Les Rétifs

by Gerty Dambury

This lyrical novel, structured like a Creole quadrille, is a rich ethnography bearing witness to police violence in French Guadeloupe. Narrators both living and dead recount the racial and class stratification that led to a protest-turned-massacre. Dambury’s English debut is a vibrant memorial to a largely forgotten atrocity, coinciding with the government’s declassification of documents pertaining to the incident.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Poetry, Magical Realism, 21st Century, The World

221 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2012

About the author

Gerty Dambury is a theater director, novelist, and poet from Guadeloupe. She studied at the Sorbonne and has held residencies at Le Centre National du Livre and Le Centre National des Écritures du Spectacle. She won the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde in 2015 for her play Le rêve de William Alexander Brown.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Restless by Gerty Dambury, translated from the French (with some Creole) by Judith G. Miller.

This novel is a wonder. Dambury structures this story of Guadeloupean history in the form of a traditional dance called the quadrille. Popular in 18th and 19th century Europe, the dance continues in varied forms in the former colonies. It is similar to North American square dancing with a caller and set patterns with partners (some good videos on YouTube!) These patterns of the dance dictate the four "movements" of this book. The before, during, and after the violent days of May 1967. Guadeloupe was a French colony (now called an 'overseas region') in the Lesser Antilles region of the Caribbean.

A cast of characters, both alive and recently departed, play narrator in this story. The central character is 9-year old Emilienne Absalon. At this tender age, she witnesses the upheaval, the resistance, and the "snitch" culture of neighbors reporting on neighbors during this time of unrest. Her main concerns are for her beloved teacher, whose subversive teaching methods have her quickly dismissed, leaving the students angry and ready to rise up. Her trials mirror the frustrations of the world around her. Worker strikes, class battles, racial divides in the colony, and police brutality.

Gerty Dambury is a playwright, and her novel shows this provenance. The Restless is stage-crafted. The reader can easily imagine dialogues and monologues on stage.

Many layers with this book. Highly recommended!

*Women in Translation month 2018
--
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge "novel with colonial/post-colonial setting".

[Liesl Mulholland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading a novel set in Guadeloupe and being inspired to dig more and learn about events that I had never know transpired in my Caribbean. I do like how the novel was written/presented in the format of a Quadrille. Would be interested in other work by the author.

[tree · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this a little while ago but the more I think about it, the more I understand this as a really special, complex story. It’s the kind of book that has stayed on my mind, more so than others.

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read an ARC of the Restless so my thoughts may not reflect the final proof of the book. Gerty Danbury creates a book in four parts reflecting a Creole quadrille. The POV switches between the living and the dead, the young and the old, the rich and the poor in Guadeloupe. Most of the POV is seen through nine-year-old Emilienne Absalon. Her child-like view of the world leading up to the violent days of May 1967. Teachers leaving, fathers not coming home, and other disruptions to a child's world. The story unfolded wonderfully, I know next to nothing about Guadeloupe's history so experiencing some of the more modern history was wonderful.

The creole throughout the text was most interesting, I enjoyed it a lot. The narrative was hard to follow at times, it bounced from first person to second to third but the writing was easy to read. The chapters flipped from person to person like a call-and-response in the quadrille The narrative reminded me of These Ghosts Are Family. I wonder about the differences between the original and the translated version I have. The Restless is a short book that shows the unrest from a child's and adult's perspectives. The book was so readable I think I need to slow down to digest some of it again. It's not media to be consumed, it's to be savoured.

[ElenaSquareEyes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may sound weird, but I found The Restless so easy to read and was thirty pages into it before I realised, and that made me instantly like this book. Perhaps it’s because I was in the middle of a fantasy/sci-fi short story anthology when I decided I needed something different. While the short story anthology was good, I struggled going from one story to another when I wanted to spend more time with the different characters or learn more about the different worlds, so it was nice to feel settled in one place with a clearly defined protagonist again.

I really liked how the story unfolded in The Restless. The chapters alternate between Émilienne’s point of view and other character’s point of view. These other characters are family members, neighbours or other people connected to the Absalon family somehow – and some are dead, and some are ghosts. Each character had a distinct voice which certainly helped with the chapters not from Émilienne’s point of view as sometimes they’d start and you wouldn’t be sure who was now recounting their tale, just that it was a different person to before.

Émilienne is a great character. The author does a great job of showing how a child would experience and try to understand suddenly losing an important figure in her life like a teacher. How some things are difficult to explain to a child because they’re to do with governments and fears of communism and having ideas that are deemed inappropriate, but how the child can still pick up on how something isn’t right or is unfair. Add to the fact her father, who she believes can explain to her what happened to her teacher, hasn’t been home for days leads her to be very unsettled. Also, Émilienne and her fellow classmates’ anger and frustrations of the sudden dismissal of their teacher mirrors those of the workers who want their wages to increase.

In The Restless’s prologue, it gives a short overview of the talks between management and construction workers union that led to work stoppages in Pointe-à-Pitre and, after the breakdown of negotiation, violence as the police were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. This is important as it’s the backdrop to Émilienne’s stress of her missing teacher and father, and it provides context for the anti-union sentiment that you slowly learn her teacher was a victim of and provides reasons for her fathers absence.

The Restless is a relatively short but effective book. It juggles its characters well and provides both a child’s perspective to sudden violence that they cant comprehend a reason for, and various adults perspectives, some only just learning about their workers rights, some who have died and were struggling in different ways, and some who are just trying to get by.

[Biblibio · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a brilliant, crackling book. Gerty Dambury's The Restless (translated from French by Judith C. Miller) is one of the best-paced literary dances I've ever read. In its purported dance-like structure (designed around the Guadeloupean quadrille, as a framing style), the book has a stunning call-and-response between the different narrators (many of whom are, no big deal, ghosts) as it builds its story.

Émilienne is the central character, around whom most of the other narratives revolve. At the novel's opening, she sits outside, waiting for her father to come home. She is worried about her teacher, who has abruptly disappeared. Oh, and there's absolute chaos in the streets of Guadeloupe circa May 1967. Émilienne is in "conversation" with the ghosts of her neighbors and semi-strangers, while her numerous older siblings vaguely intervene in the story to convey their concern. Bit by bit, we learn about what's driving Émilienne to sit outside, what's going on, and how things got here. It's not a particularly epic story, but it is most definitely a wide one, and Dambury is remarkable at setting her story at a brisk, snapping pace. (After finishing the book, I learned that she is predominantly a playwright, which somehow makes perfect sense - The Restless is so relentlessly well-paced that it seems only right to come from the hands of someone for whom pacing is a critical part of the craft.)

Gerty Dambury is, alas, a woefully underappreciated writer in English. If The Restless is any indication, she is the sort of writer who needs to be a household name, not someone who as of writing this review doesn't have a Wikipedia article in English. The Restless is SO good in so many different ways, from the clever structure, to the intelligently conversational writing, to the emotionally affecting build-up in making the reader even care about Émilienne and her family. This is a particularly easy book to recommend for fans of experimental fiction (again through that unique dance setup), but it remains wholly enjoyable for those who maybe don't seek out those sorts of internal techniques - I personally often struggle with experimental fiction when it feels like there's not much beyond the technical exercise, but The Restless never feels like that. It's a sharp, smart, well-written, enlightening, and thoughtful book. Highly recommended.

[Darshani Workman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Restless, translated from French, shines the light on the bloody massacre of May '67 in France's department, Guadeloupe.

On 26 May 1967, French police opened fire on striking workers in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Over the following 48 hours, it is estimated that between 8 and 200 people were killed in clashes between protesters and police. Initially, French officials announced that eight people had died, but witnesses and historians have cast doubt on this figure, which appears not to take into account the level of violence, the number of disappearances, and families’ fears of reporting deaths and disappearances to the authorities.

This little treasure of a book focuses on the events of the 26 May and the story is recounted by narrators, both living and dead, in a lyrical way i. e structured like a creole quadrille.

Little Émilienne sits in the courtyard and waits for her father (the owner of a construction company) to come home, because she wants him to explain to her why her teacher (a communist) has disappeared suddenly. She wants to make sense of the tension in the streets.

Émilienne is the last of a large family, and her innocence  emphasizes the gravity of the events that she’s forced to confront, and the bravery with which she does.

Before reading this book, I did not know about this event and it made me read a bit about this Caribbean country. I'm glad I did although unfortunately, 50+ years later, survivors in Guadeloupe are still waiting for France to officially acknowledge the government’s role in the brutality, including the numbers killed by police fire.


#readtheworld
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#gertydambury

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this quickly and apparently with very few notes but this didn't make it not worth a read. To start with I thought it might be a bit like one of my recent reads The Moon Is Following Me, but it definitely has a much darker side and pessimistic outlook - maybe a bit more like Trout, Belly Up though the stories are integrated with each other a bit more. In any case, from the perspective of gaining historical knowledge, the book and the author's interview at the end are great and informative. From a character point of view, the gay neighbour is the best. I think there's probably plenty more to unpack that I haven't quite distilled in my head yet - will work on it.

[Natalie]

This is one of those books that reminded me of a mixture of other books. God's Bits of Wood, The History of a Difficult Child - it's of a child's experience during a watershed moment of political violence. Told through varying perspectives in the form of the recently deceased and Émilienne, we feel the unnerving effect of a place that knows when shit is about to hit the fan, but its people do not necessarily have the correct vocabulary to explain it. In trying to protect the children from the anxiety of the political events, they instead set off a chain reaction of that anxiety manifesting in other ways, thus setting off other conflicts. While I enjoyed the concept of this novel, the execution was not my favorite, and I never know if it's one of those cases where the translation just falls flat.

[Tiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une très belle œuvre à la fois littéraire et théâtrale! J’ai aimé particulièrement le récit d’Henri

[Quincee Soto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read but can get confusing at times shifting between who is speaking and trying to figure out who is speaking.