Dans cette réécriture des Wuthering Heights d’Emily Brontë, la narration est développée à travers plusieurs générations, les récits se démultiplient, diffractant ainsi le réel. Les personnages multiples offrent une lecture politique des processus de vengeance et de fatalité. Maryse Condé fait ressurgir le paradoxe d’Emily Brontë, autrice vivant isolée mais très au contact des réalités politiques de son époque -l’abolition de l’esclavage notamment- une des premières écrivaines européennes à aborder frontalement la question du racisme en inventant Heathcliff, premier héros noir du roman occidental. Dans le spectacle s’alterneront fiction et métafiction pour faire dialoguer les deux autrices.

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Wuthering Heights is swept by the Yorkshire winds. In 1771, the master of the house, Mr Earnshaw, adopts a young boy, Heathcliff, "as black as jet and fire", whom he brings from Liverpool, then a major slave-trading port. Heathcliff's childish friendship with Mr Earnshaw's daughter Cathy turns into a passionate love affair, while Hindley, the son of the house, constantly humiliates and belittles Heathcliff. Cathy ends up marrying the son of wealthy neighbours, Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, furious, makes his fortune and buys Hurlevent; Cathy dies in Heathcliff's arms, giving birth to a daughter, also called Catherine. Heathcliff is inconsolable and takes his revenge on Hindley, the Linton family and the generations that follow.

In La Migration des cœurs (Wuthering Heights)the action takes place in Guadeloupe, at the Domaine de l'Engoulevent. Heathcliff has become Razyé, the Linton family is the Linsseuil family, and the racism and relations of domination that underlie Brontë's text are made explicit. Cathy II turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of Cathy and Razyé, and marries her half-brother. Over the course of the novel, the ghosts already present in Brontë's novel develop, the narratives multiply, passions are unleashed, in a land where the elements dominate, in their noise and fury.

EXTRACT FROM ANNE MONFORT'S NOTE OF INTENT
As a teenager, and then as an adult, I read Emily Brontë's novel, and then Maryse Condé's retelling of it, La Migration des cœurs (Wuthering Heights)I was struck by the impeccable analysis of the processes of revenge and reparation, beyond any moral question, the ghosts that circulate in English landscapes as in Guadeloupe, in these territories where the elements dominate, in their noise and fury. The show will blend the two generations created by Brontë, Maryse Condé's characters, and the languages of the two authors. 

Emily Brontë, in Wuthering Heights invented embedded narratives; Maryse Condé, in La Migration des cœurs (Wuthering Heights), développe ces récits multiples qui diffractent le réel. 

In addition to the characters from the novels, these figures will include Emily Brontë, who became a myth after the novel was published under a man's name, and about whom we know nothing except the paradoxes: an isolated woman, yet totally grounded in the legal realities and political conflicts of her time, who, deep in Yorkshire, invented the first black hero of the Western novel in the person of Heathcliff. 

This veritable literary myth, with its many textual, cinematic and musical rewritings, is an ideal vehicle for bringing generations together. We'll be creating mise en abyme, putting Emily Brontë's text in dialogue with Daniel Pennac's tribute to her in Kamo, his series of novels for teenagers. We will create a form that is an ode to landscapes as well as to literature, on the edge of cinema, theatre and opera.