Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows (review)

On its original publication in 1986, the first novel by Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronique des sept misères (Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows) announced the arrival of a distinctive new voice in Caribbean writing. Since then, Chamoiseau has emerged as the most influential and widely-read figure of the Créolité group, the literary, cultural, and linguistic movement which he founded with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant.

Even in the translated edition, it is impossible to mistake Chamoiseau's engaging yet strangely detached narrative voice, the relentless, frenetic energy of the narration itself, and the thematic fascination with the lives of Fort-de-France's urban poor. Above all, it is Chamoiseau's use of language—at once "popular" and also highly stylized—which is his signature. Language is as much the central theme as the communicative medium of his work. Nowhere in the body of postcolonial literature is the question of language so fraught, so endlessly and acutely theorized as in Martinique. Like his fellow Martinican, Édouard Glissant, Chamoiseau celebrates Creole language as the most potent means of resistance to metropolitan French assimilation, as an opaque repository of Antillean difference. In Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, as in his later works, this linguistic sensitivity produces a hybrid language—not French, not Créole, but a literary meeting of the two, an attempt to remain largely readable to a French readership, while retaining the rhythms, opacity, and inventiveness of Creole.

Just as the sensitive language issue becomes a theme in the novel, so the question of narration is charged with political and cultural significance. Martinique, as a present-day département d'outre mer, or "overseas department" of France, has never been independent. In this neo–colonial political reality, Chamoiseau is almost painfully aware of the risks of assimilation, and specifically of the traps of following all European literary conventions. Because written literature has long been the domain of the colonial master, a means of control of the colonial other, the very question of how to tell a story takes on connotations of treachery and complicity. The act of writing is seen as a compromise to French culture and a betrayal of Creole tradition in that, historically, when they were not excluded from the world of literature, non–white Martinicans were essentialized, patronized, or exoticized beyond recognition. Preferring the term "marqueur de paroles" (translated in Glissant's preface as "word scratcher") to the conventional denomination of author, Chamoiseau transforms the literariness of the written word, and alters the bond between the author and unknown reader into a situation more typical of oral culture, whereby the narrator becomes a "conteur" or storyteller addressing a circle of listeners. Thus the novel (is it a novel?) begins with this address from the storyteller: "Ladies and Gentlemen here present, the three markets of Fort–de–France (meat, fish, vegetables) were, for us djobbers, the compass of our lives. A kind of sky, horizon, fate, within which we scrabbled life out of poverty."

For Chamoiseau, not only is the question of how to tell a story significant, but so also are those of what and whose story to tell. As the narrative's opening lines suggest, Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows tells of the struggles, miseries, and fleeting victories of Fort–de–France's "djobbers", the barrow boys of the city markets, who scraped their living by running errands for vendors. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the story is told with a sense of nostalgic yearning for a time before departmentalization, before supermarkets, and before French products flooded Martinican stores and rendered untenable the already precarious existence of the vendors and djobbers. Chamoiseau's genius is to invest the prosaic existences of the djobbers with a poetic poignancy; the marginalized lives of the characters are brought out of their historical silence and into raucous agency, their intertwined stories told with a rare vigor and intensity in a cascading series of narratives. The invasion of the market by a plague of rats is told, for example...