I need to reread this excellent novel. I plan on reading 2 more Haitian novels and then rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I shall return to this novel by a highly gifted wordsmith. I completely overlooked the gender dynamics of the novel relating to the City (Fort-de-France) as masculine and the shantytown of Texaco as feminine. That gendered binary plays a large role in the novel and the character of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, a femme matador protagonist and founder of the novel. Of course, the 'feminine' shantytown also possesses the positive characteristics of the Creole nature of Martinique, so Chamoiseau elevates the feminine over the masculine, white and elite City. Moreover, the character of Marie-Sophie is based on Chamoiseau's informant for the novel, Madame Sico, founder of Texaco in real life, and his own mother, two women he characterizes as strong, Caribbean women who are resilient and decisive in their own lives. It is also important to remember that Chamoiseau himself focuses on a 'rural' culture in an urban space in the novel, since Creole is fundamentally rural due to its origins in the slave plantations of previous centuries. Indeed, all city cultures find themselves irrevocably derived and maintaining the original rural cultures that make up the story.
On a final note, it is also significant that a woman would be the storyteller in this narrative, since the storyteller is more often than not male. Chamoiseau, however, elucidates in an interview with literary critic Bonnie Thomas in her Breadfruit or Chestnut?: Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel how the Caribbean family has a tendency towards being matrifocal with a peripheral, mobile father who historically was laboring in the field or sold off in slavery days. Thus, Caribbean mothers and women have often led families and their own lives independently of a present male figure.
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