LES VOIX DU VOLCAN : L'ECRITURE DU MAL-ETRE DANS LE ROMAN FEMININ DE L'ILE DE LA REUNION

Abstract

In my dissertation I examine how Creole women in the Reunion Island confront problems of racial and social oppression in their novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. I focus on their particular preoccupations with the haunting persistence of colonial racism in the lives of Creole individuals. Their autobiographical accounts represent a sample of Reunionese postcolonial literature and the range of issues their novels address also reflects the tragic history of the island. In their testimonies, the authors especially stress the struggle against cultural censorship, self-denial, racial discriminations and, above all, against the destructuration of Creole identity. Even though I concentrate my study on three novels, Anne Cheynet's Les Muselés (1977) Rose-May Nicole's Laetitia (1986), and Monique Boyer's Métisse (1992), I draw parallels with other women writers' works from the French Caribbean, Mauritius and the United States. Thus I demonstrate that this inferiority feeling looms over any societies that suffered the cruelties of slavery and injustices of colonialism as the

past suffering and traumas are passed from generations on.