In her 2021 novel Ady, soleil noir, Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau draws on her imaginative and historical skills to reimagine the life and subjectivity of Adrienne Fidelin (1915–2004), a Guadeloupean dancer in 1930s Paris and a little-known muse, model, and lover of American photographer Man Ray. Winner of the 2021 Prix du roman historique, the book offers a compelling interpretation of how Fidelin, staged as the first-person narrator ‘Ady’, may have understood her identity among artists of the avant-garde milieu and as a woman of colour within the context of 1930s Paris. This article examines the ‘disorderly’ subjectivity of the novel’s narrator-protagonist, to adopt Kaiama Glover’s term, arguing that she negotiates the challenges underpinning her status as a woman of colour in Western avant-garde culture and, in doing so, chooses to prioritize her own selfhood.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

Dans son roman de 2021 Ady, soleil noir, l’auteure guadeloupéenne Gisèle Pineau puise dans son imagination et ses talents historiques pour réinventer la vie et la subjectivité d’Adrienne Fidelin (1915–2004), danseuse guadeloupéenne des années 1930 à Paris et muse, mannequin et amant du photographe américain Man Ray. Lauréat du Prix du roman historique 2021, le livre offre une interprétation convaincante de la façon dont Fidelin, mise en scène à la première personne comme narratrice ‘Ady’, aurait compris son identité parmi les artistes du milieu d’avant-garde et en tant que femme de couleur dans le contexte de Paris des années 1930. Cet article examine la subjectivité ‘en désordre’ de la narratrice-protagoniste du roman, constatant que cette dernière affronte les défis associés à son statut de femme guadeloupéenne dans la culture occidentale de l’avant-garde et que, ce faisant, elle accorde la priorité à ses propres choix.

Ady, soleil noir omits the majority of Ady’s life from its purview to focus on the vibrant Parisian avant-garde moment from the beginning of the 1930s to the outbreak of the Second World War, a period that Pineau refers to as ‘cette parenthèse enchantée entre les deux guerres’.¹¹ The author takes care, however, to foreground the cultural, racial, and historical context that moulds her narrator’s upbringing, positioning Guadeloupe as the original site of Ady’s life-changing trauma. In the initial chapter of the novel, the narrator, Ady, explains that she migrated to France at the age of fifteen largely because of the horrific 1928 cyclone in Guadeloupe that killed over 1,000 people, including her mother, and eventually led to the premature death of her father. Ady’s family left their island homeland to escape reminders of their loss. Yet, in moving to France with her family, Ady encountered new difficulties. Notably, the novel portrays the more subtle forms of racism that existed in France at the time, due in large part to its colonial ties to Guadeloupe.¹² After arriving in Paris with her siblings to join their older sister Raymonde in January 1931, Pineau’s protagonist evokes the imperial links that bind France and Guadeloupe: ‘À Paris, si je dis que je viens de la Guadeloupe, les gens s’écrient: ‘“Ah! La Guadeloupe! L’une des plus vieilles colonies de nos Antilles françaises! …”’.¹³ The novel posits, furthermore, that exclamations of affection and enthusiasm towards the Caribbean island point not only to France’s imperial paternalism, but also to a violent history of enslavement and colonial submission: ‘je sais [que] mon petit pays [est] amarré à la France par des liens obscurs d’amour et de haine, des souvenirs d’esclavage, chaînes et coups de fouet, ancêtres nègres marrons poursuivis par des molosses, marqués au fer, estropiés …’.¹⁴ Pineau’s authorial voice emerges in force in statements such as these, her entire body of work being devoted to explorations of French Caribbean identity.¹⁵

Although it draws attention to the violence and racism at the origin of French Caribbean relations, Ady, soleil noir foregrounds the complexities of this colonial bond. Specifically, the novel suggests that the trauma suffered by Ady’s family due to the 1928 cyclone has the potential to render them more receptive to imperial notions relating to France’s supposed cultural ‘superiority’. Ady’s sister Raymonde, for example, declares: ‘[s]ans père ni mère, à quoi bon rester dans cette Guadeloupe écrasée de souffrances, cancans et sorcellerie … Faut quitter cet enfer!’¹⁶ For Raymonde, the French métropole is, by contrast, ‘le pays de Maurice Chevalier, des fraises, des pommes, des poires et du fromage … Y a pas de méchants cyclones en France …’.¹⁷ Evoking stereotypical, and even romanticized, impressions of French culture and associating the nation with a sense of safety and stability, Raymonde evinces a more traditional form of respect towards the colonial motherland.

Ady internalizes the situation differently, namely by balancing her nostalgic feelings towards her island homeland with her embrace of Parisian avant-garde culture. On the one hand, she retains a deep connection to her ‘Guadeloupe chérie’ and, throughout the novel, evokes the love she has for her island despite its association with death and destruction.¹⁸ She expresses this enduring link in numerous ways, losing herself in the music of the biguine,¹⁹ cooking Guadeloupean delicacies, and regaling her younger family members with stories from her childhood. In this way, Pineau’s first-person protagonist seeks to escape from the trauma of the cyclone and the deaths of her parents by retaining aspects of her Guadeloupean identity. Therefore, rather than renouncing her homeland, as Raymonde does, Ady seeks nostalgia.²⁰ On the other hand, however, Ady simultaneously engages with the more subversive and marginal spaces of French culture at the time, namely the avant-garde dancehalls and jazz clubs in which Joséphine Baker made her name and the cultural milieu of surrealist icons such as Man Ray. Rather than valorize traditional forms of Frenchness, as Raymonde does, Ady immerses herself in the underground and creatively innovative spaces of Paris during the 1930s.

This tension between retaining aspects of her Guadeloupean culture and heritage and engaging with modern Parisian culture emerges most obviously in her dancing practice. For Ady, dancing is a professional activity that allows her to express her cultural ties to the Caribbean and, paradoxically, enables active participation in white avant-garde culture. For Ady, dancing is a means of enacting a seemingly contradictory process of both remembering and forgetting: ‘Je danse, transportée là-bas. De retour au pays. Tant d’images bruissent dans ma mémoire. Celles-là ne me quittent jamais’.²¹ Working as an exotic dancer and frequenting the famed bal colonial on the rue Blomet in Paris, also known as the bal Nègre, Ady encounters several communities who all seek, in one way or another, to find a place for themselves in the uncertainty of the interwar period. From the time it opened in 1924, the bal colonial on the rue Blomet became a haven for Blacks and whites alike, bringing together diverse diasporic Black communities from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, as well as wealthy whites and those keen to identify with artistic avant-gardism. As Rachel Gillett asserts, ‘[p]eople of different nationalities came into contact, danced, talked, and took advantage of the freedom to cross the color line that Paris and the “color-blind” French audience seemed to offer’.²² In this setting, Ady engages both with the small Franco-Caribbean community based in Paris at the time as well as with a wider milieu of African entertainers who are portrayed as sharing a similar desire to reconnect with their country of origin through their bodies: ‘Nous, les Noirs, on est pris d’une fièvre de cheval à cause de la musique des îles qui entre en nous par tous les trous du corps’.²³

Ady’s profession as an ‘exotic’ dancer in Paris is inextricably tied to certain aspects of white avant-garde culture. This is because white creatives in Paris at the time, including members of the surrealist movement, also frequented the dancehalls and jazz clubs like the bal colonial. These white artists sought to lose themselves in the vibrancy of Black culture, but in quite a different manner to the diasporic communities. To its European guests, nightclubs, dancehalls, and their ‘coloured’ entertainers were seductive, exotic, and foreign. In these nocturnal spaces of Paris during the 1930s, artists of colour would perform for and entertain the white guests.²⁴ A dancer and model, Fidelin was among these figures who formed part of the cultural landscape of Paris in the 1930s. Pineau portrays Ady in such a way as to suggest that Guadeloupean dance allows her to temporarily escape the trauma of her past and, in doing so, embrace the vibrancy of avant-garde Parisian culture; for Pineau’s Ady, dancing provides a means of experiencing joy in her adopted home. The narrator indeed declares that ‘[elle est] là pour ça: chasser les idées noires, faire la nique au malheur, oublier la mouise et la douleur. Joie, jouer, jouir’.²⁵ The final three words of this excerpt, repeated at various moments in the novel, implicitly nod to surrealist values such as freedom, joy, pleasure, love, and sexuality. Ady’s dancing in the exotic nightclubs and dancehalls of Paris is in this way a means of using her Guadeloupean identity to engage with subversive avantgarde culture. Dancing allows Ady to free herself from trauma and, like the surrealists, from the constraints of modern society: ‘Tout le monde veut vivre au présent. Danser au bal Blomet, c’est comme porter des œillères au bord d’un précipice. Plus rien n’existe alentour’.²⁶ Although, historically, the bal colonial was a space predominantly occupied by African and Caribbean communities,²⁷ Pineau stages Ady’s first meeting with Ray at this location. In doing so, she uses Ady’s participation in Parisian nightlife to position her at a very particular crossroads: dancing within the Caribbean and African diaspora community and thus reconnecting with and escaping from her past, Ady also exists as a part of white culture through her role as a performer. By literally dancing in and out of these different groups, Ady eschews any notion of a fixed subjectivity.

In an ideological sense, Ady is furthermore a character who refuses to loyally anchor herself in diasporic racial politics and she embraces, rather, the revolutionary doctrine of the surrealists. Pineau locates the hedonistic atmosphere of the bal colonial against developing Black pride movements such as Négritude, which were taking shape in the minds of such luminaries as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas in 1930s Paris. In her rehabilitation of Ady, Pineau also seeks to highlight women such as the Nardal sisters who played critical roles in laying the foundations for Négritude and who, like Ady, have been systematically excluded from history.²⁸ Through her own encounters with certain members of the Caribbean diaspora, as well as with family members and their acquaintances at the Sorbonne, Ady evinces her awareness of some of the intellectual debates about identity and, somewhat surprisingly, her desire to remove herself from such contentious issues. That is, she expresses her resistance to the thorny issues surrounding racial politics of the period, asking herself ‘[e]st-ce que tous ces combats me concernent? Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire: l’âme des peuples noirs?’²⁹ Instead, Ady perceives her status as an exoticized muse as a paradoxically empowering means of imposing her ‘otherness’ as a Guadeloupean woman: ‘En vérité, je suis moi. Je ne me sens inférieure à personne’.³⁰ Pineau thus portrays Ady as an historical figure who proudly performs her Caribbean identity and transgressively embraces the exoticizing gaze that male surrealists, such as Ray, cast on Black bodies. Although Ady transgresses expectations of modesty, she nonetheless fears condemnation from her family and the politically minded students in her milieu. In particular, she anticipates the shame that they would cast on her if they knew of her romantic involvement with Ray³¹ and her nude modelling for his photographic art projects: ‘Je pense aux étudiants, amis de mes cousins. Que diraient-ils, me voyant avec ce Blanc d’âge mûr? Sans doute seraientils effarés. Est-ce que j’aurais honte? Peut-être devrais-je me planquer pour échapper à leur regard …’.³² This series of rhetorical questions illustrates Ady’s awareness of racial politics at the time, while foregrounding her choice to carve her own path, towards surrealism, despite her intuition that she is betraying her family’s concerns for reputation and morality. The quotation furthermore alludes to the different ways that gender is conceptualized by these communites, namely by surrealism, by her family, and by her acquaintances of the diaspora. While Ady fears and anticipates admonishment from her family and their socially conscious friends for playing the role of a ‘pantin exotique!’,³³ she nonetheless models for Ray, choosing to embrace the Western surrealist attitude of free sexuality without shame. Ady’s words expose a tension between two kinds of ‘gazes’: she seeks to escape the ‘gaze’, and thus the moralizing judgement, of her Caribbean community, paradoxically doing so by seeking out the ‘gaze’ of the famous male surrealist visual artist, Ray.

Ady’s choice to perform for white communities as a dancer thus illustrates a particularly individualistic approach to life and identity, and an enduring regard for her own interests, rather than for familial values and expectations. Pineau’s heroine evinces what Glover calls ‘an ethics of self-regard’ because she prioritizes her own ideas on how she should live in her adopted homeland, ‘disordering’ her family’s expectations of modesty and her diaspora community’s racial politics. Specifically, the wholly surrealist values of freedom, revolution, love, and art emerge implicitly throughout the novel and explicitly in terms such as ‘joie, jouer, jouir’, illustrating that free sexuality, happiness, and creative expression were in fact a means of survival for Ady.

From many perspectives, Ady panders to the eroticizing and exoticizing gaze of white communities at the time. In the 1920s and 1930s, Parisian culture carried an imperialist viewpoint that fetishized Black bodies and culture and, in doing so, projected a very simplistic vision of African and Caribbean cultures that treated them as a monolithic whole. Gillett observes that Black people were often attributed characteristics such as ‘hypersexuality, primitivism, [and] lack of intellect’.³⁴ The adoration of Black culture in this period became known as ‘negrophilia’.³⁵ Such a term, which implies ‘love’ (‘philia’) for the Black minority, is offensive by today’s standards. And yet, although Petrine Archer-Straw specifies that the term is highly problematic because it entrenches the imperial divide between the supposedly ‘civilized’ European and ‘savage’ colonized, she usefully insists that negrophilia was, for the Parisian avant-garde, ‘meant to be provocative and challenging to bourgeois values’.³⁶ Negrophilia had a clear influence on avant-garde art and, more specifically, on the surrealist tradition through what is referred to as ‘primitivism’. An aesthetic appropriation of ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, or ‘tribal’ experience, primitivism appeared in surrealist art through African masks and other stereotypically African objects such as statues and necklaces adorned with bones. Aesthetic primitivism was intended as a kind of compliment to African and Caribbean cultures, evoking the idea that Black culture ‘could replenish and revitalise European culture’.³⁷

This imperialist posturing towards Black culture is depicted at various moments in Pineau’s novel, as in the following example when Ady and Ray dress up to attend a masked ball together: ‘j’ai joué à l’esclave, les seins nus, juste vêtue d’un pagne, une grosse chaîne en toc autour du cou’.³⁸ This is shocking because it recalls a troubling history of enslavement and racism in Guadeloupe, as well as other French colonies across the globe as Ady ‘plays’ the role of the slave. The verb jouer furthermore suggests that Ady performed this submissive role, reminding the reader that French imperialism was alive and well even during the freethinking avant-garde period in Paris. And yet Ady embraces the stereotype of the African primitive in a light-hearted way. Rather than interpret this role as a sign of her oppression, she adopts a more jovial view. She evokes the notion of folie in a statement that resonates with the surrealist embrace of freeing one’s consciousness from societal constraints: ‘On s’amuse d’un rien. On ne rate jamais l’occasion de rire et faire les fous’.³⁹ Pineau’s inclusion of an excerpt from Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal⁴⁰ in the opening pages of her novel further emphasizes the benefits that may be obtained from embracing racial stereotypes and reclaiming them as one’s own:

Found in the closing pages of the Cahier, Césaire in this extract urges his fellow Martinicans to take back their power and ‘own’ the stereotypes white people have applied to them, as suggested by ‘à moi’, as well as the word Négritude itself. In this way, instead of being objects constructed by the all-powerful other, Black Martinicans become active subjects, assimilating or discarding the racial attributes applied to them. With multiple references to the history of enslavement, including ‘le mauvais nègre’, punishments such as the carcan⁴² and the prison, and the stereotyped linking of Black people to dancing, Césaire’s verse is powerful in its denunciation of the oppressive white masters. Furthermore, Pineau infuses this extract with a comment on gender, at once acknowledging the insights of a canonical male French Caribbean writer, while placing his text in the context of the reinscription of female agency. This constitutes another example of Pineau’s skilful rehabilitation of women in history. As we discuss later in this article, Pineau reveals that the reappropriation of racial stereotypes can bring both material and ideological advantages to those who adopt them, evident in Ady’s example as well as the more well-known Joséphine Baker.

Exhibiting her own disorderly subjectivity, Ady finds agency in surrealist values. The surrealists famously cherished individual liberation from the shackles of societal judgement and, taking inspiration from Freudian theory, welcomed the release of the desires that the ‘civilized’ modern man repressed. Ady embraced the surrealist tradition through her contribution to its primitivist aesthetics and poetics, namely because she allowed her body to be fetishized, as did other muses to the surrealists (including Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and Nusch Éluard). Such a ‘disorderly’ embrace of the surrealist values of freedom and sexuality emerges in an immediate sense on the book’s front cover, which displays a photograph by Ray of Fidelin completely naked. This photograph matches other sensual portrayals of nude women, strongly eroticized figures forming the centrepieces of many surrealist works of the period. Ady’s apparent transgressive willingness to disrobe and be photographed nude is directly foregrounded in the photographs that are reproduced throughout the book. Furthermore, the narrator frequently describes modelling for Ray, including when she poses nude with another surrealist muse, Nusch Éluard. Ady reminisces on her experience of this photograph, proclaiming that she and Nusch are ‘au service de l’art’.⁴³ These words further evoke surrealism, a movement that championed the irrational workings of the subconscious and valorized art for its ability to unlock the inner workings of the mind. To dedicate oneself to art was a key part of the surrealist ethos, as its proponents sought to unbridle the individual from societal constraints in favour of a more poetic embrace of art and life.

Ady’s immodesty represents a deep affront to the values of her family and their Guadeloupean diasporic community. When her cousins’ friends implore her to ‘arrêter de faire les poupées noires, Ady! … Vous nous faites honte!’,⁴⁴ Ady simply responds: ‘Je dis que personne ne va m’empêcher de danser. Et si les Blancs aiment ça, c’est tant mieux pour eux’.⁴⁵ Ady’s disregard for the values of her diasporic milieu re-emerges in a dinner-table dialogue between Ady, Raymonde, and an elderly friend of their deceased mother, drawing attention to the values espoused by Ady’s family in Guadeloupe for whom maintaining respectability is key to their social status: ‘Ady, sois raisonnable. Les gens vont finir par le savoir en Guadeloupe …’.⁴⁶ These kinds of familial admonishments of Ady’s nonconformity to the desires of her family invade her subjectivity. Immediately after her first photoshoot with Ray, the narrator expresses her struggle to resolve the tension between her desire to be a surrealist model and her internalized shame about her body: ‘Quand il me dit d’aller me rhabiller, je me trouve bien bête. Je ramasse mes affaires et file derrière le paravent. Dans ma tête, une vilaine voix souffle sa méchanceté “espèce de pantin exotique! Tu nous fais honte!”’⁴⁷ Once again, the novel exposes a tension between the familial and community values to which Ady feels she must be faithful, and her desire to integrate into avant-garde culture, despite the enduring affection that she feels for her homeland. In this passage, she is astonished to find herself in the studio of the illustrious Man Ray, though she must negotiate the tension between, on the one hand, her family’s desires for her in France and how she imagines they would reprimand her if they knew what she was doing and, on the other hand, her own independence within her adopted homeland.

Pineau’s novel approaches the contentious topic of aesthetic primitivism and women’s fetishized portrayal in art with a degree of nuance and historical accuracy, since it acknowledges that cultural and artistic forms of objectification could in fact operate as a means of reasserting selfhood. Within the context of 1930s Paris, entertainers of colour like Fidelin sought agency through their own objectification for two main reasons. First, negrophilic culture and primitive art represented a radical rebellion against traditional bourgeois values, and such a revolt in life and art was the surrealist modus operandi. Paris, famous for the artistic innovation of the modernist period from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, had a reputation for being a progressive and open-minded hub, in stark contrast to the antisemitism brewing in the rest of Europe and to the segregationist policies of the United States during this period. Negrophilia and primitivism formed part of what was then considered an extremely progressive and left-wing stance. Despite reproducing the imperialistic relationship between white and Black communities, this culture represented a radical rejection of bourgeois tradition, a wholehearted embrace of freedom in both art and life, and a progressive – rather than conservative – openness to the different and the unknown.

Second, negrophilia and primitivism provided a perverted form of agency to people of colour because, in the context of Paris in the interwar period, the Black performer’s adherence to problematic racial stereotypes offered a means of achieving cultural, social, and economic mobility. Pineau foregrounds this in the novel by positioning Ady’s willingness to engage in and manipulate racial stereotyping against the backdrop of the more famous Joséphine Baker, who had arrived in Paris from the United States in the 1920s. In the novel, we read that Baker ‘a fait ce que ces Blancs attendaient d’elle’.⁴⁸ However, there is an important contrast to be made between Baker and Ady in their different ethnic backgrounds. Gillett writes that there were important differences between Black Americans and Black French people: while the former accepted ‘France’s claim to be color-blind’, the latter ‘identified, at least partially, as French’.⁴⁹ Black Americans were therefore considered more palatable than Black French people such as Ady. The former presented no threat to French society, while it was crucial that French colonial subjects be maintained in their subordinate position if France’s mission civilisatrice was to reign supreme. Significantly, though, while the mission’s end goal was allegedly ‘Frenchness’, this status was actually unattainable. Pineau makes these points evident in her portrayal of the 1931 Universal Exhibition that forms an important backdrop to her book and, as Gillett asserts, ‘[o]ne of the greatest exhibits on show was the value system that underpinned the French colonial exercise’.⁵⁰

Baker is an iconic example of the fact that select members of the Black minority in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s in a sense benefitted from the problematic nature of negrophilic white culture. This is largely because her approach to negrophilia and primitivism afforded her a large degree of fame and financial prosperity, eventually enabling her the freedom to undertake more socially minded activities in the French Resistance and the civil rights movement. In November 2021, French president Emmanuel Macron inducted Baker into the Panthéon in Paris – France’s Tomb of Heroes – as only the fifth woman and the first, albeit American, woman of colour to be accorded this honour, in part due to her efforts in bolstering France’s image as a strong member of the European resistance to Nazism during the Second World War. Archer-Straw, who makes frequent reference to Baker’s place in French society during the 1920s and 1930s, explains the way in which

Ady navigated a middle ground between adopting a similar role to other surrealist muses and models like Nusch Éluard or Lee Miller, who performed their sexuality, and allowing her racial identity as a woman of colour to be fetishized. According to Gillett:

Furthermore, if, as Archer-Straw suggests, Black performers sought to diminish their difference from white communities, alongside other performative strategies that exploited their physical features for entertainment, it is significant that Ady, like Baker, is a woman with a ‘brown’ or ‘café au lait’ complexion.⁵³ With both white and black ethnic backgrounds, Fidelin and Baker are mixed-race, or métisse. The two figures may thus be interpreted as more acceptable to their European spectators because they were ‘almost white’ performers who nonetheless embodied the intriguing and mysterious ‘Other’.⁵⁴ The novel thus captures the historical notion that many artists of colour living in the relatively progressive, open-minded, and creatively vibrant milieu of interwar Paris recognized the possibility of cultural, social, and economic mobility in negrophilia and primitivism.

It is through the links that Ady, soleil noir establishes with the history of Parisian avant-garde culture that we interpret Pineau’s heroine as a disorderly character, in the sense that Glover describes. Ady does not conform to the conservative values of her upwardly mobile, middle-class upbringing in Guadeloupe and, instead, embraces surrealist doctrine: she allows her body to be eroticized like other surrealist muses and exoticized like other Black performers of the period, such as Baker, in a move to improve her individual circumstances. In doing so, she experiences the financial benefits of involving herself in the artistic milieu of Paris. Immediately prior to Ady’s first visit to Ray’s studio, for example, when her younger brother asks her ‘[q]u’est-ce que tu veux faire chez ce monsieur?’,⁵⁵ Ady replies:

This passage contrasts a nostalgic and romanticized vision of life in Guadeloupe with the capitalist pace of European life. Moreover, it exemplifies the fact that Ady sought to achieve success and independence in the Western context in the most glamorous way possible, that is, because the ‘monsieur’ to whom her younger brother refers is the formidable surrealist photographer Man Ray. To achieve notoriety, Ady uses her skin colour to her advantage, emulating her illustrious forebear, Baker, who became world famous for her ‘banana dance’.

Additionally, Ady’s positive response to the negrophilia and primitivism of the Parisian avant-garde was the only way that she was able to access the carefree surrealist lifestyle. It earned her a place as the first woman of colour to appear in the high-profile fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar,⁵⁷ even though the previous magazine editor had forbidden photographs of people of colour in the magazine.⁵⁸ In some respects, this photoshoot opportunity represents Ady’s ability to move beyond her sense of racial inferiority and to feel as though she was a unique and beautiful equal within Euro-American culture. Nonetheless, as art historian Wendy Grossman argues, the photographs of her in Harper’s Bazaar bear several obvious ‘cultural markers of her otherness [which] lend an exotic and sexualised air to the image’,⁵⁹ thus accentuating her fetishized role as ‘Other’. Following the shoot for Harper’s Bazaar, Pineau’s protagonist reflects on the paradoxically problematic yet empowering nature of this situation:

This foregrounds what we refer to as Ady’s strategic embrace of surrealist primitivism, that is, her adherence to racial stereotypes in order to improve her personal situation and those of the Black minority. She does so by following in the footsteps of Baker who, in Ady’s view, uses her racial identity to create ‘des images exotiques’ that may raise the visibility of performers of colour. In this way, Pineau’s portrayal of Ady reveals a disorderly subjectivity because her protagonist resists adhering to the ideals of her family and to the Guadeloupean diasporic community of the time. Baker, for whom Ady repeatedly expresses her adoration, is an iconic example of this strategic embrace of Western values: despite earning worldwide fame by conforming to the simplistic and problematic stereotypes associated with her skin colour, later in life, Baker became an advocate for Black rights and a symbol of French pride for her place in the Resistance. Pineau thus suggests that Ady prioritizes her own selfhood. Notably, she demonstrates an independence of mind regarding the fact that people of colour may access racial justice using whatever means that are available to them and, in this instance, by conforming to racial stereotypes. Ady adopts this viewpoint at the expense of her Guadeloupean community values, choosing to escape personal trauma from the 1928 cyclone and overlook more subtle forms of racism to find happiness and freedom, even if this involves adhering to problematic racial stereotypes.

Today, surrealism is considered to be one of the most influential artistic movements of the twentieth century. And yet, during the 1930s, the group represented a radical rebellion against traditional bourgeois values and existed on the fringes of mainstream culture. Pineau emphasizes this aspect of surrealism’s history, notably when she portrays the group discussing their movement in revolutionary and abstract artistic terms. Ady summarizes the mood of group conversations: ‘le surréalisme n’est ni un feu de paille ni un coup d’épée dans l’eau. C’est un état d’esprit, un grand art’.⁶¹ She evokes the surrealist view that the movement is neither an ephemeral whim nor a fated failure, but a radical and revolutionary shift in thinking about life and art. The male figures of the movement were therefore, in themselves, marginal, because they strongly rebelled against the mainstream societal values of their day.

The women artists of the movement were, furthermore, marginalized within the group itself. Pineau’s fictional rendering of the gendered dynamics surrounding the movement is sensitive, at certain moments capturing a key element underpinning the question of women and surrealism: although male artists valorized feminine beauty and although the female body is a recurring source of fascination within surrealist aesthetics and poetics, women as creators were excluded from certain creative spaces of the movement.⁶² Susan Rubin Suleiman thus argues that women surrealist artists were ‘doubly marginal’.⁶³ By this, Suleiman usefully points out that the muses, models, and mistresses of the surrealist movement (including Adrienne Fidelin, Lee Miller, Nusch Éluard, and Valentine Penrose, to name just a few) were a group marginalized by surrealism, a group that already existed on the fringes of mainstream culture. This situation is reminiscent of women’s unacknowledged role in the Négritude movement, with both examples illuminating Pineau’s overall nuanced interpretation of history. In approaching the question of women and surrealism, the author evinces an acknowledgement of the kind of double marginality that Suleiman writes about. Not only does she foreground the subversive nature of surrealist culture and politics, she also attempts to capture the idea that white women artists, including Dora Maar and Lee Miller, who both appear in the novel, struggled to move beyond their status as sensual muses and be recognized by their male counterparts as artists in their own right. We read, for example, that ‘Dora ne participle guerre à nos parlotes de femmes. Elle se mêle plus aisément aux conversations des hommes. Elle essaye de se faire une place parmi ces messieurs. Elle pèse ses mots pour qu’ils lui prêtent un peu d’attention’.⁶⁴ In passages such as these, Pineau hints at the fact that although Dora Maar played the traditionally ‘feminine’ role of muse and lover to the core (male) members of the surrealist group, she was also a talented and ambitious artist in her own right. This suggests that although Maar was a comparatively intellectual person who enjoyed discussions with her male counterparts, she needed to be more strategic in her behaviour to gain their respect. By describing Maar as a woman attempting to create a place for herself ‘parmi ces messieurs’, Pineau alludes to the ‘double marginality’ of the women of the surrealist movement.

Pineau’s fictional rendering of Fidelin captures what we could call a ‘triple marginality’. Ady is an intersectional character, as she exists on the fringes of society due to her specific relationship to societal categories such as class, gender, and ethnicity.⁶⁵ Despite her relatively well-to-do family background, she chooses to embrace a more bohemian lifestyle, attaching herself to a surrealist milieu and thus freeing herself from the constraints of bourgeois society. Ady also occupies a specific role in the surrealist milieu due to her gender, as she is a sensual muse eroticized by iconic male artists. She is, furthermore, an exoticized Guadeloupean dancer within a predominantly white community. Crucially, Pineau does not portray Ady as triply marginal in such a way as to strip her of agency and a sense of selfhood; the author instead suggests that Fidelin was not just associated with the surrealist movement, but that she influenced it from within. ⁶⁶ Recuperating Adrienne Fidelin from the margins of history and insisting on her influential role in the surrealist movement, Pineau portrays a woman who resisted the community-centred expectations of the Guadeloupean diaspora, while using the negrophilic culture of the avant-garde to bolster her own sense of selfhood.