Abstract

The pervasive presence of violence in Caribbean literature, whether the writers are masculine or feminine, requires more than a cursory overview. The Haitian writers, Marie Vieux and Marie-Therese Colimon and the Guadeloupean writers, Maryse Conde and Simone Schwarz-Bart all present violence in the novels chosen for this study. In tracing the ambiguities in philosophical, sociological, psychological and biological discussions of violence, it becomes evident that there is no single answer to the "problem" of violence. Certain theoriticians affirm that violence is inherent, necessary and even salutory for the human race while others counter that violence can and should be avoided, modulated or restricted. Those who espouse the "pro" violence position generally exclude or reduce women as a valid category of beings, while those that struggle to reduce violence hold more egalitarian views towards all members of the human race. The first approach manifests itself in what we term the "discourse of Me" where exclusion and/or reduction of the "Other" is both necessary and justified. The second approach, despite the difficulties encountered in the process, strives to include the "Other" and furnishes the groundwork for what we term the "discourse of alterity." In effect, how violence is deployed in discourse is in some sense determined by whether the writer is male or female: historically, male writers tend to reproduce discursive violence without questioning its function while women writers tend to utilize their writing as a means of subverting discourse which perpetuates violence. Yet there are no impermeable boundaries of gender restricting writers to reproduce a particular discourse, only the critera of inclusion or exclusion of the "Other" determines the participation of the writer in the discourse of "egocentrism" or "alterity." Several techniques are identified and explored for the elaboration of the discourse of "alterity" and the novels selected are used to illustrate the proposed model for reading violence