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185 chapter 7 Visual Texts and the Revolutionary Epic During the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, Chamoiseau ’s interest in issues of representation has been evidenced through the author’s numerous contributions to visual texts in the form of screenplays, books of photography, children’s literature, and art criticism . Following L’Exil du roi, Chamoiseau’s screenplays include Passage du milieu (2000), Biguine (2002), Nord-Plage (2003), and Aliker (2009). He has also collaborated with photographer Jean-Luc de Laguarigue to produce Elmire des sept bonheurs: confidences d’un vieux travailleur de la distillerie Saint-Etienne (1998), Métiers créoles (1999), and Cases en Pays-Mêlés (2000) to produce works that reflect on everyday life in Martinique and the Caribbean as manifest through rum production, Creole trades, and domestic spaces. Two of Chamoiseau’s short stories were republished for children in Le commandeur d’une pluie suivi de L’Accra de la richesse (2002) with accompanying illustrations by William Wilson. Chamoiseau has written the text for Encyclomerveille (2009), the first in a proposed series of comic books for children and adolescents, which includes Thierry Ségur ’s richly detailed, beautifully colored illustrations in a fantasy mode. Meanwhile Chamoiseau’s novelistic style in the first decade of the twenty-first century tends toward the nonrepresentational as he explores the multifarious flows and dynamic forces that beset and give voice to the construction of locality. In works such as Biblique des derniers gestes (2002), Un dimanche au cachot (2007), and Les neuf consciences du Malifini (2009), the narrative often takes the form of wandering (often in a circling or spiral pattern) through spaces of the Caribbean imaginary , such as the rain forest. Spasms of embodied knowledge, such as pregnancy, hiccups, or flight patterns, come to embody the ambivalent forces of chaos and vying forces of regression and progression inherent in 186 Visual Texts and the Revolutionary Epic world transformation. Premonition, telepathic moments of collective intuition , and poetic clairvoyance are motifs that resurface in these works that attest to the power of the imaginary as a means for rearticulating the places, spaces, and temporalities that make up an enriched and relational vision of the world. In short, the poetics of the émerveille take on a socio-psychological dimension and often introduce eco-poetical perspectives through the criss-crossings of intersubjectively related perspectives and intuitions about the landscape and its inhabitants. A Vision of Martinique in the World Chamoiseau’s writings about the bricolage aesthetics of the Caribbean shed light on his own textual strategies of intermixture. In Les bois sacrés d’Hélénon, he pays tribute to the bricolage artist, Serge Hélénon, who creates assemblages composed of fragments of wood and other materials that evoke the Middle Passage. In “L’Éclaboussure Afrique” (2002) (“The Splatter of Africa”), he suggests that the African diaspora represents a beautiful enigma of surges (9), resulting from a rupture of consciousness , language, and culture (10). He celebrates “La vision qui assemble ses éclats dans l’obscur et le geste fondateur bien affairé aux océans de la diversit é” (11) (“The vision that assembles its splinters in the dark and the founding gesture that bustles with the oceans of diversity”). The works combine the blistering specificities of history with a fluid sensibility and as such offer a key to interpreting Chamoiseau’s poetic strategies during this period. Similarly, in Laouchez (1997), Chamoiseau observes that Louis Laouchez’s fluid, abstract works (inspired by post-expressionism) produce the effect of the spoken word traversing the forest, calling forth the response of “une digènese in-commencée” or “a non-commenced yet initiatory diagenesis .” This striking phrase also applies to Chamoiseau’s writing from L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse onward with its focus on the errant figure or poetic gesture as the source of an initiation of consciousness. His abstract prose style evokes the genesis of a new perspective, which functions as a textual response to the Laouchez’s visual art. In terms of landscape representation, Martinique vue du ciel (2007), produced in collaboration with Anne Chopin, offers stunning aerial views of the island accompanied by poetic texts in which Chamoiseau describes the poetical significance of various sites. This bird’s eye perspective is taken up again in Malfini, which offers an eco-poetical sense of the Martinican landscape. [3.21.248.47] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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