In this article , I demonstrate how the novel Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Plate of Pork with Green
Bananas) (1967) is the "corrective"
of The Last of the Just (1959), the Goncourt Prize winning début of
André Schwarz-Bart. Through a fictional journal of a Martinican dying
woman in a Parisian house for the elderly, the author, assisted by
his Guadeloupean wife and novelist herself, Simone Schwarz-Bart,
modelled a testimony that would complete the records of Shoah narratives
such as the writings of survivors (Levi, Wiesel, Antelme, Semprun).
Bringing to the forefront the missing record, the testimony of (Black and
coloured) women who went through this ordeal, both authors misled critics
and readers. Foregrounding the extreme other: female, black,
pork-eating, non-Jewish, dying in what is very recognizably a
"univers concentrationnaire" (Rousset, 1946), the authors demonstrate
the "reversibility" of the Black and Jewish fate. Shoah and slavery are
the two sides of the same fabric, the absolute terror and absence of
tolerance towards a community because of skin colour or religion, or a mix
of both.
In an article entitled "The Need for Cross-Ethnic Studies: A Manifesto (With
Antipasto)," Adam Meyer asks: "Why has Willard Motley [author of Knock
on Any Door] become a forgotten man of American literature? Because
he wrote raceless novels, creating characters other than his (Black)
background." The same could be argued for an author who published a book in 1967 for
the reverse reasons, a white author writing on characters other than his
(white) background. Moreover, this novel has been neglected by readers and critics
alike because it was way ahead of its time. Critics did not know what to make of
it because it was completely different from the author's first book, a
monumental novel on the Ashkenazi Jews in Mitteleuropa from the Middle Ages until Auschwitz. Yet, the author, a Polish francophone Jew with the
strange, "unpronounceable" name of André Schwarz-Bart, saw his amazing debut, Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the
Just), awarded the Goncourt Prize in
1959. Consequently, high expectations were set for his second book, published
almost ten years later and written together with his wife Simone Schwarz-Bart.
However, Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Plate of Pork with Green
Bananas) (1967), still the only example of a co-authored novel in francophone
literature,was apathetically received. The main reasons for this critical reception are its
unfitting and unsettling character, its profound "modernity," and its
open-endedness. This challenging "nouveau roman" surprised in terms of style, content, and form. |
