Images of creole diversity and spatiality: A reading of patrick chamoiseau's texaco

Cultural Geographies (formerly Ecumene)

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 318-336

  Chivallon, Christine ^a  

^a Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CREOLE CULTURE; CULTURAL DIVERSITY;

CARIBBEAN;

EID: 0031410121     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/147447409700400304     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. P. Chamoiseau, Texaco (Paris, Gallimard, 1992).
2. J. Bernabé, P. Chamoiseau and R. Confiant, Éloge de la créolité (Paris, Gallimard, 1993 for the bilingual edition; 1989 for the first edition). Raphael Confiant is a novelist, author of Le nègre et l'amiral (Paris, Grasset, 1988). Professor Jean Bernabé is a linguist.
3. M. Gallagher, ‘Whence and whither the French Caribbean “créolité” movement?’, ASCALF Bulletin 9 (1994), pp. 3-19.
4. Bernabé et al., Éloge p. 101.
5. Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, intellectual and politician, was one of the founders of the Negritude movement together with the Senegalese poet, and first president of the Republic of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor. N,égritude the word, which first appeared in Césaire's long poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939), can be briefly defined as reclaiming the African cultural heritage, as a reaction to the assimilation policy of the French colonizers.
6. M. Rosello, ‘Film documentaire et pensée créole: contes de cyclone en septembre de C. Succab-Goldman’, ASCALF Bulletin 10 (1995), pp. 30-31.
7. Before starting on this analysis, I think it advisable to warn readers about the difficulties they may encounter. Patrick Chamoiseau's style is complex. Although written in French, the novel nevertheless makes use of a new language which is largely based either on Creole vocabulary or on Creole constructions and words applied to French. The difficulty of translating such a style into English can readily be imagined. On this point I am extremely grateful to Dorothy Blair, the translator of the present article, for her precision, together with her appreciation of the problems involved in the translation. [While working on Dr Chivallon's article, I discovered that the projected English translation of Texaco, which was to be published in 1995, had been abandoned, presumably when the translator commissioned found the work impossible. The English versions of the extracts from the novel, quoted below by Dr Chivallon, are my own, the page references being to the French edition of the novel. - DSB.]
8. Mornes in Creole, refers to a region of low hills - by extension, to the interior of the island, traditionally the home of peasant farmers.
9. B,éké the Creole term for the White settlers and their descendants [cf. the term Backra, used in the English-speaking West Indies. - DSB.]
10. Throughout the novel, the author presents himself as ‘The Marker of speech’, sup posedly having simply transcirbed the testimony of the woman whom, in the manner of anthropologists, he calls ‘his informant’. He is helped in his task by the ‘countless note books’ which Marie-Sophie has entrusted to him, in which she has inscribed the thousands of sentences ‘retrieved from her memory’. The body of the novel thus consists of this account, punctuated here and there by extracts from ‘The Notebooks of Marie-Sophie Laborieux’ and jottings submitted by the town planner. This narrative process, which claims as its basis ‘true-written evidence’, has been criticized as a contradiction in Chamoiseau's approach. See M. J. Jolivet, ‘Les cahiers de Marie-Sophie Laborieux existent-ils? Ou du rapport de la créolité a l'oralité et à l'écriture’, Cahiers de Sciences Humaines de l'ORSTOM 29 (1993), pp. 795-804.
11. Is it not to illustrate this ‘boundless complicity’ that Chamoiseau gives Marie-Sophie's grandmother (The Guinea-Man's companion) a most strange destiny, making her spend the end of her life lying in the grass watching the red ants which will permanently destroy her eyelids?
12. Here, briefly, are the essentials of this ‘myth’: the Mentú appears to Esternome as soon as he has obtained his freedom, and shows him the path he must follow. He speaks to Esternome ‘in a different Creole from that of the B,éké not differing in the words but in the sounds and the speed of the speech. The Béké spoke the language, the Mentú handled it… This speech, at all events, this at least was certain, breathed into his heart the courage itself to depart. It also set up the Mentú at the source of our difficult conquest of the country. To occupy, the Mentú would have told him… to occupy with the utmost urgency what the Békés had not yet occupied the Mornes, the dry south, the misty uplands, the depths and the ravines, then take possession of the places they had created, but whose History no-one could judge our ability to unravel in our one thousand one hundred stories. And what were those p?laces… The En-Ville by God: Saint-Pierre and F'ort-Royal (pp. 65-6).
13. This is probably debatable, as the principle of a myth is to enable its general application, from which individual stories are eliminated. Here the myth, of which the hero Esternome is also the protagonist, remains attached to the paths followed by the heroes of the novel.
14. Noutéka could be translated as ‘We were… ’. Té ka is the mark of the imperfect tense in Creole.
15. Mayoumbé Creole word for an agricultural tool, a sort of spade [DSB].
16. P. Chamoiseau, Chronique des sept misères (Paris, Gallimard, 1987).
17. The enumeration of the population of the Texaco neighbourhood, given in the first pages of the novel, tells us a great deal about its heterogeneous nature. The men are ‘backward fishermen, odd-job workers on building sites, dockers, strong men working in sheds and warehouses, anonymous dreamers of unknown origin whose sole identity is the label of their favourite brand of rum, exiled Caribbeans, Mulattos down on their luck, travellers leading one of their seven lives in Texaco, with a concubine and a string of children, plus two or three special ones that I shall have time to deal with in detail.’ The women: ‘Beringed madams, negresses who've seen endless struggles, red as the earth of Vert-Pré, creatures whose sole aim is to get pregnant and show off bunches of kids in their arms, wrinkled, dark-eyed girls, buxom matrons with long lashes, whose abundant curves threatened to burst the seams of a shrunken garment, plus a procession of individuals in curlers, smiling and worried, about whom I shall manage to offer more details.’ (p. 33).
18. Glissant, D,iscours pp. 67-71. Note that Glissant's more recent works show a development in the author's thinking towards an analysis less appreciative of the thesis of social fragmentation, resulting from the alienation suffered by Caribbean society. On this point, see C. Chivallon, ‘Du territoire au réseau: de la diversité - ou du dilemme? - des paradigmes pour penser l'identité antillaise’, Cahiers d'Études Africaines (1997), forthcoming.
19. Tsunamis, Japanese word for a tidal wave on the Pacific coast, caused by an earthquake or hurricane [DSB].
20. In the novel there is the following footnote here to indicate the nature of these ‘calls for help’: ‘For a difficult confinement, an illness, a sudden death, a bloody fight’ (p. 306).
21. One of the questions vital to the geography or the anthropology of space again emerges: the question of centricity, and, echoing Françoise Moncomble (‘La centralit& eacute;: invariants anthropologiques’, Actions et Recherches Sociales 3-4 (1993), pp. 45-50), we may ask if this is not a necessity and a constant in the social (and spatial) exercise, which actually involves extricating oneself from undifferentiated, continuous chaos, which thus becomes insignificant.
22. E. Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris, Gallimard, 1990), pp. 23 and 46 (emphasis added).
23. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mille plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris, Minuit, 1980).
24. Glissant prefers to speak of Creolization, rather than Creoleness, the better to emphasize the idea of movement and opening, which the suffix ‘ness’ might tend to negate.
25. Glissant, P,oétique p. 46.
26. S. Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in S. P. Williams and L. Chrisman, eds, Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader (London, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 395.
27. P. Gilroy, The Black A:tlantic modernity and double consciousness (London, Verso, 1993), p. xi. See also P. Gilroy, Small acts: thoughts on the politics of Black cultures (London, Serpent's Tail, 1993).
28. ‘Patrick Chamoiseau, le Marqueur de paroles’ (an encounter with Patrick Chamoiseau), Viva, (Sept. 1992), p. 42. See also ‘Plume de Chamoiseau’, Libération 3 Sept. 1992, pp. 17-20; ‘Goncourt, l'envol de Chamoiseau’, L,ibération 10 Nov. 1992, p. 33; ‘Edouard Glissant, Caraibe du monde’ (interview), Le M,onde 5 Feb. 1994, p. xii.
29. What Raphaël Confiant has to say in this respect is very significant: ‘The term “Creole” is eminently modern, not backward-looking and colonial, as some people might think, and even post-modern, inasmuch as it indicates the emergence of a new identity model, which could be termed “multiple” or “mosaic”, that is developing under our eyes, everywhere in the world, especially in the western megapoles. Creolization has been, as it were, the prefiguration, in the course of the last three centuries, of this ireversible phenomenon’; R. Confiant, Aimé C:ésaire une traversée paradoxale du siécle (Paris, Stock, 1993), p. 266.
30. I am tempted here to question the novelist's approach, since reducing the life in the mornes in this way to a ‘collective failure’ involves the risk of completely removing this collective experience from any concept of the Creole identity. The social project of this collectivity, considered too poor according to colonial ideology, and as ‘incomplete’ by those denouncing colonial oppression, is now seen to be becoming insufficiently disordered to merit being referred to by the upholders of theories on chaos. On this point, see C. Chivallon, ‘Space and identity in Martinique: towards a new reading of the spatial history of peasantry’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995), pp. 289-309; and ‘Du territoire au réseau’.
31. Here I would want to mention Sylvia Ostrowetsky's fine article which compares the town to a cruise, with, on the one hand, the assembling, the permanence, and, on the other, the opening up, the departure, the uprooting: ‘Civilités passagères’, Actions et Recherches Sociales 3-4 (1993), pp. 79-87.