French Studies, Vol. LX, No.

2, 232 250
doi:10.1093/fs/knl078

MIGRATION AND MELANCHOLIA: FROM KRISTEVAS

DEPRESSION NATIONALE TO PINEAUS MALADIE DE
LEXIL
SAM HAIGH
Abstract
In her recent Contre la depression nationale, Kristeva argues that France is currently
suffering from a national depression that is similar in character to the individual
depression of the patient seeking psychoanalysis. Having never recovered its
national self-esteem after the Second World War, France has, according to
Kristeva, become isolated and inward-looking and, like the depressed analysand,
is in need of a restored self-image. Openness to the other, the foreigner, the
immigrant is one way in which France can rescue itself from depression and,
building on its post-revolutionary, Enlightenment tradition of hospitality, begin
to thrive and evolve once more. What is striking, of course, is that the
immigrant him- or herself disappears as subject, and instead remains simply a
means through which the French subject may be healed. Through an analysis of
the dynamics of melancholia, this essay examines both Kristevas notion of
national depression and what Chinese-American theorist Anne Anlin Cheng has
recently termed the racial melancholia of the migrant subject elided by
Kristeva. More specically, and taking Gise`le Pineaus LExil selon Julia as an
example, it examines the maladie de lexil of the French Caribbean migrant
subject who has been left out by almost all studies of immigration in France but
who can be seen to have functioned as Frances primary melancholic object.

In a recent article in Le Figaro, Maurice Druon, former secretary general of the

Academie Francaise, laments both la degradation progressive du francais en
France and the chronic underfunding that prevents the Academie Francaise
from carrying out its role: [de] nettoyer la langue des ordures quelle avait
contractees, ou dans la bouche du peuple, ou dans la foule du Palais, ou
dans les impuretes de la chicane. He mourns the passing of French as la
langue universelle, celle [de] toute personne cultivee [. . .] la langue
dEurope and informs us that la disparition de notre empire colonial a
favorise lapparition dun bas-francais. He then goes on to diagnose the
malaise behind the symptoms of impurity and contamination that he has identied, saying that language is the best indicator of the general mentality of a
people and that, in his opinion, the French no longer respect their language
parce quils ne sont plus ers deux-memes ni de leur pays. Ils ne saiment
plus, et ne saimant plus, ils naiment plus ce qui etait loutil de leur gloire. 1
1

Non-assistance a` la langue en danger, Le Figaro, 24 February 2004, p. 1.

# The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French
Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

233

A week later, Le Figaro published a response to Druons article by Bernard

Pivot, whose television show, Les Dicos dor, Druon had attacked as an
example of the degradation of the French language. Pivot takes exception
to Druons snobbery and elitism, and his refusal to recognize that French
is also un langage populaire, un parler des metiers.2 More than this, and
picking up on Druons lament for the passing of empire, Pivot links
Druons conservatism, his fear of contamination and impurity and his call
for a renewal of national pride to a mistrust not only of the popular but
also, implicitly, of the immigrant, of the threat of the other within:
Avec leurs qualites et leurs defauts, Le Petit Larousse et Le Petit Robert jouent un role capital
dans la connaissance et lamour de la langue. Mais, pour M. Druon, ils sont diriges par des
sauvageons de banlieue qui ne cherchent qua` saccager et a` denaturer le francais en y
introduisant des mots sans-papiers doublement sans-papiers puisquils sont nes de loral et
que lAcademie francaise ne leur a pas accorde leur permis de sejour.3

According to Pivot, Druon sees French as une langue immobile, drapee

[. . .], [enfermee] pour le soustraire aux mauvaises inuences venues de
linterieur et de lexterieur, while he himself calls for evolution,
openness, and attention a` la nouveaute comme au patrimoine.4
This very French debate over language is itself, I would suggest, an
indicator of the mentality of a people and of a malaise that Druon and
Pivot are by no means the rst to recognize. In 1997, Ian Jack, in an
issue of Granta entitled France the Outsider, also took as his starting point
the idea of le malaise francais and, like Druon, linked it to the passing
of Frances role as the global model of civilization and of French as the
triumphant world language.5 More than this, he dened the prevailing
moods in France as sinistrose, morosite and nostalgia nostalgia for
la France profonde, for the France that gave birth to modern ideas and
modern politics, for the France of liberte, egalite, fraternite, for France
the universal nation.6 As France the Outsider is devoted more specically
to providing an overview of new French writing, Jack goes on to
identify nineteenth-century realism as the literary apogee of Frances
national condence in its place in the world and notes that what has
succeeded it are various forms of experimental writing characterized by
solitude, introspection and a sense of meaninglessness, a turning inwards
away from the world. This, he argues, has made French literature of the
last hundred years deeply unpopular abroad, thus exacerbating introspective
tendencies and the lack of global self-assurance. Unlike Druon, however,
and more like Pivot, Jack sees a way forward for French writing, and by
2

Maurice Druon, vous allez trop loin! Le Figaro, 1 March 2004, p. 13.
Maurice Druon, vous allez trop loin! p. 13.
Maurice Druon, vous allez trop loin! p. 13.
5
Editorial, Granta, 59: France the Outsider (1997), p. 8.
6
Editorial, p. 9.
3
4

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SAM HAIGH

implication France, precisely in nouveaute, in the younger generations of

more outward-looking writers writers whom he identies as coming
largely from present or former French territories outside Europe [. . .],
[or] the children of migrants from these places.7
This identication of a general psychological malaise in France bears a
striking resemblance to that examined also in a short text by Julia
Kristeva, Contre la depression nationale 8 a text that has received relatively
little critical attention. Here, Kristeva develops ideas on national identity
from two of her earlier works, Etrangers a` nous-memes 9 and Lettre ouverte a`
Harlem Desir. 10 Going further than Jack, she argues that France is not
simply morose, gloomy or temporarily introspective, but is suffering
from a full-blown national depression that is similar in character to the
individual depression of a patient seeking psychoanalysis. Throughout
her work, and especially since the 1980s, Kristeva has analysed the relationship between individual psychological problems and social problems, and
has employed a psychoanalytic framework to examine wider, social issues.
Here it is depression and melancholia that provide this framework,
phenomena that she had previously examined in Soleil noir 11 and
Les Nouvelles Maladies de lame,12 texts that she wrote as a response to the
huge increase in depression that she began to see among her patients
from the late 1980s onwards.
In Soleil noir, Kristeva deliberately blurs the border between melancholia
and depression, and draws on insights from a variety of psychoanalytic
schools. She takes as her starting point Freuds observation in Mourning
and Melancholia that melancholia is a pathological form of mourning,
whereby grief at loss does not resolve itself.13 As Freud pointed out, for
the subject caught up in mourning, the lost object is consciously known
and missed; for the subject caught up in melancholia, the lost object is
almost always elusive, withdrawn from consciousness, and thus cannot
be missed and mourned in the same way.14 Supplementing Freuds suggestions about melancholia and the constitution of the ego with Melanie
Kleins object-relations theories, Kristeva locates the melancholic
subjects imprecise sense of loss in a failed separation from the maternal
object and an inability to resolve the ambivalence that characterizes early
ego development into healthy primary narcissism. She explains that, as
7

Editorial, p. 11.
Contre la depression nationale: entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris, Textuel, 1998). Subsequent references
will be given in the text.
9
Etrangers a` nous-memes (Paris, Fayard, 1988).
10
Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir (Paris, Rivages, 1990).
11
Soleil noir: depression et melancolie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987).
12
Les Nouvelles Maladies de lame (Paris, Fayard 1993).
13
Mourning and Melancholia (1925), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, XIV, ed. and tr. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 000 00.
14
Mourning and Melancholia, p. 000.
8

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

235

we struggle, just before we enter language, between an impulse to continue

dening ourselves by clinging to the maternal object that has until now
been vital for our survival and an impulse to separate, we oscillate
between intense love and hate for the maternal object.15 For Kristeva as
for Klein, one means of coping with these ambivalent feelings is to use
splitting mechanisms, in which love is projected onto a fantasized
good breast which provides nourishment, and hate or aggression is
projected onto a bad breast which, in the childs fantasy, has been
withheld or withdrawn.16 Successful completion of this developmental
stage entails recognizing the maternal object as having both good and
bad qualities, identifying ourselves as separate from the maternal object
and signifying our sadness at this separation through language.
The subject prone to melancholia has never properly completed this stage
of separation a stage identied by Klein as the depressive position
and it is this haunting, half-remembered nostalgia not for the mother
herself, but for the lost feeling of omnipotence derived from primary
identication or oneness with the mother17 that may be reactivated in
later life, and trigger depression. As Kristeva explains:
La blessure que je viens de subir [. . .] maintenant semble entrer en resonance, a` lexamen, avec
des traumas anciens dont je mapercois que je nai jamais su faire le deuil, de quelquun ou de
quelque chose, que jai jadis aimes [. . .] [Cette] peine nest que lajournement de la haine ou du
desir demprise que je nourris pour celui ou pour celle qui mont trahie ou abandonnee. La
depression me signale que je ne sais pas perdre: peut-e tre nai-je pas su trouver une
contrepartie valable a` la perte? Il sensuit que toute perte entra ne la perte de mon etre.18

For both Freud and Kristeva, melancholia is an abnormal way of digesting

loss,19 and is rooted in ambivalent feelings towards the maternal object that
are transformed into ambivalent feelings about the self. Melancholics
identify narcissistically with the lost, loved object, introjecting it, incorporating it into themselves in order not to lose it entirely. Once this has
occurred, however, the part of the ego that is now identied with the
object is judged harshly, reviled by the other part of the ego; the conict
between the ego and the loved object has been transformed into a
cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by
identication.20 The depressive subject is therefore fundamentally cannibalistic [. . .] it nourishes the self by destroying the other,21 and this manifests
15

Soleil noir, pp. 20 21, 22 23.

David Macey, Melanie Klein, in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London, Penguin, 2000),
p. 214. See also Soleil noir, p. 28.
17
Lawrence Kritzman, Melancholia Becomes the Subject: Kristevas Invisible Thing and the
Making of Culture, Paragraph, 14 (1991), 144 50 (p. 145).
18
Soleil noir, pp. 13 15.
19
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 8.
20
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, p. 000.
21
Kritzman, Melancholia Becomes the Subject, p. 145.
16

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SAM HAIGH

itself in the loss of self-esteem and self-hatred that alternate, or coexist, with
the overwhelming sadness of melancholia.
It is this model of depression that Kristeva extends to describe the current
malaise of the French nation in Contre la depression nationale. As Freud himself
points out, melancholia may be a reaction to the loss not only of a person
but, instead, of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such
as ones country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.22 Like Druon and Jack,
Kristeva feels that France is suffering from depression at the moment
because its idea of itself as a nation, its self-esteem, is struggling; France
no longer feels powerful (Contre la depression nationale, p. 66). She traces
this recent phase of national depression back to the humiliations of the
Second World War, humiliations or losses that rekindled the more
ancient loss central to melancholia, as we shall see. After the temporary,
post-war respite of les trente glorieuses, France began the descent into
depression once again with the events of May 1968 and now lacks clear
hopes and ideals for the future. Just as the depressed individual
withdraws into himself and is unable to speak, so French people have
withdrawn from community life and from politics; France has lost its
voice in the world both within Europe and in relation to America
and French has lost its status as a world language. Just as the depressed
person has a tyrannical super ego that demands perfection and makes the
depression worse, so the French, according to Kristeva, have a sense of
cultural superiority, of belonging to a prestigious civilization, that they
will not give up in the face of globalization, and which is thus making
their sense of isolation worse (Contre la depression nationale, p. 64).
Kristeva goes on to suggest that, rst, the nation needs to have its
self-image restored, and this, she feels, can be achieved by evoking, remembering and revaluing the nations cultural heritage its aesthetic, technical
and scientic capabilities. Then, just as the depressed person needs a means,
such as psychoanalysis, of working through his/her depression towards a
new ego ideal, so the nation needs something similar, a means of creating
a new ideal of nationhood and national identity. Of course, working on
depression itself entails understanding and putting into language an
ambivalent relationship with a lost object that is unable to be mourned
or given up, and which is at the root of the sadness and apparent self-hatred
that characterize melancholia. What, then, is Frances lost object? What has
provoked this, and previous, bouts of national depression? Kristeva herself
never directly asks such questions, but an answer may be found in the fact
that (perhaps rather surprisingly) she, like Druon, explicitly links Frances
national depression to its status as a post-colonial nation, and especially to
les ux migratoires and the feelings of insecurity, even persecution, that
22

Mourning and Melancholia, p. 000.

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

237

they have brought (Contre la depression nationale, p. 67). Just as the

melancholic feels nostalgia for a lost sense of wholeness or omnipotence,
so France feels nostalgia for the lost ideal of lunite nationale an ideal
that she feels has been elevated to the status of cult or myth in France
(Contre la depression nationale, p. 59). And for Kristeva, as for Druon, Jack,
and Pivot, this lost ideal is somehow, obscurely, linked to Frances
colonial past, of which contemporary immigration is the constant
reminder, like the residue of a traumatic memory.
Unlike Druon, Kristeva is quite clear that restoring national condence is
not the same as national arrogance and she warns against promoting the
Front Nationals brand of nationalism (Contre la depression nationale, p. 63).
In fact, she sees this as a sign of a failure to treat depression, a falling
into mania, which Freud also associated, along with suicide, with
untreated, chronic melancholia.23 Rather, like Jack and Pivot, Kristeva
sees immigrants and foreigners as part of the cure for Frances depression,
and it is here that her psychoanalytic model also becomes explicit. For the
depressed analysand, psychoanalysis entails un apprentissage de lalterite
(Contre la depression nationale, p. 41): the transference relationship between
analyst and analysand at last gives the latter an other in relation to whom
a sense of self can be built. At the national level, des activites qui developpent le souci pour lautre: le soin, lamour. . . le service public (Contre la
depression nationale, pp. 73 74), participation in la vie associative (p. 70) are
all [des] antidepresseur[s] puissant[s] (p. 74). A relationship with the
immigrant as other thus becomes, for Kristeva, a privileged means
through which a national sense of self can begin to be re-established in
France, and through which, eventually, a new relationship with Europe,
the USA and the world can be built.
She imagines this new nation as une federation detrangetes, une
entente entre des etres polyphoniques, respectueux de leurs etrangetes reciproques (Contre la depression nationale, p. 77). She repeatedly evokes Montesquieus esprit general, which she calls ce commun denominateur qui fait le
sol de la Republique et qui [. . .] est notre antidepresseur symbolique(p. 99).
The work of Montesquieu, along with the European, Enlightenment ideals
of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in general, also forms the basis of
Etrangers a` nous-memes. Here, and then again in Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir,
Kristeva argues that these are specically French ideals, and that France
must return to them in search of a new, more open and more tolerant
version of the nation. This is the cultural heritage that must be rehabilitated
in the quest to treat Frances national depression; this is Frances lost object,
the key to restoring a sense of national self-esteem and wholeness.
23
See Kristeva, Contre la depression nationale, pp. 68 69 and Freud, Mourning and Melancholia,
pp. 262 63.

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SAM HAIGH

Kristeva is by no means alone in her interest in the Enlightenment origins

of contemporary notions of hospitality in France. Mireille Rosellos Postcolonial Hospitality is one of several recent examinations of the subject, but
she, unlike Kristeva, is concerned not simply with returning to these
origins, but with showing how the Republics self-presentation as a hospitable nation has always been marred by ominous ambiguities.24 As Rosello
points out, the French tendency to idealize the notion of hospitality as a
specically French value is highly problematic. This is not only because hospitality is not necessarily a French value, but also because it may not really
be a value at all. Hospitality can be generous, but it can also be motivated by
selshness, by the desire for power or domination on the part of the host, so
that hospitable and powerful hosts [. . .] constantly [threaten] to swallow
their guests, to absorb or incorporate them, to strip them of their
identity.25 In the French context, the most obvious example of this dark
side of hospitality, as Rosello points out, is Frances colonial policy of
assimilation, and the immigration policy of integration to which it led. Of
course, discourses of assimilation of la mission civilisatrice
emerged precisely during the Enlightenment. It may thus be suggested
not simply that France is suffering from a bout of national depression
but, more fundamentally, that French national identity itself is melancholic.
The nation is founded on a sense of loss, unresolved grief, and an ambivalent relationship to what has been lost; what is more, as Anne Anlin Cheng
has pointed out in relation to the USA, this loss, this nostalgia for a sense of
wholeness or unite nationale, is one that is deeply racialized.
For Cheng, the USA has been constituted through ideals of freedom and
liberty that it has continually betrayed in practice, starting with the Declaration of Independence, which demanded freedom from enslavement to
England for a new nation built on slavery.26 National melancholia is
thus, more specically, racial melancholia: a desire both to introject the
racial other, to welcome it and hold it within, yet also to devour and
destroy it. In France, it was with the declaration of Les Droits de
lHomme et du Citoyen modelled, of course, on the American Declaration of Independence that Enlightenment ideals were simultaneously
declared and betrayed. The proposition that les hommes naissent et
demeurent libres et egaux en droits was asserted at the height of Frances
involvement in the slave trade, as Enlightenment discourses of hospitality
were in the process of being converted into colonial discourses of assimilation. And nowhere have these discourses of assimilation and hospitality
been more obviously played out than in relation to the inhabitants of
Frances oldest colonies, the present departements doutre-mer, founded on
24
25
26

Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant As Guest (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 3.

Postcolonial Hospitality, pp. 32, 31.
The Melancholy of Race, p. 10.

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

239

slavery: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion and Guyane. As we shall see,

these are the colonized subjects perhaps most directly implicated in the
melancholia of French national identity.
The French Revolution and its accompanying ideals, in all their ambivalent melancholia, may be seen to have had a particular impact on the inhabitants of the Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe, for it was there, in 1794, that
slavery was suddenly abolished, apparently in the revolutionary spirit of
liberty, equality, fraternity. In reality, of course, this abolition was
motivated by a desire to recruit freed slaves into the French army in
order to ght the invading British, and once the invasion had been successfully put down, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in 1804. This is an example,
precisely, of Frances racially melancholic relationship to its oldest colonized
subjects its desire at once to welcome and reject and it is a relationship
that has continued to be melancholic ever since. Even before abolition in
1848 and then departmentalization in 1946, the inhabitants of Guadeloupe
and Martinique were constructed as model colonial subjects. Their
history of transplantation through slavery rendered them particularly susceptible to discourses of assimilation and therefore, for the French, they
became perfect examples of what could be achieved by the nation as
purveyor of universal culture, as civilizer and assimilator, as generous
host. However, although guaranteeing French national identity, the assimilated French Caribbean subject also presents a threat to the mythied unity
of that identity, to the idea of Frenchness itself. If it is possible to be culturally, linguistically and legally French but also to be black, to speak
Creole, and to reside thousands of kilometres from the mainland, then
what does it mean to be French? And what happens when the Francais
de souche are forced to confront these contradictions in the French
Caribbean subject who resides within the borders of metropolitan France?
Just as they have been posited as model colonial subjects, so Antilleans
may also be seen as model migrants. In the US context, Cheng positions
Asian-Americans as model migrants, and she feels that the racialization
of Asian-Americans is in some ways more apparently melancholic than
that of African-Americans, who are the predominant, non-dominant
racial category, because they shuttle between black and white, assimilate
and then euphorically sing the praises of the American way.27 The French
Caribbean subject occupies a similar position, this time in relation to the
Arab or beur, who is the most visible minority group in France, and the
main focus of immigration-related fear and insecurity. As Muslims they
are seen largely as unassimilable, whereas people of French Caribbean
origin, visibly different because for the most part, black, are French
citizens, culturally and linguistically assimilated before setting foot in
27

The Melancholy of Race, p. 23.

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SAM HAIGH

metropolitan France. They may thus be located somewhere between the

absolute other that is the Arab immigrant and the dominant, white
Francais de souche. The French Caribbean persons difference may therefore
be experienced as a threat by the French person but also seen as proof
as long as he/she remains euphoric about assimilation of Frances
superior civilization and hospitality.
Such dominant, racial melancholia is well illustrated in the novel LExil
selon Julia by the Guadeloupean author Gise`le Pineau a novel to which we
shall return in more detail later, and which tells the story of a family of Guadeloupean migrants living in France. Marechal, the narrators father, is a
soldier in the French army and, in a key scene, his mother Julia absentmindedly throws on her sons army greatcoat in order to go and collect her
grandchildren from school in the rain. When she arrives at the school,
she is instantly met with the horried, collective gaze of the other, white
parents who immediately read her attire as a deliberate attempt on her
part to disrespect France itself:
Les Blancs [. . .] portaient des mines contrites comme si la France venait detre envahie par un
de ses sempiternels ennemis, comme si lhonneur de la Patrie etait pietine, la`, devant leurs
yeux, comme si la guerre etait deja` entree dans le village et quils doivent a` leur tour sortir
leur petoire de derrie`re les fagots, brandir leurs fourches pour que le sang impie abreuve
les sillons.28

As she is roughly treated by two policemen, what is revealed is the contradiction inherent in a Republic ofcially proud of its hospitality and therefore
happy to allow some of its assimilated, colonized subjects to become its
representatives, but whose very national anthem is based on notions of
purity and impurity, on the confrontation and expulsion of undesirable,
foreign elements as threats to the honour of the nation.
The confusion of white French people when they are forced to come face
to face with what it means to belong to an hospitable, assimilatory nation
is, as we shall see, matched by that of the actual objects of French racial
melancholia themselves and it is here that a crucial gap in Kristevas
model of national depression becomes evident. Indeed, what distinguishes
Chengs study from both that of Freud and that of Kristeva is her question:
what is the subjectivity of the melancholic object?29 Of Kristevas observations in Contre la depression nationale we might similarly ask: if the foreigner
is to teach us about our own, intrinsic foreignness and enable us to
reconnect with Enlightenment ideals of hospitality so as to construct a
new model of the nation, what happens to that foreigner him or herself?
What is his or her place in a nation built on his or her foreignness? In
Contre la depression nationale, the foreigners own melancholia is elided,
28
29

LExil selon Julia (Paris, Stock, 1996), p. 72. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
The Melancholy of Race, p. 13.

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sacriced to the necessity of constructing a new model of French national

identity, while Chengs study is motivated by a desire to see what she
calls the racialized other as both a melancholic object and a melancholic
subject, both the one lost and the one losing.30 Her main concern, and
one that will be shared by the remainder of this essay, is therefore with
exploring this raced subjects melancholic responses to dominant racial
melancholia.31
In Etrangers a` nous-memes where, as we shall see later, she does attempt
partially to address the melancholia of the foreigner Kristeva points to
the general problems with selfhood encountered by the immigrant who
has grown used to being a stranger in a foreign land:
Sans foyer, il propage. . . le paradoxe du comedien: multipliant les masques et les faux-selfs,
il nest jamais tout a` fait vrai ni tout a` fait faux, sachant adapter aux amours et aux detestations
les antennes supercielles dun coeur de basalte. . . Cest dire quetabli en soi, letranger na
pas de soi. Tout juste une assurance vide, sans valeur, qui axe ses possibilite s detre
constamment autre, au gre des autres et des circonstances. Je fais ce quon veut, mais ce
nest pas moi moi est ailleurs, moi nappartient a` personne, moi nappartient pas a`
moi [. . .], moi existe-t-il ?32

This description of the false selves necessarily adopted by the foreigner

who must make him or herself constantly agreeable to those in the host
country bears a striking resemblance to the work of the Swiss psychoanalyst
Alice Miller on child development. Miller echoes Kristevas observation
that la depression est le visage cache de Narcisse,33 that it stems from
the failed emergence of primary narcissism. Drawing, like Kristeva, on
object-relations theories, she examines the narcissistic disturbance of the
child brought up by a depressed parent. For her, as for Freud and
Kristeva, the depressed person is haunted by a sense of loss, a longing
for a positive, mirroring relationship with the maternal object that did
not occur at the appropriate developmental stage. For Miller, once this
person becomes a parent she will tend to assuage her own narcissistic
needs through her child, that is, she cathects him narcissistically.34
Insecure and lacking in self-esteem, she projects her own introjects onto
the child35 and the child, having introjected the needs of the parent,
becomes estranged from her own needs, repressing them to the extent
that she becomes unaware of them. Acutely attuned to what the parent
wants and needs her to be, this child, like Kristevas foreigner, adopts a
series of false selves and is always good. As a melancholic or narcissistically disturbed adult, she, too, will be haunted by a sense of loss and,
30

The Melancholy of Race, p. 17.

The Melancholy of Race, p. 21.
32
Etrangers a` nous-memes, pp. 18 19.
33
Soleil noir, p. 15.
34
The Drama of Being a Child, tr. by Ruth Ward (London, Virago, 1987), p. 52.
35
The Drama of Being a Child, p. 49.
31

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SAM HAIGH

having unsuccessfully individuated herself, will remain dependent on others

for a sense of who she is, perpetually seeking it in the reassurance and
approval of those around her.
This model can usefully be applied to the relationship between France
and its Caribbean colonies, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Not only have
Martinique and Guadeloupe always been seen as model colonies but, in
the paternalistic language of colonialism, they have also always been seen
as Frances children and specically as Frances good children,
rewarded for their relative lack of rebelliousness with departmentalization.
Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the racially melancholic relationship
between France and these colonies reached its peak with departmentalization. As Kristeva has pointed out in Contre la depression nationale, the
current phase of Frances national depression can be traced back to the
Second World War. Coming as it did in 1946, departmentalization was a
means for France to hold on to the vestiges of empire, and thus also to
boost its agging self-esteem to assuage its narcissistic needs. For their
part, the inhabitants of Martinique and Guadeloupe manifested their own
narcissistic disturbance by continuing to be model, colonial children;
lacking the self-condence to rebel, they instead sought further
approval unable to individuate themselves, they instead sought further
assimilation.
The narcissistic disturbance of Millers child is thus comparable to the
racial melancholia of Chengs raced subject, who introjects the racism
of dominant culture, in all its hostility, and then experiences it as an
ambivalent combination of aspiration and rejection, identication and selfdenigration, desire and shame. For Cheng, this then manifests itself as
racial grief sadness as a kind of ambulatory despair or manic
euphoria.36 It is this other side of Frances national depression that can
be traced in Pineaus LExil selon Julia. Although dominant, French racial
melancholia can certainly be glimpsed in this novel, as we have seen, it is
primarily a working-through of the racial grief of three generations of
Guadeloupeans living in France, and it is the narrators father, Marechal,
whose racial melancholia most closely resembles manifests itself as
the type of narcissistic disturbance outlined above. Indeed, he swings
between the manic euphoria described by Cheng and Freud as one
extreme of untreated melancholia, and the ambulatory despair of classic
depression.
First, Marechals decision to move his family from Guadeloupe to France
is conditioned precisely by the euphoric relationship to assimilation that
Cheng identies in Asian-American immigrants. In his case, it takes the
form of an extreme idealization of France and, in particular, of its
36

The Melancholy of Race, pp. 23 24.

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

243

representative, General de Gaulle. As has been well documented, and as

Kristeva points out in Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir, de Gaulle became,
during and after the Second World War, and especially with the founding
of the Fifth Republic, the saviour of the French nation who restored
national pride, however briey, after the humiliations of occupation and
collaboration. In Kristevas terms, he proposed des objectifs hautains qui
permettent, contre la depression, une personnalite nationale.37 From the
start, de Gaulles post-war and presidential roles were bound up with
empire. It was he who, during his provisional regime of 1944 46, sought
to assuage Frances narcissistic needs by renaming the empire the French
Union and introducing departmentalization. By 1958, presiding over decolonization became the means by which he could enable France to see itself
once again as a universal, civilizing nation; the generous, hospitable
defender of the oppressed.38 In relation to the DOM, it was de Gaulle
who nally upheld the promises of departmentalization, which as late as
1958 had still not been kept. His actions brought about signicant
changes in the living conditions of ordinary Domiens and Marechals generation, in particular, remained grateful to him for rescuing them from
post-war deprivation and conferring upon them the full benets of
French citizenship.
This is the context of Marechals relationship with de Gaulle, and it leads
him, during the Second World War, to join the resistance, via Dominica, as
a dissident, and then to serve in the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria
and the projects of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa. In each case he has
a strong sense of owing a particular loyalty, as a Guadeloupean, to the
nation as it has been conceived and rebuilt by de Gaulle. And when the
latter resigns as president, following the events of May 1968, Marechal
sinks into a deep depression:
Papa ne part pas travailler le matin. Depuis la demission du General, il marche en tricot de
corps et pyjama dans lappartement [. . .] Il ne parle pas [. . .] La France nest plus tout a`
fait la meme sans le General. Papa nest plus le meme non plus. Une partie de lui a perdu
foi en larmee, en la France, en la vie, en lhonneur [. . .] La France sest deshonoree. Il ne
peut pas rester dans un pays sans honneur. Il a honte pour la France. (LExil, p. 163)

This is the other side of the raced subjects racial melancholia. Marechals
euphoric relationship with France is suddenly transformed into ambulatory despair a despair born precisely out of the narcissistic disturbance
described by Miller and which characterizes the raced subjects relationship
with dominant culture.
For Miller, the narcissistically disturbed child will, as an adult, tend to
idealize the parent who was in fact emotionally unavailable or manipulative
37

Lettre ouverte a` Harlem Desir, p. 48.

David Howarth and Giorgios Varouxakis, Contemporary France: An Introduction to French Politics and
Society (London, Arnold, 2003), pp. 112 13.
38

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SAM HAIGH

as she cathected her child narcissistically39 and Marechals idealization of

de Gaulle is clearly reminiscent of this. Like Victor Schoelcher before
him, de Gaulle came to be seen by Marechals generation both as a
saviour and as representative of the French nation as a whole; what was
elided in each case, of course, was the fact that it was France itself, like
Millers depressed parent, who had imposed the conditions from which
Guadeloupe and Martinique needed to be saved. When the French people
reject de Gaulle, in the referendum of 1969, Marechal is no longer able to
sustain his fantasy that de Gaulle and France are one and the same. His
reaction and this, of course, recalls Kleins idea of infantile splitting
mechanisms, on which Millers theories also draw is to split them
into good (de Gaulle) and bad (France). This enables him as had
his idealization of de Gaulle to protect himself against the ambivalence
that he really feels, and has always felt, towards France as maternal
object. Now he comes face to face with it, with his shame and hostility
towards the very French values that he has enthusiastically introjected.
Like the child who continues to idealize her parents, Marechal continues
to shield himself from his ambivalence; consequently, his melancholia, his
narcissistic disturbance, remains unrecognized and unresolved.
Marechals experience of racial melancholia is also linked to his actual
family situation, because his mother is living with the family in France
only because he has brought her there, against her will. In doing so, he
sees himself as her saviour, rescuing her from his abusive father,
Asdrubal, and he compares himself explicitly to de Gaulle, imagining his
mother as une Marianne whom he must liberate, as de Gaulle liberated
France (LExil, p. 32). Julia herself (whom the family affectionately call
Man Ya), has no desire to be rescued and, from the start, she cannot comprehend why she has been brought to France and experiences it as un pays
de desolation (LExil, p. 55). Her experience of racial melancholia is quite
literal her feelings of claustrophobia and isolation in France are recognized by her granddaughter precisely as melancolie and hers takes
the form not of euphoria or mania but only of sadness and despair. From
the start, she experiences her exile as le manque de pays as a lack, a
loss, a wound, and as the prospect of returning to Guadeloupe gradually
fades, she sinks into full-blown depression, becomes physically ill, and
refuses to leave her bed, suffering from what her family names [la]
maladie de lexil (LExil, p. 129).
Julias melancholia is a sense of exile as nostalgia that closely resembles
that described by Kristeva in Etrangers a` nous-memes. Here, before focusing
once more on what the foreigners difference can bring to the French
nation, she recognizes that immigrants in France may experience their
39

The Drama of Being a Child, pp. 19 22.

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

245

exile precisely as depression or melancholia, gripped as they are by the

nostalgic yearning for the very motherland and mother tongue that, in
choosing exile, they have repudiated:
On conna t letranger qui survit tourne vers le pays perdu de ses larmes. Amoureux
melancolique de lespace perdu, il ne se console pas, en fait, davoir abandonne un temps.
Le paradis perdu est un mirage du passe quil ne saura jamais retrouver. Il le sait dun
savoir desole qui retourne sa rage a` legard des autres [. . .] contre lui-meme [. . .]
Letranger est un reveur qui fait lamour avec labsence, un deprime exquis.40

This is exactly how Julia, unlike Marechal, experiences France, and she
seeks in memories of home precisely a lost sense of wholeness and selfcertainty, a solution to her panic attacks and son incapacite a` dominer le
cours des choses (LExil, p. 129):
Elle veut une seule chose, retourner sur sa terre de Guadeloupe [. . .] Meme sil est vrai que
cette terre maudite ensorcelle, amarre les destinees. Elle ne philosophe pas sur le pourquoi et
le comment de lattachement a` sa terre. La raison saffaisse devant les sauts du cur. Il ny a
pas de mots, seulement le manque qui aveugle et etourdit [. . .] La terre, comme une me`re, qui
enfante, nourrit et recueille (LExil, p. 137).

Like melancholy as it is described by Freud or Kristeva, the sense of loss

and yearning experienced by Julia is inarticulable, it is beyond words; un
soleil noir that blinds and stuns. It is also associated with the maternal
object; it is precisely the lost feeling of omnipotence derived from
primary identication or oneness with the mother identied by
Kritzman. Equally, it is a loss shot through with ambivalence; as we shall
see, the dreamed-of land, like the maternal object, is restricting and
conning as well as nourishing and holding.
Crucially, too, Julias sense of loss is connected to something much more
archaic than the literal, known loss (exile in France) that has triggered it. It
is much more diffuse, much less straightforward than literal homesickness
because, unlike the nostalgia of Kristevas foreigner for the land he/she
has left behind, Julias nostalgia for Guadeloupe is rooted in the fact that
her exile has been imposed against her will. Indeed, the way Julia is
brought to France by her son has strong parallels with the way slaves
were captured in Africa and transported, by ship, to the Caribbean. Since
she is illiterate, Marechal obtains a French identity card for her by asking
her to mark the relevant papers with a cross, instead of a signature.
When she is in the depths of her depression, she remembers this incident
and wonders:
Elle a fait une croix sur sa carte didentite francaise.
Elle a signe pour combien de temps ?
Pour quelle mission ?
Juste une croix qui la encha nee (LExil, p. 125).
40

Etrangers a` nous-memes, pp. 20 21.

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SAM HAIGH

Like her slave ancestors, she nds herself in a country with which she feels
no connection and she goes on to idealize Guadeloupe in the same way that
slaves idealized Africa and dreamed of returning there.
Julia is of a different generation to her son, and her relationship with
France is thus not one of gratitude towards, and idealization of, a benevolent parent. Rather, it is conditioned almost entirely by an archaic sense of
loss associated with slavery. Marechals generation trapped as they are in
the euphoric stage of racial melancholia and thus desperate to assimilate
and prove themselves to be French nd slavery shameful and humiliating
and repress the memory of it. Julia, however, is too old to be tempted by the
idealization of de Gaulle, and too young to remember Schoelcher and
abolition with gratitude. Having grown up with stories of slavery and
abolition, she is well aware of her slave ancestry and passes on these
stories to her grandchildren. And it is here that the ambivalence of Julias
relationship with Guadeloupe, and with her personal and collective
history, becomes evident. Despite her longing for Guadeloupe, what
Julia has left behind there is a violent, abusive relationship that, as she
herself recognizes, is reminiscent of indeed repeats that of a master
and his slave. Paler skinned, and manager of the plantation on which she
worked as a cane cutter, Asdrubal, Julia says, a cherche la plus laide des
negresses noires pour faire offense et bailler de la honte a` son papa. Il
ma jamais aimee ou si mal, dune bien laide facon. Jetais comme un
affront, un outrage [. . .] son esclave (LExil, p. 95). This is a role for
which Julia has been prepared since childhood, and she recalls her
mother telling her: une negresse noire, laide, a` cheveux graines, doit
meriter, plus que tout autre, sa place au ciel (LExil, p. 73). Just like a
slave, she sees the pain inicted upon her by Asdrubal and, later, the
pain of exile in France as something to be borne with religious faith,
in the expectation of rewards in heaven.
Such attitudes, handed down from generation to generation, must clearly
be set within the context of the narcissistically disturbed relationship
between France and Guadeloupe, in which the latter, as a colony,
resembles les ailes cassees dun oiseau qui ne prendra jamais son envolee
(LExil, p. 26). This is a relationship based on violence and hierarchy, in
which those with paler skin expect total submission and obedience from
those with darker skin just as adults, in the work of Miller, expect
total submission and obedience from their children. Brought up to expect
nothing more, Julia nds her relationship with Asdrubal familiar, comforting, even safe, and is thus compelled to to return to it again and again, to
seek it out and repeat it just as her son is compelled to repeat his own submissive relationship to France in his idealization and adoration of de Gaulle.
As both Freud and Miller point out, the compulsion to repeat past experiences, however painful, because they are familiar prevents these experiences

KRISTEVA AND PINEAU

247
41

from being fully understood and worked through. Julia, in her desperation
to return home to her husband, is potentially trapped in just such a
compulsion to repeat. However, when she does return to Guadeloupe,
we are told that she does not allow Asdrubal to resume abusing her.
Having at last been able to glimpse, if not work through, the ancient
origins of her racial melancholia when it was triggered by her exile in
France, Julia would seem, at last, to have attained some measure of
freedom from old patterns of behaviour.
The narrator, too, has her own experience of racial melancholia and it is
that of the second-generation migrant who has no concrete sense of home.
It is the narrator who encounters overt racism on a regular basis, in the form
of racist bullying at school, most frequently at the hands of her teachers. The
specic sense of loss that this precipitates in her, as a black child in 1960s
France, is one that does not afict either her parents or grandmothers generation. In her study, Cheng examines what she calls the racial grief of
African-Americans and Asian-Americans subjected to precisely the racist
humiliation that Pineaus narrator suffers at school. For Cheng, selfdenigration is the most common response to dominant racial melancholia,
and it manifests itself in a sense of yearning and mourning, the imaginative
loss of a never possible perfection that of an idealized, white body that,
melancholically, has been introjected.42 This is certainly familiar in French
Caribbean writing, too in the work of Frantz Fanon, for example, or
in that of the Guadeloupean Miche`le Lacrosil, whose rst two novels,
Sapotille et le serin dargile and Cajou, like Pineaus novel, were set, and
indeed written, in the 1960s and describe racism and bullying at school of
which the narrators experiences in LExil are extremely reminiscent.43
Lacrosils characters, like those examined by Cheng, are so profoundly
marked by their experiences of racism that they become consumed by a
desire to be white. In Pineaus novel, however, the narrators racial grief
does not take this form and she feels condent, from the start, that she
can survive without the approval of the white teachers around her: je
nai pas besoin de [leur] regard pour vivre et grandir (LExil, p. 63).
Her racial grief instead takes the form of a desire to nd wholeness and
perfection elsewhere, and she experiences a sense of loss that resembles the
nostalgia of her grandmother, but without the specic geographical
location, Guadeloupe, to which it can be attached. For her, it is an illdened sense of homelessness44 and she attaches it, at different times, to
41
See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII , ed. and tr. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 5,
21 23, and Miller, The Drama of Being a Child, pp. 95 98; pp. 107 08.
42
The Melancholy of Race, p. 18.
43
For a more detailed analysis of these two novels, see Sam Haigh, Mapping a Tradition: Francophone
Womens Writing from Guadeloupe (Leeds, Maney, 2000), pp. 18 54.
44
Miller, The Drama of Being a Child, p. 14.

248

SAM HAIGH

various geographical locations in her search for a concrete place with which
to identify it. This feeling began, we learn, when her father was posted to
Africa several years earlier, and the entire family lived there briey.
Although the family was never accepted in Africa, despite their skin
colour, the experience of having lived there leaves the narrator with le
sentiment davoir perdu quelque chose [. . .] Jai nourri en moi cette
perte, pesante comme un deuil, manque sans denition [. . .] Une faim
quon ne peut envisager (LExil, pp. 20 21). This is, once again, a sense
of loss, lack and longing that resembles but is not mourning, and
for the narrator it worsens once Julia has returned to Guadeloupe, when
a sense of abandonment is added to it. The racist taunts (retournez dans
votre pays: LExil, p. 139), once again send the narrator imaginatively in
search of what she feels she has lost: je veux bien retourner dans mon
pays. Mais quel pays? (pp. 13940). LAfrique du temps darmee de
papa (p. 140) is no longer a comforting image for Julia; instead, images
come to her from her grandmothers Creole tales, and she begins to
return to Guadeloupe in her imagination, creating her own versions of
the tales in which she herself is the heroine.
Thus it is as her ill-dened sense of loss gradually becomes more focused
on the Caribbean that her family nally decides to return there. The narrator
is immediately lled with a sense of urgency and becomes determined to
ward off adulthood for as long as possible in order to arrive in the
Caribbean before her childhood is over. For her, it becomes important to
gain a sense of having grown up in the Caribbean and not solely in
France (LExil, p. 172). When they arrive in Martinique, she feels immediately that ce pays, comme la Guadeloupe, a toujours hante ton coeur
(p. 184) and these feelings intensify once the family nally returns to Guadeloupe itself where, again, tout [. . .] est inconnu et pourtant reconnu
(p. 177). The Creole language is a vital part of all that is familiar yet unfamiliar for the narrator and she at last feels enabled to ramener au jour le
parler que Man Ya a depose en nous-memes (p. 198). The sense of
longing la faim that has always been with her at last has
something concrete to which to attach itself.
It may thus at rst appear that the narrator has fullled the melancholic
fantasy of recapturing the lost sense of wholeness that should ensue from a
narcissistically healthy childhood that she has escaped lasting racial melancholia by identifying her lost object as both the maternal space of Guadeloupe and what, after Kristeva, we might term the semiotic tongue of
Creole. Such an interpretation, however, would be to oversimplify
Pineaus text and its exploration of racial melancholia. Here, as for
Kristeva and Miller, the melancholics desire for a half-remembered sense
of wholeness is one that will always remain unfullled, because the time
for that wholeness has passed and can never be recreated. The narrator

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249

was not, after all, born in Guadeloupe. This is un retour au pays pas natal
(LExil, p. 193); everything is not quite familiar, she does not quite belong,
her Creole is imperfect and heavily accented with French. Her journey has
been more than a simple return; it has been a series of departures from
France, to Africa, to France again, to Martinique, to Guadeloupe. What is
more, these departures are experienced as losses, and as she comments when
they nally leave for Guadeloupe, dans chaque depart on abandonne
toujours un peu de soi (LExil, p. 211). This time it is her childhood
that she is nally giving up; her arrival in Guadeloupe coincides, she
feels, with her entrance into adulthood. This is signicant, as it signals
her ability to recognize what she has lost the racial grief that she has
suffered through having her childhood in France and being forced to
live a condensed version of it in Martinique. Crucially, she recognizes this
loss, mourns it, and moves forward into adulthood aware that what she is
leaving behind cannot be regained. This is vitally different from the melancholia of the narcissistically disturbed child described by Miller who,
like the narrators father, constantly seeks what she has lost, convinced
that it exists while remaining totally unaware of what it might be.
Thus the narrator is able to effect successful individuation and to move
into adulthood having acknowledged her loss having integrated it, in
Freuds terms, through mourning as opposed to melancholia.45 She is
therefore able to move on from melancholia in a way that neither her grandmother nor her father ever are. What is more, by the end of her narrative she
has shifted all her ill-dened feelings of loss, abandonment, and grief away
from a maternal object that she has gured geographically as Africa,
Martinique, Guadeloupe and on to her grandmother. When her grandmother dies, Julia is able to manifest the resolution of her melancholia
through literal and successful mourning. As she explains at the end
of the novel: [Man Ya] nest jamais partie, jamais sortie de mon cur.
Elle peut aller et virer a` nimporte quel moment dans mon esprit [. . .]
Elle est la`, dans le temps daujourdhui, vivante (LExil, p. 218).
Thus we see how the narrator, her father and her grandmother negotiate
the racial grief of those migrant subjects who, historically, have always functioned as Frances melancholic objects a repository for the nations
ambivalent sense of loss, a constant reminder of both the glory and threat
of the ideal of hospitality. The work of younger generations of what Jack
identies as outward looking writers, like Pineau, from those parts of
the French nation that are at once geographically peripheral and psychologically central, does indeed speak volumes about Frances national
depression. For Druon, these writers like Julia in her sons army
greatcoat represent the threat of contamination and impurity that is at
45

Mourning and Melancholia, pp. 000.

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SAM HAIGH

the root of this depression. For him, the solution lies in the redoubling of
the efforts of institutions like the Academie Francaise, institutions with
whose very existence Kristeva takes issue in Contre la depression nationale.
For her, the Academie Francaise is symptomatic of a specically French
tendency to enracin[er] leur image identitaire dans la langue (p. 71), a
tendency that is always exacerbated during periods of national depression
and their attending repli identitaire (p. 71). Indeed, as if with Druon
himself in mind, she deplores having to read, during such periods, tel journaliste digne successeur de Verdurin qui vous sert les stereotypes du protectionnisme stylistique et philosophique (p. 72).
For Kristeva, it is the existence of institutions such as the Academie
Francaise that makes France particularly inhospitable to the foreign
writer, who must be kept out of the temple of the French language
precisely because it fears the metissage that such openness may bring
(Contre la depression nationale, p. 72). In this she echoes Pivot, who also, as
we have seen, views the Academie Francaise as xenophobic in its protectionism, inhospitable to external inuence, unwilling to grant [un] permis de
sejour to elements that it considers to be irresolvably sans-papiers.
However, as we have also seen, it is not enough simply to declare oneself
hospitable and open to the other without rst examining the implications
of these ideals, and ones motives for embracing them. To look to writers
like Pineau, as does Jack, primarily as a means of rescuing French literature
from solitude and introspection or, as does Kristeva, because of what they
may teach us about national depression, is to miss what Cheng calls
the history of disarticulated grief.46 It is to miss the history, that is, of
racial melancholia viewed from the perspective of the melancholic object
as raced subject.47
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

46

The Melancholy of Race, p. 29.

I should like to thank Maureen Haynes for all of her help during the writing of this article, and also
for drawing my attention to the work of Alice Miller.
47