needy was an appropriate subject for women.” Abolition was considered to be such a subject.

Widening the Canon
Kadish’s academic career began with a dissertation on the French New Novelist Claude Simon, who later won the Nobel Prize in literature, mainly because his work — in contrast to that of most New Novelists — dealt with social issues. That appealed to Kadish.

“In absolutely everything I’ve ever published is that element of social change and social justice,” Kadish said. “That has been with me my whole life.”

Kadish’s mother, born in Savannah, Ga., in 1908, was herself a socially conscious person who despised racism. At age 19 and fresh out of high school, she hopped a bus to New York City, where she would meet and marry Kadish’s father. His family had emigrated from Russia after losing the family-owned bookbindery, and everything else, during the Russian Revolution. He held to the belief that all cultured people should learn French.

Discussions of the day’s public issues were common fare at dinnertime. Her parents, while sympathetic to human rights and social causes, were fatalistic — skeptical that change was possible. Kadish, however, argued for and believed in social change. As a student during the 1960s, she didn’t take to the streets but quietly contributed to social causes through scholarship.

When she arrived at UGA in 1993 to head the Romance Language Department, Kadish already had a keen interest in the issue of slavery and abolitionism in French literature. She had studied and admired a seminal work by Léon-François Hoffmann, a professor of French at Princeton University, but realized that he and most other scholars seemed to overlook writings by women.

They overlooked something else as well. “Hoffman’s book had made a considerable impact, but it did not force the study of francophone slavery to the center of attention. It remained essentially marginal,” said Roger Little, professor emeritus and former chair of French at Trinity College, Dublin.

But that started to change after publication of Kadish’s and Massardier- Kenney’s Translating Slavery. This well-received and much-discussed book examined writings on race and gender by three French women. In addition, it analyzed how their works were translated and the factors that influenced translation.

“The translator’s job is to get out of the way and let the original voice speak,” Little said. But Kadish and the book’s other contributors discovered that when it comes to charged subjects like race and slavery, translators do not get out of the way. Many factors — racial background, gender, ideology, culture — affect the translation. “A word that might be offensive to use now might not be offensive at all at the time and might actually be used by people who were abolitionists,” Massardier-Kenney said. “You have to study how those words would be used in English not only now but at the time when the story takes place.”

One example is the word black. “That word is loaded,” Kadish said. “In French, noir was used by abolitionists; nègre was used by others, but it has negative connotations.” The translation must reflect this.

Following the success of Translating Slavery, Kadish hosted international conferences at UGA. “Doris has been a pioneer in this whole area,” said Deborah Jenson, associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In 1997, when she put on two simultaneous symposia at the University of Georgia — the 19th-Century French Studies conference and the Slavery in the Francophone World conference — that was the first time that 19th-century French scholars had been organized around issues of slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism.”

One of the conferences’ highlights was the first English-language production of Caribbean-born Maryse Condé’s play In the Time of the Revolution, which is about the slave revolts in Haiti and Guadeloupe. The conferences also were the impetus for a book of essays about forgotten events and repercussions of slavery on France, former French colonies and the United States. Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities, published in 2000 and edited by Kadish, included essays by contributors from disciplines such as history, literature, linguistics and journalism.

“Doris Kadish has widened the canon of 19th-century French studies and she has looked at it from the angle of other disciplines and cultural studies,” Massardier- Kenney said.

Found in Translation
As Kadish studied works of lesser-known women authors, she discovered that their views were quite different from those of men. For example, instead of focusing on the violence of the Haitian revolt, women took the view that the brutality of slavery drove the slaves to act as they did. It was, she said, a quite modern view.

Sophie Doin, a wealthy 19th-century French Protestant and abolitionist, wrote widely about the downtrodden — the poor, women, prisoners, slaves and others. Kadish republished four of Doin’s forgotten works, along with an introductory analysis, in a volume that includes the novel La Famille Noire (The Black Family) and three short stories.

Doin’s stories featured interracial relationships and the Haitian revolution. Her black characters risked their lives to save whites who they cared about. Through literature, Doin not only presented this revolution in a positive light — as a symbol of freedom for people of all races and genders — but more importantly she humanized slaves.

“Doin was an abolitionist at a moment in history where her writings could have had a real influence on the public,” Kadish wrote in the introduction. “It would be a mistake not to recognize the significance of Sophie Doin as a minor author.”

Charlotte Dard, another little-known writer, was a survivor of the doomed frigate Medusa. She wrote an account of the sinking and her family’s experiences as colonists in Senegal in the book La Chaumière Africaine (The African Hut), published in 1825. A new edition with an introduction by Kadish was published in April 2005.

Dard provided a unique viewpoint both as a woman and as a middle-class colonist. Her book described the relationships among the various peoples she encountered: French, English, Moors and blacks. African people were portrayed as compassionate, generous, humane, and intelligent; the Moors, however, were depicted negatively as cruel traders in human flesh.

The life and writings of yet another overlooked author, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin (1770-1853), are coming to light through efforts of Kadish’s doctoral student Lisa Van Zwoll. The Marquise had friends in high places and was well connected to the literary world, Van Zwoll said. Her memoir, Journal of a 50-Year-Old Woman, was filled with anecdotes about famous people she knew, such as Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and many other political players. She also described her escape from The Terror — the backlash against the aristocracy that claimed many lives following the Revolution. During that time, she spent four years in Albany, N.Y., where she had a farm and slaves, whom she later freed.

Kadish said that these women’s writings should be judged by new criteria. Though not deemed high literature, they have helped resolve mysteries of seemingly contradictory views. For example, Kadish had been puzzled by the alignment of abolitionists in the 1820s both with monarchists and colonialism. Dard’s book helped provide an explanation: the abolitionists viewed colonization as a remedy for slavery.

When France lost Haiti, it lost much of the economic advantage of the Americas; and so France turned toward Africa. Abolitionists believed that France’s colonization of Africa would be beneficial to both peoples: The French would reap economic advantages and the Africans, who would be paid for their labor, would benefit as well. It wasn’t until the 1880s that those who supported abolitionism began to question colonialism.

Colonialism, even where long gone, still contributes to many modern-day problems around the world, and the residual effects of slavery — “slavery of the mind,” as Condé has called it — still grips citizens of the former French colonies and elsewhere in the Americas. By Kadish’s republishing and analyzing works by little-known authors, texts once lost are being rediscovered — and are providing new insights into historical and contemporary events. Kadish and her collaborators also are translating stories and books previously available only in French to widen access to these treasures by researchers and readers, and many such texts can be accessed from her Web site.

“Doris is one of the few scholars interested in the francophone world apart from the literature,” Condé said. “Many write about the literature, but few are interested in history or even the sociology. It seems to me Doris is the only one to pay attention to what has been called the ‘so small.’”

That attention is producing a steady stream of works likely to continue well into the future. Her new essay on Sophie Doin’s portrayal of the Haitian Revolution is slated to appear in the June 2005 issue of Yale French Studies; and a monograph, Against French Slavery: 1816-1830, will be completed within the year.

“People need to know that during the horrible phase of slavery there were individuals who fought against it, many devoting their lives to that fight,” Kadish said. “I have a treasure trove — boxes and boxes of relevant materials — that need to be made available either online or in other ways.”

For more information, contact Doris Kadish at dkadish@uga.edu or visit her Web site at www.uga.edu/slavery.

Kathleen Cason is associate director of the Research Communications Office and associate editor of UGA Research Magazine.