Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction

4. Créolité, Community, and the Word Scratcher

95 chapter 4 Créolité, Community, and the Word Scratcher Solibo Magnifique laments the death of the Creole storyteller, but gives birth to oraliture or orature, which is produced at the interfaces of the oral and written as well as through the interplay of languages. Similarly, the introduction of the Marqueur de paroles represents a new kind of performative writing that self-consciously refers to its own composition. Literary issues are brought into dialogue with ethnographic questions about the role of field research, observation, interviews, data collection, the role of the participant-observer, and so on. For Chamoiseau, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of intense analysis and incredible creativity as he articulated his ideas concerning the dynamics of storytelling , creolization, and writing, particularly in Éloge de la créolité, Lettres créoles, and Au temps de l’antan. Many of these ideas found expression in Texaco, the novel for which Chamoiseau won the Prix Goncourt. During this period, Chamoiseau also produced the first two of his three narrative accounts of childhood, Antan d’enfance (1990) and Chemin d’école (1993), which do not so much fulfill as undermine or question the feasibility of realizing the Creolist objectives of recuperating interior vision and discovering an “authentic” voice. With the Word Scratcher, Chamoiseau’s efforts to redefine the role of storytelling, narration, and writing become inextricably bound up with his vision of Martinique’s past-present culture and perspectives. Éloge de la créolité / In Praise of Creoleness In May 1988, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant attended the “Festival caraïbe de la Seine-Saint-Denis” where they read the treatise that would be published as Éloge de la créolité (1989). 96 Créolité, Community, and the Word Scratcher The manifesto opens with the declaration: “Ni Européens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nous nous proclamons Créoles” (EC, 13) (“Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles”) (EC, 75). Beginning with the Martinican situation, the text offers an analysis of creolization in the Caribbean and other regions of the world and ends with the claim that the world is undergoing a process of creolization. Divided into three main sections, “Toward Interior Vision and Self-Acceptance,” “Creoleness ,” and “Constant Dynamics,” the work suggests that creolization is essential to decolonization and the protection of diversity in a postcolonial world. “Creoleness” is subdivided into a discussion concerning the role of orality, memory, the “thematics of existence,” modernity, and the choice of speech. The oral presentation met with criticism, particularly on the part of a number of African delegates who objected to the rejection of African identities and the critique of Negritude. Following the publication of the text, a period of intense debate and productive criticism ensued throughout North America, Europe, and the Caribbean. In particular, the publication of the counter-manifesto, Penser la créolité, a collection of essays edited by Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, articulated a number of key objections concerning the Creolist perspective, citing its masculine (misogynist) perspective, its essentialist vantage point, an overemphasis on the linguistic and a lack of attentiveness to the open cultural process of creolization. The work was faulted for putting forward generalizations about Creole identities, which might have reflected the francophone Caribbean experience, but failed to represent the many experiences of creolization around the world. In retrospect, it may seem somewhat surprising that this short treatise sparked so many debates, particularly as the idea of a Creole society was already well established in the Anglophone Caribbean thanks to the pioneering work of Kamau Brathwaite’s The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. In the francophone Caribbean, academic work on creolization and Creole literature was already quite established by that time. Confiant and others had published works in Creole from the 1970s onward and Chamoiseau had already been “chamoisifying” language (working at the interfaces of French and Creole) since Chronique des sept misères. In part, the hyperbolic rhetoric of the treatise is to blame for the criticism it spawned. Looking back, some of the Creolists’ arguments remain contentious. For instance, the authors criticize Negritude as a movement that is seen as having potentially worsened “our identity instability by pointing at the Créolité, Community, and the Word Scratcher 97 most pertinent syndrome of our morbidities: self-withdrawal, mimeticism , the natural perception of local things...