For What the Land Tells: An Ecocritical Approach to Patrick Chamoiseau's Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows

How can one practice marronnage when the hills themselves have become plantations?

—Richard D.E. Burton, Le Roman marron: Études sur la
littérature martiniquaise contemporaine (86-87)

In his Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant states that any discussion of French West Indian identity must take into account the centrality of landscape. He writes:

The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from that land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood. (105-6)

Beginning with the original "discovery" ¹ of Martinique by Christopher Columbus in 1502, its possession by French colonizers in 1635, the over 200 years of slave trade and dehumanizing labor in the sugarcane fields, and today the destruction of the ecosystem, the land itself is a powerful repository for Martinican collective memory and consciousness. Part of why the landscape of Martinique is so sacred, according to Glissant, is that it is a witness to the years of unrecorded subjugation of French West Indian people. Indeed, the landscape functions as a repository for a misrepresented past: "Landscape retains the memory of time past" (Caribbean 150). Consequently, any gesture of destruction against that land is portrayed as an act of violence against the collective memory of the past. The land, states Beverly Ormerod, is the past's "only true guardian . . . history waits, latent, in the Caribbean nature, which is filled with sorrowful reminders of slavery and regression" (170). Physically cementing over the natural landscape with over-development, then, can only have disastrous consequences for the preservation of a memory already occulted beneath the rhetoric of Western history. French West Indians are literally running out of room in which to store and preserve their cultural heritage.

It is in this climate of environmental concern that an ecological association was created in Martinique in the 1980s. Since its inception, ASSAUPAMAR (Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine martiniquais) has had as its mission the preservation of Martinique's natural and cultural heritage for future generations. Its current concerns include environmentally-insensitive land development, poor waste treatment, the recession of agricultural lands, forests and mangroves, and the pollution of the bays of Fort-de-France, Marin and Presqu'île de la Caravelle. These issues are all the more serious when we consider the fact that Martinique (a) is an island and, as such, has limited resources, and (b) is still occupied by France and depends on the "Mother Country" for the majority of its food supply. ² When asked about the reasons for preserving Martinique's agricultural lands, Pascal Tourbillon (legal consul for ASSAUPAMAR) explains the importance of offering an alternative to European products in order to have a certain level of security concerning quantity (self-sufficiency), quality (health) and to maintain a certain biological diversity on the island.

In addition to being Martinique's most celebrated Martinican author today, Patrick Chamoiseau is deeply committed to issues of ecology, having served as vice president of MODEMAS (Mouvement des démocrates et écologistes pour une Martinique souveraine) in the 1990s. MODEMAS is a militant movement for Martinican sovereignty and has as its president Garcin Malsa, who is an outspoken ecologist and mayor of the town of Sainte-Anne (Pied). It should come as no surprise, then, that Chamoiseau weaves his ecological convictions into his fiction. An examination of his first novel, Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows ³ reveals a very definite correlation between the French modernization of Martinique and the erosion of its indigenous countryside and culture.

In this study, I take an ecocritical approach to Patrick Chamoiseau...