Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  December 1996

  Diamant–Morne Rouge–La Favorite

  Translator’s Afterword: Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau

  All quotations are my translations from the French texts in question, for which any available English titles are also given.

  In 1635, Pierre Bélain d’Esnambuc arrived in Martinique with about a hundred French settlers, and by 1660, the resident Caribs had essentially been “disappeared” into history. The growing colony made sugar its main product and trading commodity. In 1685 Louis XIV, the Sun King, promulgated the Code Noir to regulate the transportation of Africans into slavery on sugar plantations in the French colonies. Several hundred years of slavery—and brutal slave rebellions—then carried on through the French Revolution (the French Convention abolished slavery in 1794, at least in theory) and Napoléon (who as consul reestablished slavery in 1802), to end at last with the complete abolishment of slavery on French territory in 1848.

  Napoléon’s about-face on slavery is widely imputed to his wife, Joséphine, a native of Martinique whose plantation family owned hundreds of slaves. In 1859, a statue of Joséphine, cut from marble donated by her grandson Napoléon III, was erected in La Savane, a park in Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France. In 1991 this statue was beheaded, as was Joséphine’s first husband in 1794 during the Reign of Terror. Several years later, red paint was splashed on the neck and shoulders of the statue. As of 2017, the paint and beheaded statue are still there.

  After abolition in 1848, Martinique remained a French possession until it was made a département in 1946, a région in 1974, and—in spite of interest in independence and autonomy on both sides—a collectivité territoriale in December 2015.

  Martinique is not an independent state.

  *

  Patrick Chamoiseau was born in Martinique in 1953, and his books reflect both life there and the way he views his evolution as a writer.

  The three autobiographical narratives of his early years are ingenious tales that touchingly expose the pernicious effects of the island’s colonial past and dependent present. Antan d’enfance (Childhood) introduces the little négrillon, who grows up in Fort-de-France in a family apartment ruled by his indomitable mother, Mam Ninotte. Hungry for knowledge, he explores the riches of his Creole world. Pining for school in Chemin d’école (School Days), he inaugurates “the age of petroglyphs” with a stick of chalk: doodling on walls like a tiny Cy Twombly, the Scribbler is born.

  The négrillon’s first teacher wants his charges to survive in their “French” society, so, meaning well (and lapsing into Creole himself when exasperated), he tries to suppress their Creole natures, even by hitting them with a switch. When a substitute teacher extolls their African roots to foster racial pride, the children cannot make sense of him, either. The négrillon hunkers down “in this sacking of their native world, in this crippling inner ruination,” and “without fully realizing it,” ensures his own survival: entranced by the mysteries of ABC, he studies “for his own pleasure. Bowed over his pages of writing,[. . .] the pen scritching along,” he becomes an apprentice Word Scratcher.

  In À bout d’enfance, the narrative complexity of reminiscence intensifies: Chamoiseau speaks directly to himself “at childhood’s end”: “My négrillon, where have you gone to ground?” The narrator reflects on the nature of memory, solitude, the border between reality and imagination, and the anticipated promise of writing he had sensed so long ago. The négrillon turns to books and dreams for guidance in all things, particularly in the mastery of the imaginary. For the challenge this book poses is, how to live? Which will soon become: how to write? How to find what still speaks in the past despite the treachery of memory? “O my négrillon, I see myself seeing you,” says the narrator; “I see you preparing me. . . .” And “in a lucidity of dreams, of poetry and of novels, at the very heart of the writing, perhaps intact, always attentive, and even at the tag end of childhood, the child is present.”

  By the time this last book in the trilogy appeared, Chamoiseau was the author of an already sizable body of work. After studying law and social economy in France, he had become a social worker there and later in Martinique, where his interest in ethnography and the influence of Édouard Glissant inspired him to study increasingly threatened forms of Creole culture. His first novel, Chronique des sept misères (Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows), follows the hectic misadventures of a market djobeur-porter—a vanishing breed—in Fort-de-France, while Au temps de l’antan (Creole Folktales) is an homage, as is Solibo magnifique (Solibo Magnificent), to Creole storytellers and their dying art. From the outset Chamoiseau has tried to portray a Martinique true to the fading authentic realities of an island in sociocultural crisis, a threatened heritage that gives the lie to the image of carefree French citizens untouched by social injustice and racism. Paradoxically, these savage truths are told in language of extravagant invention, through often farcical events and even supernatural tomfoolery that can leave the reader caught between laughter and despair.

  In everything he writes, Chamoiseau cherishes the figures of the storyteller, the Maroon, the drifter-wanderer, the Word Scratcher, the warrior of the imaginary, all those who fight against their marginalization on an island where their captured ancestors were dumped to literally slave their lives away making money for their torturers, so well might they ask: Whose country is it, anyway? In his Goncourt Prize–winning novel Texaco, the avatars of resistance swarm in many guises to defend their Creole neighborhood, Texaco, a precarious squatter section of Fort-de-France in a coastal industrial park. Watched over by a Mentô sorcerer, the stalwart Marie-Sophie Laborieux, in an epic sweep through time and place, “pleading our cause,” tells her family history and that of Texaco, highlighting the increasing political awareness by Martinicans of their embattled and sometimes opposing identities as a people. The crazy-quilt polyphony of narrative voices includes the Word Scratcher, Oiseau de Cham,* who will encourage Marie-Sophie by extolling “the vast weave that is literature, the multiple-and-one clamor gathering together the languages of the world, peoples, lives.” Marie-Louise begins writing in notebooks—and feels a kind of formaldehyde death settle over her careful sentences as she attempts to capture the Creole parlance of her late father. She misses life in her words, with their avalanche now cut up by commas, and her dilemma mirrors the author’s, for words are air, and how can one trap the wind? As the Word Scratcher noted when this saga began, “literature in a living place must be taken alive. . . .”

  *

  The monumental range and importance of Édouard Glissant’s work are beyond summary here, but his major themes are vital to Slave Old Man, in which his texts figure so totemically. Arguing for the valorization of black experience everywhere through ancestral ties to Africa, the political and literary movement of Négritude in the 1930s challenged French colonial power in all its forms, and in the Caribbean, condemned acculturation and its acceptance of the “tourist” myth of the “happy isles.” In the early 1980s, turning away from this Afrocentric orientation, Glissant formulated the concept of Antillanité, “Caribbeanness,” which expanded the range of the archipelago to include all peoples historically present in that region, and emphasized the need for those present-day inhabitants alienated by social injustices to reclaim their sense of both place and collective memory.

  Bluntly put, the rigid hierarchies supporting such iniquities as the master/slave, white/black plantation system were denounced by Glissant, who early on endorsed the now-familiar challenge to all such weaponized binary oppositions by attacking their foundation in self-serving Western theories—of knowledge, race, politics, culture, language, history—that can blindly endorse human horrors on the ground. For example, History, the logbook of a dominant culture, often overshadows real human histories: in Chamoiseau’s School Days, a Martinican black child opens a textbook to read: “Our ancestors, the Gauls. . . .” As Glissant notes in Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), “History is not only an absen
ce for us, it is vertigo,” and in his novels history—an occulted history—is the image of black bodies weighted with cannonballs plummeting silently to the ocean floor.

  By critiquing those reductive universal truths, Glissant wished to bring thought and imagination more into line with lived reality. Without the colonialist ideals of purity, divine genesis, and other touchstones, “creolization” ceases to be a dismissive matter of miscegenation, mongrelization, or even simple hybridization and becomes the open recognition and celebration of natural variation in all things. Relieved of any concept of identity founded on “closed” notions of race, territory, or nation, the archipelago in Glissant’s thematics now figures as a string of islands in flux, involved in what he saw as the outward influence of the Caribbean Sea toward the Americas and beyond. Glissant was an early advocate of “Caribbeanness” as a global phenomenon, and his concept of creolization evolved into a continuous process, that of contacts among cultures or elements that produce unpredictable results, new identities. Creolization “creates in the Americas absolutely unexpected cultural and linguistic microclimates, places where the repercussions among languages or among cultures are abrupt” (Une pensée archipélique).

  Glissant saw in the malleability of Creole languages a force for diversity, an inherent opposition to any monopolizing, homogenizing sameness. This resistance, protective of difference, he called opacité. All languages everywhere are shape-shifters, so to speak, and English is known for its omnivorous appetite for foreign words and homegrown neologisms, but the Creoles of the Caribbean are marked by their violent creation in an unholy crucible. The process of creolization depends on the survival of diversity, of irreducible otherness, of opacity as a mode of pushback against cultural appropriation. Opacity not as obscurity, but as an irreducible particularity, the stubborn otherness of the Other.

  The poet, for Glissant, is indeed that unacknowledged legislator of the world, capable of transforming history, and although he was never a politician, Glissant’s is a political poetics. From Le discours antillais: “The past, our endured past, which is not yet history for us, is yet here tormenting us. The writer’s task is to explore this obsessive pain, to ‘reveal’ it constantly in the here and now.[. . .] For my part, for a long time I have been trying to conquer a sweep of time that steals away, to live a landscape that keeps proliferating, to sing a history that is nowhere given. The epic and the tragic have in turn seduced me with their promises of slow disclosure. Constrained poetics. Force-fed language. We all write to lay bare what is at work unnoticed.”

  *

  In 1997 Chamoiseau published both L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse (Slave Old Man) and a book that can be seen as “theory” to the novel’s “practice”: Écrire en pays dominé (Writing in a dominated land), a lively combination of autobiography and theoretical reflection that asks: “How to write when, morning ’til dreams, your imaginings take nourishment from images, thoughts, values that are not your own? How to write when what you are stagnates outside of the fervors that determine your life? How to write, dominated?”

  Suffocating beneath the weight of colonial modernity, a spiritual desert of consumerism, and an avalanche of concrete and cars, the “poor scribe, Word Scratcher in this broken land,” suspects that “all domination (the silent kind even more) germinates and develops at the very core of what one is.[. . .] Therefore I had to question my writing, inspect its dynamics, suspect the conditions of its coming-forth, and detect the influences worked upon it by this no-longer-visible domination.”

  Reacquainting himself with his birth land after his ten years in France, Chamoiseau embarks in Écrire en pays dominé upon an epic review of his life and the history and literature of the West Indies. He tracks his growing awareness of the silent destruction around him, describes his search for information, understanding, and counsel in his reading, which now ranges among the literatures of the world, and reflects on the difficult interface between literature and life. Chamoiseau’s text can be as spare as a haiku or as densely tangled as mangrove roots, and includes the Creole call-and-response influence of “the old warrior,” whose every harangue, warning, taunt, encouragement, nugget of information, and so on is introduced as follows: “The old warrior gives me to understand: . . .”

  Glissant’s writings, always concerned with the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality, do much to support the theoretical armature of Chamoiseau’s review, which is not dryly abstract, but deeply engaged with living. When Chamoiseau reruns those history lessons from his Mam Ninotte childhood, this time he will ditch the Gauls to reexamine the fate of the first inhabitants of the Caribbean archipelago and their almost complete erasure in the onslaught of colonization. He re-catalogues the horrors and complicities of the Triangular Trade, and the post-abolition release of slaves as little more than poverty-stricken refugees on the island where they were born, still bereft of their ancient birthright, stolen centuries before. Even today, although about 90 percent of Martinicans are of mixed African and European descent, their island’s economy remains largely in the hands of people of European ancestry.

  All the material benefits Martinique enjoys as part of France cannot mask, for Glissant and his heirs, the spiritual malaise eating away at their island. In a sense, Chamoiseau is conducting a double cultural psychoanalysis, not only addressing the conflicted heart of Caribbean societies but facing his own quandaries as a Martinican writer. Chamoiseau specifically cites Glissant in his discussions of the originality of Caribbean “origins” on islands forcibly or entrepreneurially stocked with peoples from around the world in a virtual laboratory of modern creolization. And by comparing his life to that laboratory, Chamoiseau performs a kind of experiment, testing his mentor’s theories in the field, evaluating the purpose of literature and the writer in the real world.

  While studying and working in France, Chamoiseau had read Glissant’s novel Malemort, a dense, fragmented Martinican labyrinth of corruption and disillusionment, and been stunned. He understands nothing. When the strangeness of France—the seasons, the snows, the subways “of ten thousand solitudes”—casts him back almost naked upon himself, memories of his native land overwhelm him; hidden things appear as in “a fluorescent dream.” The map of his childhood returns to him—and now he rereads Malemort with moving clarity as “the irruption into [French] of another consciousness.” He reads Dézafi, a novel in Creole by Frankétienne, “the father of Haitian letters,” and understands that his Haitian Creole has cracked open its mineral gangue to reveal itself as art. “I had discovered that intense circulation between the Creole and French languages, and creative freedom in a dominated language.”

  When he takes core soundings of the “anthropological magma,” the layers of Martinican “selves” (Amerindians, Europeans, Africans, Indians, Asians, Levantines), this time he researches them thoroughly, “dreaming” himself into their stories, playing their roles, seeing with their eyes. In the end Chamoiseau speaks for a Creole-self. “I no longer sought for myself any primordial purity but accepted a previously unbearable idea: we were born in the colonial coup” that determined our relationship to all that exists, born out of the wombs of slave ships and “the tremors of islands and continents.”

  And of all the figures evoked in this book, the most vital, “born of that asphyxia, O that strength!—the one who bestowed a Word upon those men of the foundations,” may be the Conteur Créole, the storyteller who makes “lost voices” speak.

  Chamoiseau dreams him up:

  My body takes on the gestures, songs, dances. I call, speak, and reply to drum, and drum takes flight with my swirls of words.[. . .] I mix men with animals, earth with water, sun and moon, lies with a few varieties of truth, and everything flutters around with everything. I am not alone in speaking, I speak in no one’s place, I speak in concert: they get me going, I heckle, they support me, I question, they outrun me, I scoot pass them, they surround me, I get away, they appeal to me, I withdraw, they pull back, I round them up and
inquire, they murmur, I improvise.[. . .] I am in this enlivening dream. And suddenly I understand: the Storyteller makes these bodies, re-energized by movement, speak-together, answer-together, stride with the same step, feel the same joys, unanimous fears, all-breaking-away together.