Chronotropic Writing: A Historical Reflection on My Four Women by Gisèle Pineau

This paper traces the historical deconstruction and development of the concepts of chronotropic writing in My four women by Gisèle Pineau. The themes of interpersonal relations and transgenerational storytelling are not just recurrent features in Gisèle Pineau’s work, but are visible in most narratives of French Caribbean feminist writings. This platitude depicts perfectly its existential, phenomenological, as well as socio-political and cultural dispositions. This assertion is not far-fetched from the relatively recent times that Caribbean writers have begun to throw off their former shackles of a servile fixation with European culture and values. This has consequently galvanised the immense creativity of the Caribbean writers as a whole. Gisèle Pineau’s My Four Women analyses an oral archive and a closed space in Caribbean women’s writing. This justifies the inherent historical passage that tends to preoccupy the socio-political literary space of the French Caribbean. The original version written in French as Mes quatre femmes (2007) reenact scenes from the past and tell stories on how Guadeloupian women in general, especially Pineau’s different generations and descendants have imparted knowledge about how they passed through the trauma of enslavement, colonialism, migration and marginalisation.