The inherent power of resistance: How Canisia Lubrin's debut novel Code Noir reflects on postcolonial agency
Lubrin's Code Noir is based off of the articles decreed by Louis XVI to regulate slavery in colonial France
The Code Noir, or the Black Code, was a set of 59 articles decreed by Louis XVI in 1685 which regulated ownership of slaves in all French colonies. In her debut fiction work, Canisia Lubrin reflects on these codes to examine the legacy of enslavement and colonization — and the inherent power of Black resistance.
With each of its 59 stories accompanied by an illustration by American artist Torkwase Dyson, Code Noir seeks to imagine a better future for its characters. Each impacted by the 59 article decrees of Louis XVI, the linked stories range from contemporary realism and dystopia to futuristic fantasy and historical fiction.
Canisia Lubrin is a Canadian writer, editor and academic who was born in St. Lucia and currently based in Whitby, Ont. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Award and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Her poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It also won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Literary Prize for poetry.
Lubrin spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about Code Noir.
What's amazing about the real life Code Noir, which inspired this book of the same name, is the sheer audacity of it all. It casually codifies inhumane treatment and it defines a group as subhuman, namely Black people. Tell me more about the real life Code Noir.
These articles are part of the grand master narrative of white supremacy, which institutionalized things like the transatlantic slave trade and the many multiform systems of global domination and colonialism.
I'm not a lawyer or legal scholar, but what I found interesting in the codes themselves, as a writer, are those various nodes of narrative domination — and how they have propagated and evolved even into present day jurisprudence and things like the double standards of immigration policies, stop-and-search or stop-and-frisk or carding.
When encountering the codes, I saw that a lot of those ideas are still deeply entrenched in our social structures.
Some stories are set in the Caribbean. Some stories are set in North America. It's interesting how the impacts of enslavement and colonialism reverberate throughout places and locations and time. There's one story in the book where you thrust us to the year 3032 called Wave Runners. It's a piece essentially about exile and resistance, but it doesn't feel like a future that we'd like to visit. Why did you take readers there?
It's interesting because I was having a meal with some friends — and sometimes stories come that way. We had a crab appetizer that was served in the shell. I wondered what caused this crab to evolve with that exoskeleton that should be very menacing; they don't want anybody getting through them to terrorize them and eat them. And I was like, "Yeah, kind of like Black people."
And so I imagined this micro fiction in which Black people have grown exoskeletons after many years of brutalization.
This story takes place in the sea, inside a cave where we have this sort of improbable premise of a Black person jumping into the ocean and then finding themselves in a cave. And so begins this process of evolution. You have the tides of the moon and the sea working them into this sort of physiology to evolve into a kind of physique that resists bodily injury.
It's not necessarily that I want readers to enter that future. This is a kind of jump off point: one story that says, "Listen, we tried everything. We read all the greats, we had all of the narratives. We had all of the art, we had all of the genius and still we had to grow this non-human form."
I sort of imagine this micro fiction in which Black people have grown exoskeletons after many years of brutalization.- Canisia Lubrin
Can we talk about the lovely visual art by Torkwase Dyson, the American artist who provided illustrations for this book? What are the illustrations and how do they illuminate this work?
I wanted to disturb the presence of King Louis' articles in the book. I did not want them to have the kind of legibility that would foreground their presence, their logic.
They're illogic. A lot of them make no sense. I did not want to have them be too legible and too "logic forward."
I had a very brief conversation with Torkwase Dyson, who is an absolutely phenomenal visual artist and a profound thinker. She went away and came back with these beautiful drawings that give a kind of vernacular of the defiant presence of Blackness in the world. And I thought they doubled the meaning of the stories and were working in these ways that provide a visual emotional resonance to what is happening in them.
I really didn't have to tell Torkwase to say that, she just got it.
It's in those small shared interpersonal spaces where the story happens in a manageable way.- Canisia Lubrin
So the Code Noir was obviously a brutal law, but it also created a sense of community and resistance among both enslaved and free Black people across the French colonial empire. How does resistance inform this book?
Forms of resistance happen in small ways and in large ways. I wanted for this book to engage the smallness that is happening in parallel to the large scale forms of liberation that we often know — the protest and the organizing that puts systemic pressure on the ways of the world. That leads to something like the abolition of slavery, for instance.
So what I really wanted was to lean into the authority of the kinds of life making — where the law cannot actually have an effect, right? It's in those small shared interpersonal spaces where the story happens in a manageable way that, say, someone, like a fiction writer can come and say, "All right, I can dramatize this thing?"
The way that we pass stories on to one another, through songs, through letters, through gossip, through codifying in different ways: the cipher, the Negro spiritual. The way that these things move and are porous: that is the kind of structure of resistance that I wanted the stories to exist in.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
