Patrick Chamoiseau: A Critical Introduction by Wendy Knepper (review)

This study is one of a number of recent book-length studies devoted to the Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau. It complements most notably Lorna Milne’s Patrick Chamoiseau: espaces d’une écriture antillaise (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), Maeve McCusker’s Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), and Noémie Auzas’s Chamoiseau ou les voix de Babel: de l’imaginaire des langues (Paris: Imago, 2009). As the subtitle suggests, the scope of Knepper’s volume is wide: instead of highlighting questions of temporality, space, or language, she aims to provide a critical overview of this multifaceted and prolific writer’s entire œuvre. If the book’s principal contribution is the comprehensive and integrated account of Chamoiseau’s production, including writings too often regarded as minor or peripheral, a further benefit is the incisive portrait of the overall biographical, cultural, linguistic, literary, social, ecological, and political context of, and influences on, Chamoiseau’s work and thinking. The study is structured along both chronological and generic lines. In separate chapters Knepper comments not just on various novels and essays, but also on the theatrical forays, manifestos (written alone or with others), and creative collaborations, such as artistic books of ethno-photography, art criticism, and screenplays (for films directed by José Hayot or Guy Deslauriers, for example). She also analyses Chamoiseau’s activism and his contribution to other, often neglected, genres such as children’s stories. Crucial questions are not dodged. Knepper tackles the matter of Chamoiseau’s readership(s) and the politics of ‘popular’ versus ‘literary’ writing: indeed, the focus on the integrality of Chamoiseau’s work favours a certain critical acuity. Thus, Knepper notes the danger of what she forth-rightly terms a ‘doudouiste’ softening of focus (in some of the cinematic collaborations, notably those with Hayot). Conversely, the acidity of certain personal attacks in articles for the journal Antilla are also (fairly) noted as apparent aberrations in an otherwise consistent concern with countering the violence of subordination. Nor is Chamoiseau’s more ‘mainstream’ writing neglected, from the récits d’enfance to the unclassifiable Écrire en pays dominé, and from the Goncourt prizewinner Texaco (1992) to the epic Biblique des derniers gestes (2002) and more recent novels. However, because the author’s concern is to outline the contours of the complete corpus rather than to study a specific problematic or text in depth, these readings, while gaining from being apposed with readings of the more marginal works, sometimes leave the reader yearning for more fully developed analysis of specifics. In other words, the scope of the study imposes a pace of treatment that is occasionally problematic. Thus, beyond the numerous proofing lapses, when the analytical frame does freeze on specifics, the probing can be perfunctory. On the very first page, for example, the deeply suggestive word ‘dérive’ is inexplicably read as ‘departure’. These are small cavils, however, given the welcome inclusion of the French original of most quotations. And they fade into insignificance beside the study’s fulfilment of its ambitious aim of comprehensive scope and beside the quality of so many of the insights offered and connections made.