Flat Prose Dilutes Tale of Caribbean Girl’s Bleak Coming of Age

“Mamzelle Dragonfly” is the story of 16-year-old Adelise, whose life of crushing poverty is eased by her love for a flowering tree in her backyard: “With my heart pounding against its bark, I’d hug it tight till I fell in a kind of daze,” she says. “[It was] as if we were wrapped together . . . turned into one body, one flesh.”

Despite this naive, almost sensual attachment to the unspoiled, natural world, the young girl is soon thrust into the harsh reality of harvesting sugar cane in Martinique, where she endures backbreaking work and sexual abuse at the hands of the commandeur, or overseer. But Adelise has detached herself from the horrors of her situation through a whimsical fatalism and thus does not register the outrage a reader might expect: “[T]hinking it over, I see that my body was never my own . . . my body belongs completely to that tree.”

“Mamzelle Dragonfly,” the first of noted Caribbean writer Raphael Confiant’s novels to be translated from Creole to French and then into English, is the sad journey of this daydreaming innocent through the oppressive realities of life in the Martinique of the 1950s and 1960s. Adelise’s travels are initiated by her mother, who foresees the dead end awaiting her daughter, if not the actual abuse, and sends her to make a better life with her Aunt Philomene in Morne Pichevin, a poor, violent district of Martinique’s capital city, Fort-de-France. Unbeknownst to Adelise’s mother, Philomene herself is a prostitute who, despite her best efforts, can only show her niece one way to make a living. But Adelise is so inured to sexual abuse that upon hearing her fate, she feels “nothing at all.” So whether her clients are a lecherous old man and his son, the “imbecile, dribbling a whitish foam down his chin,” or a jeweler procured by her aunt’s dandified boyfriend, Adelise seems to care only for the fancy clothes turning tricks affords or a bit of gossip in the neighborhood square. The narrowness of her life is exacerbated by author Confiant’s flat, unadorned writing style which, with the exception of occasionally colorful Creole patois, comes off as leaden and dull.

Leaden, too, is Adelise’s plodding romance with Homere, a young man whose major attraction seems to be that he reminds her of home. There is little in the way of character development to engage the reader with Homere or to enliven his love for Adelise. There is more potential for excitement in the political upheaval that appears without warning in the second half of the novel, when a December 1959 revolt in Fort-de-France stirs Homere and his drinking buddies to register voters and attend rallies, albeit for pay. Adelise, Philomene and the gossips in the square are all swept along, even taking part in a deadly riot most of them do not understand. Yet neither these events nor her pregnancy by Homere deters Adelise from turning tricks, even when the consequences turn tragic.

With Adelise so unmoved, it’s hard to muster any sympathy for her situation or that of the other characters of this flimsy, unaffecting novel. When reading novels in translation, one is always left wondering if the skill of the translator has a bearing on the rhythm and quality of the final product. But in this case, one suspects that “Mamzelle Dragonfly’s” short length just didn’t provide enough space to accomplish more than sketches for a richer novel that never made it to the page. Whatever the reason, “Mamzelle Dragonfly” seldom soars with the grace or passion that its name implies.