The Work of Raphaël Confiant: before and after the Praise of Creolity

Cécile Bertin-Elisabeth, Patricia Conflon & Corinne Mencé-Caster , Coord.

To be published January 2023

Raphaël Confiant was, in the 1970s, the first to publish novels in the Martinican Creole language. At the time, writing these first long texts was a real challenge. This required to literate a language configured by and for orality and therefore to amend it, to fatten it, to graft it, to root it in order to adapt it to writing. The initiative proved to be fruitful since it made possible other works in this language by other authors.

The novels in Creole and in French by Raphaël Confiant are part of a vast gesture that the author calls “The Creole Comedy”, an expression inspired by “The Human Comedy” by Honoré de Balzac. It chronicles several centuries of progress of Martinican society, from the point of view of its psychology, but also of its ethnology, its sociology, its aspirations… Confident achieves this by making Creole a literary language. Moreover, by inscribing Creole in French, he forged the so-called writing of Creolity. The theorization of the latter by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and himself in 1989 led to the major work that is the Praise of Creolity born of the manifesto presented on May 22 – a very symbolic date – the previous year. .

Neither praise, nor review and even less exegesis, this collective work seeks to show how Confidentian writing is original, both in its conception of Creole and French, in its way of handling the latter to better give to "(re) feel” the first.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the international symposium on the work of Raphaël Confiant which was held in Martinique from October 26 to 28, 2021.
This is one of the tributes paid to this great creolist, researcher, author, translator, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching at the University of the West Indies, with, in particular, the publication of "Les vies de Raphaël Confiant or the many facets of the work of a Creole writer”, published in the magazine Archipelies .

Raphaël Confiant, ex-director of Crillash, has published nearly 80 works: novels, essays, collections of tales, proverbs, lexicons – including a Creole lexicon of the Covid with Hector Poullet – and he is also the author of the first and most important Dictionary of Martinican Creole.

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Raphaël Confiant is a major figure in Martinican creolism
The current director of the Crillash is Gerry L'Étang , who took over from Corinne Mencé-Caster and Raphaël Confiant .