Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory (review)

This book is an assured and subtle critique of Chamoiseau’s work that situates it within contemporary debate on post-colonial scholarship and opens it up to memory studies. Within this frame, McCusker skilfully navigates from the earliest to the most recent of Chamoiseau’s works and, through a series of close readings, reflects upon his engagement with private and collective memory. McCusker contends that Chamoiseau’s work is a ‘deeply political attempt to explore the compelling momentum of modernization in the Caribbean’ and this view informs an analysis that attends to the ‘interplay of language and politics [. . .] in the forging of a highly distinctive memorial literature’ (p. 18). The modernization of Martinique, in its phase of mass consumption, followed quickly on the heels of departmentalization in 1946 and led to the decline of forms of Creole culture centred, for example, on the local market place. McCusker makes the argument that this loss has come to act as a kind of screen memory for an older trauma, an almost irretrievable collective past, that of slavery. McCusker makes a convincing case yet is also critically alive to the seductions of her subject’s prose: its emotional charge and the paradoxes that are never entirely masked. She notes, for example, the ‘nostalgic conceptualization’ of memory in Éloge de la créolité with its emphasis upon ‘memory’s fragmentary and aleatory qualities’ and astutely observes that this ‘should be read against the rhetorical grain of a manifesto which seeks to impose its frequently exclusionary view of “la mémoire vraie”’ (p. 10). This welcome and finely judged critical distance is maintained throughout. Chamoiseau’s privileging of collective and childhood memory and his use of Caribbean pre-history allows him to generate sites that sponsor imaginative forms of resistance to official history. Indeed, they are privileged to a point where history is ‘either entirely absent or marginalized so as to make no sense’ (p. 66). McCusker points to Chamoiseau’s brief allusion, in his autobiographical Antan d’enfance, to Christmas riots in Fort-de-France as an example of his use of litotes to convey a child’s vague awareness of political events. One could argue that the effect of understatement is different here than when used to undermine official history. Nonetheless, though a former vice-president of the political movement MODEMAS, Chamoiseau’s inscription of contemporary social conflict (and there was much in the late-1950s and early-1960s) is evasively oblique rather than direct. Chamoiseau’s politics, at least within his books, is a politics of identity. Resistance, here, is primarily aesthetic and McCusker raises the issue of what kind of agency is mobilized through a writing that promotes a form of baroque aesthetic and difficulty that, for some, is complicit with French high culture. At the same time, McCusker’s pleasure in reading Chamoiseau’s sumptuous prose is clear even as she acknowledges its paradoxes, exclusions, distortions and, more recently, its stylistic longueurs. Her book, perceptive and stimulating, is a further sign that postcolonial studies has matured as a critical platform for the study of literature and its contentious contexts.