Slave Old Man
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54 La Bête à Man Ibè “Madame Hubert’s Beast” is this witch’s familiar, a maleficent animal, and Man Ibè is known for her bloodcurdling screams.
58 Fer Fè means iron, and as an exclamation it encompasses the gamut of dramatic situations, serious problems, and real suffering.
60 trace back the names In Glissant’s “La folie Celat” (The Celat Madness), in Le monde incréé, Marie Celat evokes the names of the dead:
“I have so many names in me.[. . .] I spoke the names, right at that moment, what use is it?[. . .] I had peered into the cask. Nothing but the cane-trash of time.[. . .]
“After all these years we have been crossing, without seeing the trace, the time has come to unblock the path, to trace back the names.”
The corrosive suffering of Marie Celat reflects the sickness of Martinique itself and the need to ground its people in time and place through the reappropriation of their past and their presence on the island.
“I am the rock. . . . Behold my bones dry out in my flesh gone to chalk. I appear and disappear, like a thrown rock. Take me, throw me into your derailing mass hysterias, throw me into your carnivals, under your plague of traffic, into your Monoprix chain stores, through the plate-glass window where your simpering grimaces grin back at you.[. . .] What is capsizing in my head?. . . . Ah! What’s spinning round? The names the names the names. . . .”
It is when Marie Celat finally assumes the care of souls who alone know their lost names that she moves toward redemption, as if bearing away all sins: “I have so many names in me. . . . Never mind, I carry them away uncounted, so that my salvation may come.”
It is time to trace back the names: “And it isn’t that I want to fall into this night, either, but the night falls in me, with all the rain.”
61 seventh wave There is a folk belief that ocean waves travel in groups of seven, and that the last one is the biggest wave.
68 three Ebony trees Crossroads are the favorite haunt of spirits and demons, and a crossroads where three ebony trees shelter under a mahogany tree is a vital space in the Longoué and Béluse family saga novels of Glissant, for whom landscape is a character in both story and history. The scene of a murder, this crossroads is the scene of its own murder when corrupt “progress” uproots the ebony trees (among which the ancestral Maroon had thrust his cutlass into the soil in a defiant gesture against La Roche), a living link with the past, leaving a wound that never heals: “the lost trace found lost” (Malemort).
72 Brittany Crewed by dead or damned sailors and pirates, sometimes under the lash of giant dog demons and so forth, ghost ships have long haunted the coast of Brittany and its Gulf of Morbihan. And it’s never good luck to see one.
72 cat bones One West African tradition transplanted to the Caribbean and the American South was the use of black-cat bones, thought to give invisibility to their possessors, since black cats are hard to see at night.
80 Carib The indigenous inhabitants of the West Indies, who migrated from mainland America, were a complex collection of peoples including the Ciboney, the Taino-Arawak, and the Kalinago or Carib, whose migrations went through the chain of islands. Displacement was by peaceful assimilation or warfare, as in the raids by the fierce Carib that drove the Taino to the north in the 1400s.
80 pétun Tobacco was called pétun in a now-extinct Caribbean language.
80 cannamelle This is an old French word for sugarcane, cane à miel, “honey-cane.”
80 the volcano Mount Pelée began its most famous eruptions on April 23, 1902. On May 8 it devastated Saint-Pierre, the largest city on the island, with lava and pyroclastic flows, killing about thirty thousand people. An equally violent eruption on May 20 destroyed what remained of the city, killing two thousand people who had arrived to help. On August 30, a pyroclastic flow reaching farther eastward killed about a thousand people in those areas. The volcano is now semi-active.
82 papaya and boredom Born in Guadeloupe in 1887, Saint-Jean Perse was a French poet-diplomat who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and within his cycle of West Indian poems, “Pour fêter une enfance” (“To Celebrate a Childhood”) describes remembered family and servants: “And I did not know all Their voices, and I did not know all the women, all the men who served in the high wooden house; but for a long time yet my memory holds mute faces, the color of papaya and boredom, that stopped behind our chairs like dead stars.”
89 hydromel Hydromel is a mixture of water and honey that when fermented becomes mead, an alcoholic beverage.
94 Oriamé l’Africaine This entre-dire by Glissant deepens an opening into Chamoiseau’s text already begun by Marie Celat. Oriamé was also on the slave ship Rose-Marie, where the female captives were at the mercy of the crew. In “La folie Celat,” in Le monde incréé, Glissant speaks of Oriamé, the first in the long line of his women fated to resolute solitude:
“Oriamé rose in an ocher morning, already the rocks were tumbling down inside her.
“The ridge of acomas and redwoods, where night has laid a crazy coverlet, stretches out in the West. It is Africa, and it is not. The Before Land, where we do not know which mouth has gaped wide and closed again.[. . .]
“Oriamé sees the boat that will deport her into the unknown, and the railing from which she will throw herself into the waters, finally knowing the sea, the unknowable sea. She beholds in the distance Marie Celat.[. . .]
“Oriamé . . . reappears in Mariséla, to go away again. She has borne that stone, which is a rock. Where has she put it down? And where then, where has she lost it, if not in the depths of the sea?”
94 the great wind In “La folie Celat,” in Le monde incréé, Marie Celat evokes the blowing sands of time and submerged memory that drive her wanderings:
“Before, formerly, once upon a long time . . . The country man ran beneath the cloud, went up went down with it, traced his body in the woods and ravines. They cry that he’s crazy, but he recites the geography, he spells in the breeze. What does it bring us, all this wind? ‘All this wind,’ says papa Longoué. Seeds and sands emptying out from the land of Africa, without counting the little creatures set wandering as well over this ocean. And if you search through this same said ocean, then you discover how-many paths paced among the stars of the depths, where you count up the Africans secured with cannonballs, poured out in chains into the abyssal deep.”
Oriamé’s stone of sorrow has grown larger in the sandy ocean depths. Marie Celat feels impelled to give voice in the night. “La folie Celat” ends with a dialogue between Marie Celat, of the Longoué line, and Mathieu Béluse, whom she married in 1946. The text finishes in Beckettian fashion with Mathieu immobile, and Marie Celat “gone without moving”:
“I want to cry out.
“I want to give birth to the words in my throat, that you have—not one—understood. Seek deep into yourselves, there where everything is bristling, on edge, then you shudder at the very thing you do not understand.[. . .] I want to shout words into your crackling bonfires, words you hear without understanding, and you are blinded.”
(In La case du commandeur, Marie Celat is released from an asylum in 1978.)
97 solibo A solibo is a pratfall or a roll down a hill, and one carnival evening in Fort-de-France, the Creole storyteller Solibo Magnifique dies in Chamoiseau’s novel of the same name, from an égorgette de la parole: his throat cut by a word.
97 vermicelles-diable The vémicel-djab, Cuscuta americana, is a parasitic vine with long orange tendrils (the “vermicelli”) that help it cover bushes and trees until it smothers them.
98 Bêtes-à-diable The firebug and the ladybug have similar coloration, but the latter, named after Our Lady, is called the bet-a-bondié in Martinican Creole, the Good-Lord bug, while the bet-a-djab gets the devil’s name because it likes heat.
100 Job’s tears Coix lacryma-jobi is a tall grass that produces the perfect bead: a beautifully polished seed with a hole through it.
104 évohé Evoe is the Latinized form of the ritual
cry of the bacchantes, who invoked Dionysus during the ecstatic dancing at their bacchanals in honor of the god.
107 Territory Born on an island scarred by the results of violent de-territorialization and genocide, Glissant challenged the very concept of Territory after what he saw as the loss of everything that would justify or bless a people’s presence there. In the era of globalization, of Terra, he championed diversity as the real origin of human communities throughout the world. Such forms of identity recognize themselves in relation, not opposition, to “the other,” as exemplified in the composite cultures of creolization.
113 Marqueur de Paroles Glissant’s 1988 preface to Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows referred to the author as the Marqueur de Paroles, the Word Scratcher, and this character first appeared in Chamoiseau’s own work in Solibo magnifique as the writer who investigates the death of the champion Creole storyteller Solibo. Wherever he appears in Chamoiseau’s work, the Word Scratcher agonizes over the role of literature for a people whose culture is oral, whose “oraliture” is waning, and who are foundering without memory and identity, so that he must try to give them a lifeline into literature with the scratching of his pen.
113 Morne-Rouge Named after its reddish volcanic soil, Morne Rouge is the highest town in Martinique and lies along the Trace. The large pyroclastic flow of August 30, 1902, buried Morne Rouge and killed hundreds of people in the last fatal eruption of Mount Pelée to date. The town is now the site of a yearly pilgrimage in honor of Notre-Dame de la Délivrance, the patron saint of the island, who had spared the town in answer to the inhabitants’ prayers on May 8, when an earlier eruption devastated the city of Saint-Pierre.
113 let their chains drift with the street Qui livrent leurs chaînes aux rues comes from the Creole expression ba lari chenn, which means “to give chains to the street”—to cast off chains and vagabond, stroll aimlessly. And although wandering may be a sign of dispossession, in the esthetics of Créolité it is a privileged state, the mode of absorbing poetic consciousness that blurs boundaries and opens the soul to what is.
113 three-caterpillar absinthe The medical usage of absinthe wormwood dates back to ancient Egypt, and the word wormwood refers to its traditional role as a vermifuge, to worm animals and people. Like the “worm” in a tequila bottle, these caterpillars vouch for the potency of the alcohol.
114 a work This is Chamoiseau’s footnote: Texaco, novel, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1992.
116 Kouli After slavery was abolished in Martinique in 1848, unskilled East Indian laborers were recruited to replace slaves who had abandoned the béké plantations. Later in the century there was a small influx of Chinese immigrants, who tended to take up shopkeeping, along with Syrian/Lebanese arrivals, who specialized in retailing cloth, clothes, and household goods.
125 Oiseau de Cham Most of Chamoiseau’s noms de plume in his texts derive from cham(p), “field,” and oiseau, “bird,” and include Zibié (from the French word gibier, “game,” now used for any kind of bird), Chamzibié (field-bird), and Oiseau de Cham (Bird of Ham—the son of Noah long considered the ancestor of African peoples).
135 beguine The beguine is a dance and style of music that originated in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the nineteenth century, fusing contemporary French ballroom dance steps with West Indian bélé music strongly influenced by African rhythms.
About the Author
Born in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau is the author of twelve novels, including Solibo magnifique, Chronique des sept misères, and Texaco, which won the Prix Goncourt, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and has been translated into fourteen languages. He is one of the founding theoreticians of the Créolité movement.
About the Translator
Linda Coverdale has a PhD in French Studies and has translated more than eighty books. A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she has won the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize.
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