Laureation Address: Gisèle Pineau
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Dr David Evans, School of Modern Languages
Tuesday 1 July 2025 – morning ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Gisèle Pineau.
Gisèle Pineau is one of the most prolific and important writers of the French Caribbean, publishing steadily since the early 1990s to significant critical acclaim, and providing a welcome counterbalance to the conventionally male-dominated and masculinist bias of Antillean literature.
She is the author of novels, short stories and essays, many of which have won international literary prizes. Her work has been translated into several languages including English, and she is regularly studied on university curricula in the US and the UK, including here in St Andrews.
Born in Paris to French parents from Guadeloupe, Gisèle Pineau has explored the many challenges, and also gifts, of this double identity in her work. She wrote her first novel at the age of ten, as a way of reflecting on her experiences of racism. In her writing she interrogates the notions of ‘home’ and ‘heritage’ for those not born in their parents’ country of origin, raising questions about both the imagined transnational community of the French Republic and that of the Caribbean diaspora.
In her work, French exists alongside Guadeloupean Creole and traces of the Caribbean oral tradition, expressing that liminal identity and demonstrating her conviction that ‘bilingualism is a strength’.
She deals with themes which are central to the work we do in the Arts and Humanities, exploring the relationship between personal and collective trauma and asking, what is your relationship to History if you were not born on the side of the dominant power?
She is particularly committed to portraying women who have to negotiate the complex social and cultural context of a Caribbean society where they bear enormous responsibility, especially for family matters, but are not empowered to run society or to enjoy the freedoms men do. On the contrary, they are often subjected to violence. Pineau represents these situations with subtlety and compassion, arguing that the difficulties confronted by Antillean society – including gendered ones – can be traced back to the history of the islands in slavery.
Throughout her life, Gisèle Pineau worked as a psychiatric nurse, and if writing, for her, is an act of resistance, it is also an act of care. Writers, she says, are “witnesses who don’t look away. They revisit the past, not to lament it, but to offer new ways of looking at it”.
She often depicts characters leaving a familiar environment to discover a new world, learning to adapt, and growing stronger through their experience of displacement. In the words of her grandmother Julia, who finds her way home alone at night during a visit to Paris: “I believed, I overcame! I’m ready for other challenges.” Her work celebrates the power of human resilience, resourcefulness and our capacity to remain hopeful, whatever happens. She insists: “Even when one has gone through the most terrible experiences, one can get back up.”
Her work reminds us how important it is to fight prejudice, to be wary of received ideas, to resist the injunction to dominate, humiliate and exclude those weaker than us, and to appreciate the richness of the world in all its variety: “My words,” she says, “are those of a woman who dreams of a better world. The diversity of the world must be seen as a treasure, an offering.”
Indeed, her diverse output includes an award-winning fictional biography of Adrienne Fidelin, the first model of colour in the US press of the 1930s, Femmes des Antilles, a collection of essays published in 1998 to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, and fiction for young adults which encourages the acceptance of difference, since, she argues, children’s wellbeing is a collective responsibility.
Gisèle Pineau talks of writing as a duty, but also a pleasure. The role of literature, she says, is to nurture a form of empathy and solidarity. It functions as a solid rope to stop us from getting dragged down, and as a bridge linking us to others.
Her work stands as a powerful reassertion of the importance of stories, writers and their readers, in maintaining the values of understanding and compassion even in the darkest of times.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her major contribution to French and Caribbean literature, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Gisèle Pineau.