Content Notice: This article contains discussions of colonial violence and suicide.
Dr Doyle D. Calhoun teaches and works on a range of topics related to African and Caribbean literatures and cinemas; Senegalese literature and cinema in French and Wolof; the archives and afterlives of French slavery; Négritude; and the literature of decolonization. He is University Assistant Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.
Dr Calhoun’s recent monograph, The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire, was published by Duke University Press in October 2024. In this conversation, he discusses the relationships between history and literature, the definition of archives, erasure, memory, and multilingual scholarship.
How much did you talk to historians about this project and how much explicitly historical work did you rely on?
The relationship between history, the archive and literature is one way of thinking about the project in general, I would say. The turn to literature was partly due to the paucity of historiographical work on this topic. There are a few historical studies for the British Empire—the historian Terri Snyder has a really good book on suicide in the British Atlantic world—but beyond that there was no equivalent monograph for the French Empire.
And frankly I think one of the questions of the book became: why is suicide in these contexts such a stumbling block to historical work? Part of that has to do with the dispersed nature of these archives, the fact that many have been destroyed or disappeared, but also because suicide has long been this taboo thing in Western scholarship to an extent.
But I also think that—and I write about this especially in the Introduction—there were very concrete reasons why suicide was kept secret under slavery and colonisation and why it was dissembled or downplayed or made to look like something else, and those reasons were mostly financial. Enslavers could not be reimbursed for the deaths of enslaved persons who died by suicide and that meant that there was financial motivation to not present deaths that were clearly the result of suicide.
On the other hand, you do have this body of work from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was obsessed with colonial suicide, and tried to theorise it, tried to document it, often in ways that were overtly racist and part of this broader imperial project. Some abolitionist writing also falls into this category. So for me, the space where these acts were treated in their fullest complexity was in aesthetic works, in literature, in forms that we normally wouldn’t recognise as historical but are doing a kind of work on the past. My suggestion in the book is to take some of these works seriously as archives and alternative histories in their own right.
I think literature in this sense has long been ahead of conventional historiography in that, for postcolonial writers, it’s always been this space of reckoning—and to an extent recovery, of identities that have been lost in traditional archives, recovery of national narratives of resistance, survival, and loss as well.
Do you think that the dichotomy that we draw between history and literature is holding us back?
I think that’s certainly part of it, and in the second chapter of the book, which is called ‘Oral Archives’, I really make the case for taking other forms of narrative and other forms of writing—in this case oral history—seriously as part of the historical record. In some instances we don’t have any other choice because no written trace remains, but in other cases, I think these other forms of history actually do really important work. They don’t have the same relationship to truth values as maybe a written record might—but on the other hand, many colonial records are so false, and so incorrect, that I think the idea that we would take these documents as the only source of truth and information is one of the reasons why this reckoning with colonial power has taken so long, in the French case especially.
So for instance, in the first chapter, Fabienne Kanor’s novel Humus actually takes this very concrete written trace in the archives of slavery: an excerpt from a ship’s log that had been buried in the archives in Nantes for centuries. That’s her point of departure for creating this narrative about the women of the slave ship Le Soleil who had leapt overboard at the same time; no historian had picked up that trace. Or if they had, it was purely for its documentary value, whereas Kanor explodes it and makes it into an expansive choral history.
The first sentence of the book is ‘There is no good way to write about suicide.’ As you put it, sometimes what we’re doing is saying, ‘Let me find you.’ You talk about the impossibility of ever really knowing that people who died by suicide intended to make it a political act, a speech act—but you decided to write the book in the end.
I think I found that as a general tendency in writing about the colonial past, whether it’s in literature or history. It’s understandable, and it’s something that I think appeals to us as humans. We wouldn’t want to be erased or forgotten and so we assume that’s the case for other people.
But when we don’t have access to those people’s motivations, there is this strange trespass that is involved in trying to ‘recover’ someone’s history. I think the idea of recovery itself becomes really fraught and in some ways unethical when we’re talking about suicide, because it’s this really radical instance of self-negation and self-disappearance, self-liquidation, and so the deeper I got into the project the more I found myself questioning what I was doing. What does it mean to go looking for someone whose final gesture was, in some way or another, a form of self-silencing and self-erasure?
So, I start the book with that sentence—that there’s no good way to write about suicide—and I think that becomes a sort of refrain throughout the book. But in the next paragraph, I say, just because there’s no good way to do it, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try, and that there’s nothing to be learned from that exercise. I think the whole project in a way is about how to make that kind of failure, which is inevitable, productive and useful to the present.
If we decide that we want to try to read suicide as text—which is also a fraught exercise—its author disappears the very second that it comes into being. So on a certain level we have no access to that meaning, even if the context seems clear to us, even if there’s a suicide note. There’s always this level of unverifiability and I think that’s where literary activity becomes really important.
I wondered if part of what makes it productive and useful is taking the time period from the eighteenth century to the present and explicitly trying to let that past speak to the present.
The chronological sweep of the book is quite significant, and I think if I were a historian I never would have gotten away with charting the story from the end of the eighteenth century all the way to the present day. And there are certainly risks and disadvantages to that kind of approach. But my goal in organising the book that way was showing how this history of suicidal resistance is ongoing. Increasingly we’re confronted with examples of public self-immolation, and that has a much longer history. In order to try to understand some of these acts and events as a legitimate political language, we have to understand that genealogy.
You present a potential for reckoning with the colonial past through re-narrativising it and re-entextualising it. Do you see that potential being fulfilled in the present, in the writers that you know and work with?
I think these writers provide imaginative forms or models for futures that have not yet existed and for ways of engaging with the past that other kinds of discourses either have yet to do or have only been able to do under extreme pressure. I’m certainly not naive enough to think that literature is going to save the world and resolve our pressing political problems. But I do think that at least with respect to France’s colonial history, the colonial past has to be seen in clearer terms, in the terms that people from formerly colonised spaces are laying out. So it can't come from France. It has to come from Caribbean writers, African writers, Indian Ocean writers.
That’s partly why, in the Conclusion, I end with this very recent report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy—which is actually on the restitution of African art, but makes this bigger point: in order to have restitution, to have reparation, there first has to be a very deliberate re-writing and a kind of correction of what the colonial encounter actually was.
About the word ‘archive’—you raise the terms ‘anarchive’ and ‘other-archive’. There are obvious benefits to calling something an archive in that you point to the fact that it’s doing that memory work, but do you think there are drawbacks in suggesting a chronological structure or an institutional place?
I do think that in French colonial history, increasingly you’re seeing the need to engage with other forms of archiving and other forms of historical records. A recent example of that is Lia Brozgal’s book Absent the Archive, which is about the October 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris. And she really makes the case that in certain cases of state violence and colonial violence, the archive has been deliberately disappeared or so overdetermined that actually the only responsible historical move is to conceive of other possible archives. Certainly historians of slavery have long thought about this question of how to write about an archive that is so structured by loss and exclusion.
And so I think there's been this gradual expansion of ‘archive’ out of necessity and that's partly how I'm thinking about it. But certainly the suicide archive as a category is anti-institutional, insurrectional in some ways. It’s dispersed, it’s fragmentary, and the way that I formulate it is in a constant state of renewal and re-assembly. ‘Archive’ in this book is very much a verb. Not only are the aesthetic works that I’m looking at doing their own kind of archiving, in the nature of how they’re constructed and the traces that they decide to elevate, but also my interest is in looking at the act of suicide itself as a possible archive—as something around which traces, explanations and reactions very quickly assemble. We see this in really clear ways in contemporary forms of suicide as political violence, whether it’s suicide bombing or self-immolation protest. They’re so quickly bound up in other kinds of discourses, and something about that act suddenly being thrust into the public scene I think also attracts texts and textuality in a way.
Do you think we do a disservice to students by teaching them about the difference between primary and secondary sources?
I do think some of these distinctions between what counts as a primary source and what counts as a secondary source are kind of arbitrary and produced through specific disciplines. And what does it mean to take a novel seriously as a primary source in a historical study? How does that change the kind of analysis that's available, and how does that change the discipline as well?
As you’ve mentioned, in studies of the colonial past and present, you have no other choice than to do that.
Right. That gesture is viable too, not just for the colonial period, but also for the postcolonial period—when you have, in many cases, forms of state violence that were directly informed and modelled after colonial forms of violence. Many postcolonial nation-building narratives, when they did take up narratives of suicidal resistance, also overdetermined how they were read or understood. In the first chapter I look at the case of Louis Delgrès and his followers, which has become this kind of national epic in Guadeloupe—an anti-slavery story of emancipation and resistance, but at the same time it’s overshadowed other forms of resistance and survival, especially with respect to the role of women in anti-slavery resistance at the time. Resistance becomes this really complicated category and we risk, I think, romanticising some of these acts if we consider them as examples of pure resistance.
You work in this book in several languages. Do you think that is part of exploding the archive as a totalising record?
I think the linguistic diversity, and hybridity to an extent, of the project emerges on the one hand out of the works that I’m analysing, but on the other hand is part of this methodological choice to work against the monolingual frames that have so long structured French Studies as a discipline. So the idea that this project has a chapter on a novel and an oral history in an indigenous African language is, I think, really important. And that’s not something that I’m adding. It’s something that’s already there and that needs to be recognised and re-inscribed, because these languages have, since the colonial period, always existed alongside and in tension with French. I think we’re doing ourselves, our students and our readers a disservice if we don’t recognise that linguistic complexity.
‘Memorialisation’ is not a word that you use a lot in the book. Do you think it’s a helpful category that brings together historical memory and culture?
I think it’s certainly part of possible engagements with colonial history. Each of the chapters ends with a shorter section that brings us back into the present. And in some cases that’s the space where I actually talk about physical monuments, statues, memorials.
I think those forms of memorialisation are one way of making the colonial past present and available as a space to think about. But I don't think it’s the only way and I don't know that it's the most effective way in certain cases. The risk with memorialisation is that you set up a kind of single story. The even greater risk is that a monument, a national day of remembrance, a law, those become ways of avoiding real reparative action. What’s the value of Macron saying he acknowledges the suffering of Algerians, or the French saying that the slave trade was a crime against humanity, but without paying reparations? Without setting up a system of restorative justice? So I worry that in some cases some of these efforts to memorialise are also alibis for the neocolonial state.
I wanted to ask about your use of the phrase ‘aesthetic forms’.
It’s a kind of category that I’m using to encompass the range of works that I’m looking at. But also hopefully one of the things that becomes evident over the course of the book is that many of these forms that we consider not aesthetic, so the historical record, or the traditional archival document, actually harbour aesthetic possibility. And so in that sense the aesthetic is kind of a contaminating category as well.
I wondered if that critique was a bit of a critique of everything that calls itself non-aesthetic as a claim to objectivity.
I think that’s part of it. Even these things that official discourses and common knowledge want to produce or maintain as non-aesthetic harbour aesthetic possibility and I think there’s a political potential in the aesthetic and the unverifiability of language that’s non-referential. And then a real danger in state efforts to circumscribe how things are signifying or how they can circulate.
You talk about the possibility of suicide shadowing regimes of power and about many other suicide archives waiting to happen. Are you thinking about other contexts for suicides?
In the conclusion there’s a call and an invitation to start to rethink colonial history, not just in the French context but in other contexts, through the lens of suicidal resistance. I think much of that is also just sort of responding to what’s been there for a long time. For instance, I think people often forget that Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, which in some ways created the field of postcolonial studies, is about suicide. The two examples she gives are suicides. I think there’s a reason, and that’s why she considers it as a model for thinking about coloniality and subalternity in discourse. But Foucault as well—in his articulation of resistance, he says there’s always the possibility of resistance so long as someone has the possibility of jumping out of a window. And I think it’s a story that has not been fully told, and I hope that despite the difficulties and despite the challenges, people begin to take it seriously as not just one of the forms of anti-colonial resistance but also one of the ways in which we might start to rethink that past in the present.
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