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4 Squatters in the Cathedral of the Written Word Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself. —Siegfried Kracauer, “On Employment Agencies: The Construction of a Space” Patrick Chamoiseau’s TEXACO (1992) chronicles the squatter community of Texaco, a slum located at the edge of Martinique ’s capital, Fort-de-France. As an underprivileged and illegitimate space, the slum reflects and shapes the lives of its inhabitants. The abandoned lot of the Texaco petroleum company is gradually settled by former slaves who, fleeing the plantation, arrive in the city in search of employment. The squatters’ occupation of the abandoned site signals the spontaneous cultural potential of “an open community grounded not on identity but on strategic alliance” (Lincoln, 3), while also reflecting, in spatial terms, the historical deprivation of the Martinican slave population and its struggles to acquire full social recognition after the abolition of slavery. The slum community also raises the broader question of exclusionary urban politics and its zoning regulations. Given Texaco’s focus on the inherent urban conflict between authorized and unauthorized spaces, I approach the question of spatial appropriation in this novel through two related spatial concepts: terrain vague and heterotopia. The slum of Texaco represents both of these conceptual categories, allowing us a closer examination of the dialectical relationship between space and counterspace of Chamoiseau’s “Creole city.” While terrains vagues designate derelict postindustrial “urban sites that have lost their original function” and are now “open to unplanned activities and unofficial communities” (Doron, 208, 207) like Texaco, heterotopia is Foucault’s way of accounting for spaces that are outside of our “normal” space and serve to contain or contest the social phenomena we will not accommodate . With respect to my reflection on Caribbean postcolonial space 106 Squatters in the Cathedral of the Written Word and its relationship to contemporary spatial theory, Foucault’s emphasis on the complementary relationship between real social space and its imaginary (utopia) or actual (heterotopia) contestations is of central importance. Texaco resorts to two parallel types of spatial reflection: in one, the slum is a heterotopia, a space situated on the outskirts of the city from which it is excluded, revealing that city’s normative structure inherited from the colonial world;1 in the other, the slum is paradoxically a utopian ideal constructed around an impoverished but tightly knit Creole community whose survival depends on the oral narration of its spatial history. In this way the heterotopian reality of the slum and its utopian twin reveal and defy the normative colonial structure in which a destitute Creole citizen is treated as a sign of deviation or crisis to be contained and overcome. As Foucault points out, the nature of utopia/heterotopia is to be outside the accepted and normalized social space, but its outside status actually reveals the principles of inclusion and exclusion that regulate a particular social context. Both heterotopian and utopian spaces have the curious role of denouncing normative spaces by contesting or compensating for their strict regulations. Yet, for the purpose of my analysis, it is also important to remember that these two types of spaces constitute a kind of complementary binary: what heterotopia attempts to do in reality, utopia strives to achieve in imagination . The actual space of heterotopian contestation (the struggle for a place of one’s own in a slum or a dilapidated house) continually clashes against the utopian visions of an ideal space, which fails to materialize and is ultimately created by means of narrative fiction itself.2 Between the two poles—an inadequate heterotopian space and its unavailable utopian solution—the novels resort to a “third space,” the space of narration and storytelling itself in order to respond to the limitations of spatial reality. In this way fiction becomes an alternative metaphorical space rather than a vehicle of realistic spatial depiction. The two types of space I rely on in my reading of Texaco—terrain vague and heterotopia—share the character of exteriority and transgression insofar as they are first excluded and then perceived as threatening to the urban authority. From Lefebvre’s perspective, both spaces constitute forms of appropriation of prohibitive and dominated spaces through simple daily repossession of “empty” space in the margins of the official city and signal the transformative social potential of counterspaces. In Chamoiseau’s case, the official city is a colonial city where the traces of colonial...

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