Patrick Chamoiseau's School Days

“In those days, the blue-eyed Gaul with hair as yellow as wheat was everyone’s ancestor. In those days, Europeans were the founders of History. The world, once shrouded in darkness, began with them. Our islands had been veiled in a fog of nonexistence, crossed by phantom Caribs or Arawaks themselves lost in the obscurity of a cannibal nonhistory. And then, when the colonists arrived, there was light. Civilization. History. The humanization of the teeming Earth. They shouldered the heavy burden of this world they were raising to the lofty heights of consciousness. We had to strive stoutly so as not to abandon them to the solitude of this responsibility. The teacher wanted to carry the world on his shoulders, too” (121-22)

Chamoiseau’s account of his schoolboy days, School Days, translated by Linda Coverdale, is a touching narrative filled with adorable moments of youthful innocence, curiosity, adventure, and struggle. Like his other writings, his playful, unique style of writing that fuses humor  French, Creole, and inventive rhetoric to encapsulate another world succeeds brilliantly in School Days. As a child growing up in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Chamoiseau recounts his younger, preliterate days as a “little black boy” who irritated his mother and older siblings incessantly to have the chance to go to school. Once in school, however, his Creole worldview and self-identity is challenged by the institution’s Francophile nature and the Teacher’s attempts to make Frenchmen out of black, Creole-speaking students. Nevertheless, the sweet novel, though often heavily focused the destructive impact of the Francophilic tendencies of school on the language and identity of Martinique, exemplified by Big Bellybutton, a poor Creole-speaking child who ultimately concedes to the Teacher his inferiority as a poor, black Creole child coming out of the sugar cane shacks of colonial Martinique, can be seen as ending on a positive note through what may be termed as nascent créolité in that Chamoiseau articulates a fusion of the Creole language, mythology, and worldview of Big Bellybutton and his wannabe French Teacher. This fusion consists of not only the African and European elements of culture and language in Martinique, but also the Indian, Syrian, and indigenous Carib and Arawak presence in the history, cuisine and society of the Antilles.

Besides describing the important moment in his early school days when he would become a proponent of créolité, School Days is an artful example of storytelling that captures the world through a child’s eyes. He incorporates Creole phrases, mythology and magic into the story, evident in their belief in magic and quimboiseurs:

To tie up a Teacher (you’re not hearing this from me), you had to cross your fingers and hold them like that, thrust deep in your pockets; stand on your left food in front of the school; murmur over and over again before he appeared: Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the teacher…(You didn't hear this from me…) (125).

This aforementioned adorable quote marks the belief by a young Chamoiseau, Big Bellybutton (whose ‘real’ French name is never mentioned, only the Creole Big Bellybutton) and other schoolboys in their ability to cause illness toward their Teacher, a Frenchman with black skin and a white mask to whom France was a magic word (108). The little Chamoiseau also had his adorable moments prior to school, scribbling on the walls of his home, persistently demanding of his mother, Mam Ninotte, to take him to school like the Big Kids, his older siblings, and strolling through the city streets as Syrian merchants, workers, and other adults carried on with the busy activities of the day. The student bullies, who persecute Big Bellybutton especially, also provide moments of comic relief when the latter pulls out a snake’s head to scare them away or when the poetic rejoinders of Les Respondeurs or Chamoiseau occasionally breaking his third-person narrative provide further commentary on the little black boy’s life.

Clearly, for Chamoiseau, learning to read and write was not just survival, or learning to live despite going to school to “shed bad manners: rowdy manners, nigger manners, Creole manner—all the same thing” (120). Survival entailed learning to thrive through new discourse, one partly indebted to the negritude past but inclusive of all of Martinique’s heterogeneous origins. Chamoiseau, while criticizing the schools’ attempts to make Gauls out of Martinique’s children, teaching them to see the world and read literature from French eyes, when winter snow and rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed days of blond childhood were never part of life for the overwhelming majority of Martinicans, nonetheless found value in the ability to transport oneself to new terrains, new worlds, beyond the island shores of his home. This necessitates a synthesis of Creole and French, the Caribbean and its diverse origins, to represent the world of his youth in this formative period of his schooling. Overall, this is a fascinating account worth reading by anyone even remotely interested in Martinique, French colonialism, Caribbean literature, or the magical realism of the lens of a bright child. To read it in English was utter delight, since Coverdale’s translation retains the artful blend of Martinican/Creole vocabulary with the collective voice of the narrator and Les Respondeurs in addition to Chamoiseau’s characteristic humor.

Patrick Chamoiseau's Strange Words

"One of these white folks had refused (as usual) to acknowledge the child he had fathered on his servant. Instead, he became the boy's godfather: a fancy way of washing his hands of him."

Patrick Chamoiseau's Strange Words, translated from French by Linda Coverdale, is his reinterpretation of Creole folktales of Martinique he heard as a child. It was also published in English as Creole Folktales. Writing down these orally-transmitted stories inherently changes the fundamental process through which these stories were told in Martinique, usually by a storyteller with an audience. Indeed, the storyteller also inserted him or herself into the tale, which Chamoiseau replicates in the written form, using several humorous self-referential statements regarding the storyteller's relation to characters in the story, for example.

Unfortunately, the tales themselves are quite short, and with only 12, the journey into the nighttime stories of Martinique ends just as its beginning. That said, these tales are often very dark and full of supernatural phenomena and magic, such as witches, zombi, demons, rainmakers, and tricksters. Indeed, this novel serves as a nice complementary reading to Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique, a short novel about the death of orality and the battle between the spoken Creole word and the colonial French written word. This collection of Creole folktales illustrates how these different languages and their respective worldviews fused to create them in the first place. Thus, Ti-Jean Horizon, the mulatto son of a slaveholder and a black slave, becomes a hero according to the trickster ideal in African-derived folklore, but uses his guile at the end of the tale to simply takeover the plantation of his beke father. If collective liberation were the ethos of this story, which was told in communal settings of slaves, how come an individual's escape from slavery would become more important than the liberation of all slaves on the plantation? Clearly, the individualism and rationalism of "the land of Descartes" clashes with African communalism and solidarity as well as clashing due to differing stances on supernatural occurrences.

Anyway, one should read this short collection of folktales to better understand the worldview and context of the lives of slaves and ex-slaves throughout Martinican history. The horrors of the slave trade, brutality and dehumanizing practices of white planters, poverty and hunger, and resilience of the people themselves become quite apparent. Moreover, women emerge as significant characters, often as female heads of their households. Now, this is not the place or time to discuss in depth gender dynamics in the colonial French Caribbean, but women in these stories run the gamut from helpless beauties to strong, independent heroines. Indeed, in many stories families are introduced with only a mother as the parent, and no mention of fathers appears, which, historically was related to lack of legitimacy in their unions with black men in the eyes of whites and the slave trade, but also related to rape and other factors. Beyond analyzing the stories for how they reveal the historical and cultural background of Martinique and the French Caribbean, these short stories are often fables with important morals against sins or defects like gluttony, or for simply explaining the origin of certain animals, the vegetation, etc. Overall, this was a fun, fast read that aroused the reader's hunger for more oral and written literature of the French Caribbean.

Remembering Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco

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.

Thoughts on Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent

“…despite his long stay in the land of Descartes, since he had been raised in this country like the rest of us with the same knowledge of zombies and various evil soucougnans, the Inspector’s scientific efforts and cold logic often skidded.”

            Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent translated from the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov, the same duo that translated Chamoiseau’s Texaco, is a wonderful novel of short length on the battle between French and Creole in Martinican sociolinguistics. A meta-text in the form of a mystery, Chamoiseau inserts himself into his often humorous critique of Martinique turning its back on its Creole oral literature in favor of French. The oral tradition, represented by the titular character, Solibo Magnificent, is killed, “throat snickt by the word” in the middle of a story told to an audience in the evening during Carnival time in Fort-de-France. Solibo’s death becomes a police investigation to determine the cause of his death, or the death of Creole oral tradition as Martinique “modernizes” and adopts more of the French language and written literary tradition. Now, Chamoiseau, a pupil of Edouard Glissant and part of the reolite literary movement, sees Creole as the authentic language for Martinican (and other Caribbean writers of the French Caribbean) as best suited to represent Martinican reality and culture in the written literary forms because the language itself is a reflection of the totality of peoples and experiences of the Caribbean. A response to the weaknesses of the monolithic blackness assumed by the negritude movement, famously espoused by Aime Cesaire, creolite celebrates and embraces European, African, indigenous and Asian peoples and cultures that form the basis of the Caribbean sociolingustic reality. 

Chamoiseau, who inserts himself into the text as the author-narrator endeavoring to capture the oral Creole spoken by Solibo, experiments with fusions of French and Creole, oral and written literary traditions, and the inevitable loss of meaning and distortion that occurs through endeavoring to represent oral traditions in the written form. Thus, Chamoiseau’s character in the novel admits his own failure to fully capture the strength of oral traditions, but endeavors to embrace both the written and spoken word, a synthesis rooted in the creolite movement to embrace all cultures within Martinique. Indeed, that is most likely why the text is not entirely Creole either, since French, though part of the colonial heritage and legacy of racism and slavery, reinforced by the corrupt police department and its repression of lower-class residents of Fort-de-France, remains at the core of Martinique as the island remains an overseas department of France with whites in possession of most economic and political power. Chamoiseau’s character in the novel also represents his experimentation with the traditional novel form as known in the West. Here, the author’s character becomes a participant in the plot, allowing it to be read on many levels and include the reader, who must decipher the clever wordplay and multiple forms used in the text. Chamoiseau also divides the novel into 3 parts: an incident report, as typed by the police in the investigation, the “body” or chapters of the text written by Chamoiseau himself, with frequent changes in narration, the use of footnotes to explain and translate Creole phrases, Martinican cultural references, and lack of traditional grammatical structures, and finally, an “After the Word” that attempts to represent Solibo’s last words before his death. Chamoiseau’s text, a nuanced, multi-layered endeavor to embody Martinique’s contradictory and essentially Creole identity, also shows off the author’s writing ability because few could successfully write about the battle between French and Creole language and identity in a way that successfully fuses both irrevocably, with shortcomings and losses to both. Referring to himself as the “word scratcher,” as he later does in Texaco, Chamoiseau tries to represent the craft of writing as an alternative form of ‘drawing’ the world that must also incorporate Creole, oral, and lived experience in its depiction of the world to describe Caribbean societies, since the “oraliture” of Creole is the key component of Caribbean societies. 

In addition, Solibo Magnificent challenges the hegemony of French rationalism and European perception of the world. Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Chamoiseau criticizes French (European) worship of reason, which leads to overlooking the personal, lived experiences and requires an often unnecessary division or measurement of the world, leading to dehumanization or oppressive unequal conditions through binary oppositional thinking. For Chamoiseau, both the real-life writer and the narrator of the text, embracing both the spoken and written word is a rejection of binary oppositional thinking, which is a perpetual result of western European worship of reason. Inspector Evariste Pilon, a Francophile black Martinican, perpetuates the hegemony of rationalist binary thinking throughout his investigation, which leads to false assumptions on who murdered Solibo because his rationalism (inherited from time spent in the land of Descartes, the French language which is always used by Pilon) cannot accept the fact that Solibo dies because of “internal strangulation” caused when speaking before the witnesses under the tamarind tree in La Savane of Fort-de-France. His investigation, which relies on police brutality and torture of the suspected witnesses, causes the death of two men because he cannot accept the scientifically impossible death, which also demonstrates magic realism, another writing technique Chamoiseau utilizes to illustrate the fantasy of the lived world and oral tradition. Indeed, Solibo’s death is not only impossible from a rational standpoint, but his body miraculously gains weight and becomes as light as a feather when the police remove the corpse, and shows no signs of poison or illness. Pilon’s rational epistemology, ignoring the highly personal and Creole realities of the witnesses, cannot accept what fourteen human beings saw with their own eyes because of his narrowly prescribed perceptions of the world. Moreover, Pilon’s interrogation of the witnesses ignores the multiple layers of meaning attached to time, occupation, age, and other qualifiers of human life that are measured or defined by measurements of time in hours, minutes and seconds. Indeed, when asking the witnesses their age, occupation, and address, the sadistic Chief Sergeant translates the questions into Creole as, “The Inspector asks you what hurricane you were born after, what do you do for the beke, and what side of town do you sleep at night?” Pilon’s French, rationalist outlook does not allow him to accept the nuances of time, occupation, and alternative approaches to understanding one’s life. For the witnesses, speakers of Creole, their lived experience determines the meaning of Pilon’s questions in personal ways based on local culture, geography, and economics, which means natural disasters play a strong role in how one records time, Martinican whites control the distribution of jobs, and transitory lives are common for lower-class Martinicans of the shantytowns of Fort-de-France. French rationalism, an inherent component of French (and European colonialism in general) power in the Caribbean therefore supports the persistence of white rule in Martinique. Due to language’s ties to power, the imposition of French and denigration of Creole by elites maintains the colonial social order in economic, linguistic, political arenas. 

Another avenue through which Chamoiseau proclaims creolite is the text’s numerous references to Martinican music, Creole, history, politics, the description of the urban shantytowns, and the plethora of footnotes and sectors of the Martinican population represented by the witnesses to Solibo’s death. The witnesses themselves represent light-skinned blacks, shantytown dwellers, street vendors, unemployed musicians, a writer (Chamoiseau himself), a “Syrian” bastard, an ancient former agricultural worker insultingly referred to as Congo for his way of speaking Creole and his very recent black African ancestry, coolies, a drummer who accompanies Solibo’s storytelling, and the radical nationalist desiring independence. This diverse array of the people of Martinique, separated by varying degrees of class, ethnicity, politics, and individual expression, all comprise the already heterogeneous social reality of the island. And these aforementioned individuals all share a Creole identity originating from their shared experiences of slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, and an appreciation for the oral traditions of Creole, though by the time of Solibo’s death, fewer people were listening to his stories and he fulfilled his griot role less as the younger generation turned its back on its cultural origins. Chamoiseau’s espousal of creolite as the basis of Caribbean identity also manifests in the world he creates in the novel, a world filled with magic realism, musical and cultural practices of the island, the Carnival celebrations that storm through the capital, and the insertion of Creole expressions and using the written form to represent orally in the novel form. The novel’s constant allusions to politics and contemporary issues tearing Martinican society apart, such as the Martinican Progressive Party’s support for autonomy or independence from France, the continued police repression and corruption abusing the poor and black, and the cuisine, zouk and Haitian music (Nemours Jean-Baptiste) constitute a microcosm of the Caribbean, and by extension, the entire world. Martinique’s internal heterogeneity symbolizes the Creole reality of the entire Caribbean, which also marks its essential role in world history as one of the birthplaces of modernity. Creolite is the hallmark of real modern culture, if one defines modernity as something universal or capable of incorporation disparate traditions while embracing the contradictions. As a result, Martinique’s creolite designates the island as an important example of human progress by its capacity to include so many seemingly combative cultural forces, such as the African, indigenous, European and Asian influences developed into the wholly unique island Chamoiseau honors.

Solibo Magnificent unfortunately may not be for all. The novel loses a lot in translation since the reader no longer has the mixed Creole-French language of Chamoiseau-ese. Of course the novel’s focus on language and Martinican culture will be totally alien to most English readers, despite the aid of the translators’ footnotes and glossary of Creole terms that appear in the novel. The plot and the format of the novel that fuses oral and written word may initially confuse others or appear meaningless to those unfamiliar with Chamoiseau’s creolite. For those interested in learning about other cultures and willing to expand their knowledge of an important area in the world should read this novel, which is all about multiculturalism and the necessity to respect all cultural traditions of different races or ethnicities, a value that still remains underutilized by much of the world. In order to support his celebration of human totality and universality, Chamoiseau demonstrates the weaknesses of the fetishization of rationalism that reinforces French colonialism, racism, and the power of the French language over Creole. Chamoiseau also critiques complete rejection of the aforementioned characteristics of the French colonial legacy, since complete denial of reason and French will isolate Martinique from a much larger world and will not change the conditions of illiteracy, poverty, and technological advancements that made some of the novel’s characters, such as Solibo and Congo, almost obsolete in society. Hence, the death of Solibo while speaking to his audience while speaking the word, as a consequence of his rejection of the written word, symbolizes the death of oral tradition that remains opposed to the written tradition. Solibo’s total rejection of French and written traditions repeats French rejection of alternative expressions of language, literature, and philosophy, which contributes to Solibo’s increasingly less relevant words of wisdom to the people of Fort-de-France. Overall, this is a fascinating experimental novel on the power of language and its relation to cultural practices and identity. Lacking the historical depth and detail of Texaco, which explores the history and culture of Martinique through the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, Solibo Magnificent is a shorter novel and fast read.  

Texaco Reflection

Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a French-language novel published in 1992, was brilliantly translated from French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov in 1997. The novel, named after a shanty town of Fort-de-France, Martinique, is essentially Chamoiseaus’s assertion of créolité as the core of Caribbean identity and reality. I first heard of the novel from Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chamoiseau uses language, the countryside/urban divide, history, and the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux as an allegory for Martinican identity. Créolité, an idea proposed by Edouard Glissant, an ideological successor and Martinican intellectual in the tradition of Aimé Césaire, the proponent of negritude. Negritude was essentially an assertion of black cultural nationalism embracing African-derived traditions, music, poetry, and Marxist political theory to resist colonialism and racism in francophone colonies. Though most developed in Martinique, Senegal, and other francophone nations, negritude developed in contact with the Harlem Renaissance and cultural/political developments in the 20^th century. Of course negritude’s focus on African cultural origin and problems of an ideological monolithic Africa made negritude less appealing to future generations of Caribbean intellectuals. Thus, Glissant, or Chamoiseau, for example, celebrate the heterogeneity that makes up West Indian (an in particular, Martinique) identity. Instead of solely focusing on the black Martinicans, Indians (coolies), békés (colonial whites who stayed in Martinique after abolition in 1848), Chinese (also coolies), Caribs, mulattoes, and French identities are each thrown together to weave a complex family history using elements of magic realism to display the Creoleness, or cultural miscegenation that comprises Caribbean peoples. Indeed, Caribbean peoples cannot be reduced to a simply African origin (despite the overwhelming majority of Caribbean peoples being descendants of African slaves), but considered Creole due to the vast numbers of cultures mixed through the colonial process. Thus, negritude’s limitations become more apparent when one considers the long history of the entire West Indies, which has never been a monolithic Africa, but a product of centuries of cultural mixing. Indeed, even in Caribbean societies that are predominantly ‘black’ and do not appear to be Creole, such as Haiti, one finds that cultural heterogeneity predominates through the long history of mulatto, white, and black competitions for political power and social dominance.

Chamoiseau explores créolité especially through the use of language and internal intertextuality and points of view throughout the novel. The novel has four narrators, the author himself (humorously referred to as Oiseau de Cham, or bird of Shem), the urban planner, known as Christ in the shantytown, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, who dictates her story to Oiseau de Cham and the urban planner, and Ti-Cirique, a Haitian intellectual exiled from Haiti after a failed attempt to overthrow Papa Doc’s regime in Haiti. Each of the aforementioned characters influence the novel’s use of language through editing, excerpts and transcripts of their own notes, which are ultimately layered and reorganized into footnotes and sections by Oiseau de Cham, who divides Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s history into 4 sections or eras in Martinican history, beginning with slavery. The irony of Ti-Cirique, the dark-skinned Haitian intellectual and Francophile, who tries to use the mulatto French that is more French than European French, is overwhelming. Despite his noirist, or negritude-influenced ideology, Ti-Cirique embraces France more than the French, and his voice is best represented through attempts to “correct” Marie-Sophie’s narrative into proper French. This is doubly ironic since many proponents of negritude saw Haiti as the birthplace of the movement, due to the successful slave revolt that gave birth to the nation and the ideological ties to 19^th century Haitian intellectuals such as Antenor Firmin. The urban planner, on the other hand, embraces both the “mulatto French” and Creole spoken by the majority of Martinicans, which follows créolité ideology since the truest form of Martinican identity requires both Creole (which is a mixture of African languages, French and other tongues) and French, the colonial language that is part of the core of Martinican linguistics and the state. The Urban Planner also believes in the value of the shantytowns, such as Texaco, which represent the Creole majority and are necessary for the history and culture of the island. Thus, he becomes one of the main supporters of the slum, despite government pressure to eradicate Texaco and force the population into subsidized housing within the city proper. Indeed, Texaco developed as part of the City (Fort-de-France), but because mulatto and white control effectively limited the possibilities for the ex-slaves and former rural workers (hill folks) to actually attain political power or become a significant economic power in the City, despite being a majority. So the shantytowns develop based on rural culture, which is a remnant of slave culture, but through contact with whites, Asian laborers, Syrian merchants, mulatto politicians and bosses, and white colonial overlords, and employers, the shantytown dwellers are forced to adapt to a multiracial, urban society based on caste. Marie-Sophie and Oiseau de Cham, concur with the Urban Planner on the necessity of ensuring the survival of Texaco, although Marie-Sophie herself wants her narrative to be “proper” French, due to her father Esternome’s preference for French. So the text of the book (in the original French publication and English translation) is a little confusing since Creole expressions and religious and cultural practices are thrown in, alongside proper “mulatto French.” Furthermore, the novel also explores language through the competition of various types of the Word: oral tradition, Marie-Sophie’s edited narrative (Ti-Cirique edits her notebooks, which are used by Oiseau de Cham, and the Urban Planner hears her stories in person, as does Oiseau) and the final version offered by the author. The notebooks and various points of view represented throughout the text reveal the manipulation of language by different parties and the power of each medium of storytelling. Indeed, Oiseau de Cham considered the written word not capable of truly capturing the strength of Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s stories, which exemplifies a preference for Creole, the spoken language of the Martinique.

In addition to the interesting use of language and its historical ties to French colonialism and creole identity, Texaco uses magical realism and the family history of a Marie-Sophie as an allegory for the nation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende did this more famously for Colombia and Chile, but it’s still a powerful allegory for getting to the root of Latin American and Caribbean identity, since a family is a product of the nation’s society. Like Garcia Marquez and Allende, Chamoiseau is also thorough in his coverage of the nation’s history, and due to the use of magic realism, seemingly impossible events occur without explanation. Beginning with Laborieux’s father’s experiences as a slave and 19^th century Martinican life, the world of the plantation and early rural migration to urban centers such as Saint Pierre, which was totatally destroyed in a 1902 volcano eruption that caused the death of Esternome’s first lover, Ninon. Elements of rural Martinican culture survive the progression of time, such as the Mentohs, or spiritual healers and advisors, who save the lives of both Esternome and Marie-Sophie. They’re seemingly eternal beings, and their supernatural powers are never explained, despite Marie-Sophie’s attempts to get answers from Papa Totone, one of the Mentohs. The use of magical realism also suggests that the world of the Caribbean is really “not real,” in that the process through which Caribbean societies developed is unreal due to a lack of historical precedent and the incredible amount of creolization that occurred in the 500 year history, which is more evidence of Creoleness. Furthermore, Martinique becomes significantly less “African” over time, with the disappearance of Mentohs and miraculous events in the 20^th century. Major events in Martinican history are also part of the story: the abolition of slavery in 1848, the volcanic eruption that destroyed Saint Pierre in 1902, WWI, WWII, the election and rise to prominence of Aime Cesaire, De Gaulle’s visit to Martinique, and the perpetual conflict between the “proper” city of Fort-de-France and the impoverished shantytowns. Marie-Sophie and her family provide a powerfully personal interpretation of Martinican history, and highlight Creolity throughout the piece. Indeed, Marie-Sophie Laborieux herself is multiracial (a capresse, or daughter of a mulatto and black), and her experiences working for mulattoes, upper-class blacks and whites as a domestic provide a window through which one can view the hierarchy of power. As a woman, and not light-skinned enough to pass for mulatto, she also exemplifies feminist thinking through her actions. She rejects child-rearing, subservience to men, and begins the initial hutch that gave rise to Texaco, becoming its leader and main opponent of the white man whose land she builds on. Marie Sophie’s life therefore brings to the fore the importance of woman as agents in history in addition to demonstrating the cultural syncretism that has occurred in Martinique and the rest of the Caribbean.

Moreover, Chamoiseau directly critiques negritude and its impact French Caribbean identity through Aime Cesaire’s character and Ti-Cirique, the Haitian bibliophile and Francophile. Indeed, when Aime Cesaire first speaks to the masses of blacks as their first black mayor and Marxist, Esternome tells his daughter that Cesaire is a mulatto. One of the protagonist’s employers, a middle-class mulatto, also attacks Cesaire for critiquing France and colonialism, yet all of his education came from France. These internal contradictions of Cesaire completely severing Martinican ties to France ideologically and his inability to connect to rural, lower-class blacks show negritude’s shortcomings because France is irrevocably part of Martinique, and Cesaire’s education and speaking illustrate that. Thus, Cesaire endeavors to represent Fort-de-France’s urban poor and shantytown folks, but his refusal to recognize the mixed heritage of Martinique because of presumptions of “African” cultural predominance excludes a large proportion of the population, including those more closely tied to Africa, such as ex-slaves like Esternome. However, Cesaire was able to reconnect to Marie-Sophie Laborieux and the people of Texaco in future decades, ensuring that the city council brings electricity and modern amenities to the poor of the region. Cesaire also remained very popular among blacks in the city, despite the flaws of negritude, which actually bought into a lot of European assumptions about Africa. Regardless, Marie-Sophie Laborieux reads and quotes a line from his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land to finally convince him to help Texaco when she and a group of other residents invite themselves into his home. Ti-Cirique, the Haitian exile living in Texaco also highlights the problems of negritude. Like Cesaire, the negritude literary figures never create a truly unique form of expression that is independent of European or French because they do not write in Creole, the language of the people. Negritude-influenced authors reject European standards, yet continue to write in the language and styles of the colonizers, and Ti-Cirique, despite being part of a group of Haitian literary figures opposed to Duvalier, cannot find value in literature unless it is written in the languages of Europe.

Overall, Texaco does live up to the hype Junot Diaz gave it. Only about 400 hundred pages long, it’s actually quite readable for the most part. The first half, the story of Esternome and his generation is actually more compelling than most of Marie-Sophie’s personal life, but the novel’s use of magical realism in a Caribbean context and approach to Creole identity is fascinating. Moreover, the use of multiple languages and its multiple points of views illustrate the complex nature of Martinican identity, which is essentially a struggle between French and Creole. Like Junot Diaz’s masterpiece, Texaco uses a single family to tell the history of a Caribbean nation, and by doing so personalizes history, mixing the oral and written word to display the undoubtedly Creole identity of Martinique. And despite what some may suspect, my sympathy for negritude is not as great as one would think. It was an important part of black transnationalism and cultural movements throughout the francophone African diaspora, but like any ideology that embraces a single identity or “race,” could never encapsulate the Caribbean world.