A Reader in the Room: Rose-Myriam Rejouis Meets Patrick Chamoiseau

Translating my conversation with Chamoiseau, listening one more time to the tapes, I have to ask myself one question: do my readers want to hear the interview as it happened, or do they—who weren’t in the room—deserve an edited text that is a more articulate but less organic record of what was said? Though I am not throwing away my tapes, I am choosing to be the author of this interview. This means I am making minor changes (mostly to my words) and limiting this version to our discussion about his work in general. We began by talking about Chamoiseau’s literary project, Créolité, a movement that is in part a response to cultural uniformity and to the retreat of Martinique’s oral Creole culture, and which places the specificity and hybridity (métissage) of the home culture at the heart of the text. But maybe there is a simpler way of explaining what Créolité is about: when you go to Martinique, Chamoiseau’s prose seems to jump out at you, the places answer to their names, the names Chamoiseau uses in his novels. Looking at a queue of buses, with their marqueed destinations, especially gives that impression: Lamentin (Chamoiseau’s neighborhood), Balata, Texaco . . . I learn that Jambette and Julot—characters in Chamoiseau’s novels—are places in Martinique. Walking around Fort-de-France, I have to pause and wonder where Martinican reality ends and Chamoiseau’s writing begins. Listed in the city’s yellow pages is a hotline called: S.O.S. Détresse (Association Merci Seigneur), S.O.S. Distress (Thank-the-Lord Association). On the radio, there’s a show about how the kalior (the professional lady-killer) seduces girls: an echo of a scene in Solibo Magnifique. No matter where I went in Martinique, I felt like Chamoiseau, or his novels, had been there. I was always walking on sentiers balisés, marked trails.

This conversation took place June 11, 1996, in Chamoiseau’s office at the Juvenile Justice Tribunal in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where the writer works as a counselor.

RÉJOUIS

In an interview with Charles Rowell (Antilla, No. 546 [23 Juillet 1994]), you say “opacity is this irreducible dimension of every being in the world. Transparency grounds the colonial act and infects the notion of universality . . .” I know this fits with Edouard Glissant’s poetics—who, in his Caribbean Discourse, sees opacity as a privileged and necessary expression of otherness—and that you think of yourself as an heir of Glissant. Have you met with any difficulty in your goal to mesh a poetics that aims at or at least embraces opacity together with a desire to be true to the story you narrate?

CHAMOISEAU

I don’t think that’s an issue, because truth can be opaque and authenticity can be expressed in an opaque manner. So the real problem isn’t there. It even seems to me that one could not express the truth of a culture, of a people, of a country without opacity. So at the very least, they go together, truth/opacity. In all human truths there is a dose of irreducible opacity. On the other hand, in literature as it is usually conceived, in the relationships between people and cultures, the tendency is to proceed on the basis of legibility and transparency, and that’s when my problems begin. That’s when, speaking of Texaco, many people say: ‘I don’t understand,’ ‘some of the things are beyond my reach,’ ‘there are a lot of unintelligible words,’ and so on. People don’t accept the fact that a narration may have opaque, unintelligible, untranslatable zones which are maybe true for me and do correspond to realities which mean nothing to them, which are opaque to them. And so I had to impose certain things. In that spirit, I don’t put glossaries in my books, there is no glossary at the end. I include the Creole words such as they are. I don’t translate them, etc...