The feminine erotic in Drasta Houël’s Créoleries

This is the first English translation of Créoleries, a sequence of poems by the Martinican writer Drasta Houël (1868–1949). While Houël generally wrote in French, these five poems are unique in that Houël first composed them in Martinican Creole and then translated them into French for a metropolitan audience. The introduction situates Houël's writing through the doudouist aesthetics that largely characterized French Antillean literature written prior to the négritude movement and argues that Houël subverted the traditional colonialist gaze of this aesthetics by writing from the perspective of the Creole woman of color that doudouism objectified. The introduction also engages in a queer reading of Houël's poetry by examining the gender fluidity of her verse and construction of a feminine erotic space.