La collaboration remarquable du couple d’écrivaines et activistes culturelles martiniquaises, Claude et Magdeleine Carbet, de 1928 à 1958

The reedition of the collection of short stories Féfé et Doudou, Martiniquaises has allowed to unearth the works of the couple of women writers and lovers Claude and Magdeleine Carbet, produced with four hands over some thirty years between Paris and Martinique. Recent studies have reminded of the long neglected role played by other Martinique women, such as Suzanne Césaire and the Nardal sisters, in Antillean cultural life. As it happened, Claude and Magdeleine Carbet, who met at the Pensionnat for girls of Fort-de-France, belonged to the same intellectual and artistic networks of colonial France, active in Paris between the two World wars. We remind here of the bold public conference given by Olympe Claude for the 1931 inauguration of a mixed masonic lodge called « L’émancipation des femmes » in Fort-de-France, and of the extraordinary work furnished by the two writers as founders and managers of the monthly colonial bulletin Ceux d’outre-mer in Paris from 1937 to 1939. Reunited in Fort-de-France after 1945, they opened a library in the city center and animated together, for over twelve years, the cultural scene of a Martinique now integrated in the « Union française ». Their collections of poems, songs and short stories –composed in an exceptional sisterly spirit– are certainly impregnated with a « regional » culture, but cannot be reduced to an exotic « doudouiste » production, though Jack Corzani sometimes did so in his monumental encyclopedias.