What we have suffered from most, more than any other people, is really alienation, in other words, the lack of knowledge of oneself... The Antillean being is a human being who is deprived of his own self, of his history, of his traditions, of his beliefs.
Aimé Césaire

1Colonial empires often justified their rule in narratives: quasi-religious founding texts, using the rhetoric of national belonging and focusing on historical and geographical landmarks, enemies and official heroes. In this way they shaped a collective ethos, termed ‘habitus’ by Pierre Bourdieu (Le Sens pratique), where a symbolic violence, known and acknowledged by both the dominant and the dominated nations, came to be established:

The effect of symbolic domination... exerts itself not in the pure logic of informed consciences but through schemes of perceptions, appreciation and action which are constituent of habitus and which establish, within the conscious decisions and controls="true" of the will, a sense of knowledge profoundly obscure to itself. (58-9)

2The dominated society contributes to its own domination, consciously and often subconsciously, by tacitly accepting the imposed limits and censorships inherent in social structures.

3In the former francophone Caribbean colonies, such ‘symbolic violence’ has been put in place through French cultural imperialism. Césaire emphasized this social phenomenon when he stated that the only creator of cultural values was the coloniser2. Indeed, colonisation cannot be dissociated from cultural imperialism. Imperialism strives to civilize by projecting one’s culture onto another. Colonisation illustrates ‘the power of reproduction’ of a nation in another space3. Although Martinique has been a French department since 1946, the alienation which resulted from acculturation during the former empire is still present, as attested by the works of Glissant, Chamoiseau, Deslauriers and Condé.

4Within the Martinican context, Césaire not only challenged the European claim that the civilisations of Europe had an undeniable superiority over all others, but he also pointed to the figure of Caliban as the representative colonised, subjugated man, claiming for his newly self-forged identity, recognition and acceptance. Caliban fights to have the right to his own personal name, to his self-identity and thus to his concept of the ’I’.

5Likewise, Chamoiseau, one of the leaders of the literary movement of créolité, has embraced the same goal in his works, that of redefining the ex-colonised Black Martinican man by going back to his origins to confer an identity upon him, and thereby provide him with a symbolic space within which to transcend his traumatic history and at the same time reject (neo-) colonialism, the cultural, intellectual, racial and moral hegemony of the West. A multi-faceted artist—essayist, theorist, playwright, novelist and scriptwriter—Chamoiseau (re-) constructs narratives and discourses of ‘nationness’, to use Homi Bhabha’s term. In most of his works, the nation comes into being as a structure of cultural signification, a national identity reconstructed out of the memory of various historical traumas.

6After having studied law in Paris, Chamoiseau returned home, to Martinique where he started to work as a youth worker. Gradually he began to explore his artistic talent by writing critical essays, film scripts and fiction. The question is why. Was each work in a certain sense a kind of palimpsest for the next one, building upon its meaning and yet invested with a new significance? Why does the ‘I’—the self-figured in a symbolic, heroic manner in his novels— gradually weave itself into a collective ‘we’? Is it a coincidence that one of the main characters in Un dimanche au cachot (2008) is named Patrick Chamoiseau and is also a youth worker? And why does the diegetic narrator in Solibo Magnifique have the same name as the empirical author: Patrick Chamoiseau? Is he engaged in solipsism or is he exploring his reconfigured self by examining his colonial selves?

7This article proposes to analyse these questions from a postcolonial perspective and to examine the ‘haunting’ presence of Chamoiseau’s profession in the complex process of his (self)- (re) creation (s). Even after he became an established writer (particularly after winning the Goncourt prize in 1992), Chamoiseau has continued to work with young people (though only part-time).

8It is undeniable that Chamoiseau’s writings are firmly rooted in the Martinican context; he has stated that his aim is that we ‘... talk to ourselves, for ourselves and through the echo, let our voices be heard by others...’ (Chamoiseau 1990: 38). Chamoiseau differs from Confiant in that he takes a less radical stance concerning both literature and politics: abroad, he often promotes and discusses his work and he is a member of an ecological political party for a green and autonomous Martinique. He also transcends the Martinican context when he explores the glissantian concept of ‘Tout-Monde’ (as attested by such works as L’Intraitable beauté du monde, Quand les murs tombent and Les Neuf consciences du Malfini).

9Chamoiseau’s profession enables him to be more ‘rooted’ in the Martinican social context and to better grasp the social ills that affect young people. In his essay Écrire en pays dominé, Chamoiseau recounts how as an educator he manages to reach out to a young delinquent Martinican by helping him discover the works of Césaire. Delving into the historical past is a means not only of coming to terms with the nation’s history but also with the story of a long dominated people. Chamoiseau, as youth worker, brings to the delinquent a copy of Césaire’s work that represents: ‘... a tone, a force, a flamboyant will which nourishes the silence of dominated beings’ (Chamoiseau 1997: 96). His pedagogical aim seems to be to give meaning to the life of young delinquent Martinicans (who are more often than not suffering from an identity crisis) by presenting them a different—and positive— (self)-identity coming out of their own national history. He does so not only through his interactions with them but also through his literary and cinematographic work.

10For the author, investigating the identity of the Martinican Black man implicates the nation’s history/story—that of the people, of the vox populi as opposed to the official (westernized) discourse. He delves into the ‘mythical’ past to symbolically re-construct the ‘I’ of the Black man. Reconstructing genealogies of ‘origin’ supplies a certain sociological order as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski makes clear:

...myth acts as a charter for the present-day social order; it supplies a retrospective pattern of moral values, sociological order, and magical belief, the function of which is to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events.4

11Thus Chamoiseau probes ‘the first trauma’5 (as does Glissant), the uprooting of Africans from their native homelands followed by their being made into slaves—a process accompanied by a systematic deculturalization based upon a binary white/black narrative wherein the African is portrayed as inferior.

12Chamoiseau composes a sociopolitical, cultural and artistic discourse in his writings. Not only does the movement of créolité ‘write back to the empire’ but it also proposes to change ‘the cartography of the imagination’ through a new ‘... understanding of who the Antillean really is’ (Bernabé et al. 1989: 22). Thus the past and its history coincide. The theorists of créolité concur with the Glissantian notion of H/history: the official French History (with capital H) has to be deconstructed and the unofficial history (and stories) of Martinique have to be constructed to forge and confirm a more ‘authentic’ sense of identity.

13As a scriptwriter, Chamoiseau’s discourse, while often a counter-discourse to official History, is in itself an agent of History in so far as it contributes to a social and historical awareness. In The Middle Passage (2000), Chamoiseau rejects a monolithic reading of slavery, replacing it with a counter-history. The African slave, usually an object in Western cinema, becomes the Subject who relates the story. This axiological displacement challenges institutional History and illustrates how the African diaspora can construct its own singular and collective discourse, not as victims but as survivors, with agency.

14This counter-discourse is constructed through different types of resistance in the film The Middle Passage. The African slave is systematically portrayed by Chamoiseau as the African enslaved to stress their agency. Some of the enslaved Africans choose death by jumping overboard or by refusing to eat; death represents not only liberation but also an act of affirmation of the self. This form of resistance deprives the slave master of his desired object. In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy explains: ‘By robbing the slave master of the desired object of appropriation—the black body—the slaves inscribe their own agency’ (63).

15Chamoiseau also deconstructs the colonial ideological figure of the enslaved African as a physical body close to nature without psychological complexity. In The Third Eye: race, cinema and ethnographic spectacle, Fatimah Rony points out: ‘... the native... is identified with the body. Dances by indigenous people were projected as wild, savage, frenzied movements by people lacking rationality: an image which became a popular stereotype in commercial films’ (Rony 1996: 65). In this film, resistance takes place through dance and music when the enslaved Africans are taken on the deck to dance to the sound of the violin. However, it is the extradiegetic Senegalese sabar music which captures the imagination of the enslaved creating a gap between the movement of the bodies and the music, highlighted by the stroboscopic effect of the sequence. Their rhythmical dance is inspired by the Orishas, spirits of Benin and of Nigeria. This mutual and mute understanding amongst the enslaved prefigures the new African identity across the Atlantic: the Creole identity. To ensure their stronger resistance and survival, the enslaved Africans developed a sense of solidarity based on their common experience of enslavement that transcended ethnic and cultural differences.

16Chamoiseau’s emerging cinematographic discourse is a postcolonial one which denounces colonial domination and offers a different perspective on Martinican history. This is also clear in The Exile of King Behanzin (1993) where the scriptwriter—through the story of King Behanzin (1844-1906) of Dahomey (now Benin) who defended his wealthy kingdom against French invaders—composes a counter-discourse to the European assumption that African countries needed civilisation.

17Chamoiseau explores universal themes such as oppression and exploitation, which counter and re-appropriate the discourse of the coloniser, utilising Martinican history, stories and culture. In so doing, Chamoiseau’s cinematographic discourse becomes a means of postcolonial resistance.

18In the symbolic space of Chamoiseau’s re-writing of Creole culture, the runaway slaves and the storyteller are portrayed as figures of resistance and heroes. The rigorous logic of the French slave code, Le Code Noir, written by Colbert, dictates how slaves were to be treated. Their existence was defined by diverse degrees of disobedience. Article 44 defines the slave as ‘a thing’, having the same value as ‘furniture’ (Sala-Molins 1987: 178). He is an object of ownership, both a ‘thing’ and an animal at the same time. Such a subjugation of the black ‘I’ had to be rewritten in terms of heroic acts. The runaway slave becomes heroic because he has the will to escape in spite of severe punishments and probable death if re-captured.

19This is made particularly clear in L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse based on the paradigmatic relationship of the dominating and the dominated, of the white master and the black slave. The old obedient slave suddenly feels the ‘décharge’, the urge to plunge, literally and metaphorically, into a ‘primordial’ consciousness to rid himself of all humiliation. His flight into the woods takes him a world of ‘primordial blackness’ where memory is erased and left as a blank page.

20The symbiosis that unites visual forms and sounds with complex movement brings about a change in perception, or rather, self-perception of the old man:

The things around him were without shape, moving, as if exposed behind very transparent water; I opened my eyes wide to see them better. I. The leaves were numerous and green... I. I could raise my eyes and gaze at those trees. (89)

21In the same sentence, the pronoun ‘him’ used by the omniscient narrator to refer to the runaway slave suddenly becomes the pronoun ‘I’ (a first person narrator). It can be inferred that the protagonist, on discovering freedom, re-discovers himself and finally dares to affirm himself in this new environment.

22The repetition of the pronoun ‘I’ which stands as a separate sentence in the narrative, shows that the old man is gradually attributing to himself the right to say ‘I’—the right to self. He is no longer owned, he belongs now to himself. His trauma has been transcended by freedom. If the runaway slave has become a hero, the storyteller has also acquired a similar position. In Lettres créoles the storyteller is defined as actively building up a counter-culture to that of the plantation while living at the very heart of its cultural negation (82). Chamoiseau depicts a syncretised Creole culture, which has managed to emerge in spite of the oppression and attempts at cultural assimilation by the colonizers.

23By ‘constructing’ these mythical figures, Chamoiseau creates and invests Creole culture with a new perspective on the past. For Black Martinicans who have long been subjugated, this new past becomes all the more significant as they can claim it as their own heroes and as their collective cultural history.

24If the ‘I’ in the works of Chamoiseau re-discovers its own identity, it is further motivated by the need to weave itself into a collective ‘we’, within the constructed symbolic of a common Martinican culture through which the trauma of the past can be transcended. Forging this common cultural identity is significant: Chamoiseau positions himself in opposition to the political and cultural domination of Martinique and to French cultural assimilation. In his essay ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’ Geoffrey Bennington explains that:

...the idea of the nation is inseparable from its narration: that narration attempts, interminably, to constitute identity against difference, inside against outside, and in the assumed superiority of inside over outside, prepares against invasion and for ‘enlightened’ colonialism.6

25In his narratives and discourses, Chamoiseau also draws upon the collective memory of the people to compose a common Martinican cultural identity. However, in order to do so, he has to construct his own identity as a (script) writer.

26As an artist, deconstructing (colonial) History in order to construct himself fully, he suffers from what he terms as ‘triple rupture’: from orality to writing; from Creole to French and finally, from the storyteller to the writer (Chamoiseau, et al. 1999: 90). Overcoming the ‘trauma’ of this ‘triple rupture’ enables him to create an authorial voice.

27If the Creole writer legitimizes his intrinsic self with difficulty, his enunciation constantly demonstrates the impossibility of identifying a true place for himself. He nurtures his creative spirit from the somewhat ambiguous nature of his own adherence to his discursive field and to Creole society. Looking for a certain literary authenticity in spite of these ruptures has been a source of suffering, the legitimacy of his writing being constantly undermined by feelings of doubt and torment (‘les affres’). Orality is attributed a certain supremacy in that the storyteller symbolically assures the link with Africa. For Chamoiseau, the Creole storyteller plays the fundamental role of ‘resistance’ during slavery: he is considered to be a hero and his words, a source of inspiration for a better Martinican society.

28In Chamoiseau’s writings, the narrator suffers from not being able to convey meaning through speech; in its place, the movement of the body emphasizes repetition, redundancies, the power of rhythm and assonances to depict the essence of Creole society. The difficult reconciliation of writing and speaking is made clear in Solibo Magnifique when the storyteller expresses his despair: ‘Oiseau de Cham, you write. Good. I, Solibo, I talk. Do you see the distance?’ (52). Writing is portrayed as a dreadful and dreaded instrument capable of stifling Creole sensibilities, creativity and liberty.

29The narrator is constantly challenged by the need to preserve the dynamism of orality within the static dimension of writing. After the storyteller, ‘the poet of identity’, no one has the right to tell the story: neither a protagonist, nor the narrator, nor the author. To want to transcribe the storyteller’s power of the spoken word is to betray him; to write is to betray oneself, is to renounce a singular tradition and in so doing one’s own identity. Out of this betrayal, a narrator, calling himself a ‘marqueur de paroles’, appears to try to reunite the two spheres, to become a translator, interpreter of ‘... speech which nourishes writing and writing which makes up speech’ (Chamoiseau 1997: 200).

30In a culture where the transmission from the storyteller to the writer is not the role of the author, the narration is fractured in the tension between orality and the written word and with it, multiple versions of stories without beginning or end. The narrator is no longer stable entity, creating a trauma.

31As a ‘Creole’ author, Chamoiseau wants to maintain the storyteller’s power of the spoken word and questions his own writing through authorial characters in his novels. He conceives of ‘l’écrire’ (the dynamics of the act of writing as opposed to ‘l’écrit’ which is static). ‘L’écrire’ is closer to the words of the traditional storyteller potentially free from the ’constraints’ of euro-centric writing, which is stamped with the ideology of the Universal.

32At stake in ‘l’écrire’ is a theoretical, cultural and sociopolitical emancipation that aims to undo the perspective of the Other; with an internal geography which better expresses Creoleness while avoiding at the same time doudouism. Within ’l‘écrire’, Chamoiseau’s narrator often defines himself as a ‘marqueur de paroles’: the one who collects, notes and recalls the ancestral and popular power of the spoken word.

33The narrator in Texaco is an ‘amarreur’ who weaves together a number of different voices, while reflecting on his own role and on that of the story. The ‘I’ of the narrator strives to become a ‘we’ as he records everyone’s story. The author appears constantly as a character who is trying to define himself through his writings, which often have their own autonomy in the novel.

34The theme of writing is thus made more complex. The act of writing becomes transparent by constructing the ‘I’ (the first person narrator), who is in the actual process of writing. Writing, narrating is a means of resisting what the authorial character feels to be the constant aggression of a world seeking to absorb, to obliterate him. ‘I write so I am’: this seems to be the inaugural revelation and the obsession of the fictitious author.

35In Roland Barthes’s terms, ’Du Vouloir-Écrire au Pouvoir-Écrire’ (from the need to write to the ability to write), the authorial character feels the gap and perpetually questions his own writing. He is constantly torn by dissatisfaction as he seeks to come close to the storyteller’s power of the spoken word. He questions himself concerning the appropriate narrative style to adopt and seems to obey to the injunction of a secret typology of his own, continually putting himself into question. Thus the empirical author transposes upon his diegetic character his own quest in writing.

36The diegetic character who is often the narrator and an authorial figure is gnawed by doubt; during the course of the narrative, he becomes increasingly uncertain of his own role. He gives up the right to talk to the other characters as well as to engage their interior monologues. He becomes the collective narrator, the pronoun ‘we’, composing a narrative with several voices and a heterogeneous language. None of the characters has the legitimacy to tell the story.

37This is shown in À bout d’enfance when the narrator tries to ‘... have a grip in the maze of his writing’ and confesses ‘... searching without knowing what to look for’ (188). In Biblique des derniers gestes there are numerous instances when the narrator notes his uncertainties in his ‘Notes de l’atelier et d’autres affres...’

38The homodiegetic narrator, ’marqueur de paroles’, considers his role and objectivity as inferior to that of a writer. Even if he gives himself the function of gathering and conveying the speech of the other characters, he suffers from his own sense of incompetence. Thus in Texaco, the narrator feels unable to rely on his tape recorder which always seems to be set with technical problems but which however compensates for his lack of attention and memory. He deems himself unreliable.

39Likewise in Solibo Magnifique, the narrator must confront the same problems, as his battery run tape recorder never works, and this is further aggravated by the fact that he himself acknowledges that ‘he suffered from asthma and that it was impossible for him to remember his plan of work’ (43). The authorial character knows that he is not playing his role properly and that he has no hold on the story he is trying to narrate.

40He would like to be an ‘ethnographer’ or an ‘observer-creator’ drawing inspiration from the daily life of the people he encounters. This is exactly what the narrator (who is not an ‘I’ but a ‘we’, emphasizing the notion of collective experience) does in Chronique. However, he is conscious that his ‘direct and interactive observation’ of the people he is supposed to describe has made him ‘integrate’ with them; thus he is unable to succeed in his endeavor. He considers himself a ‘parasite in sterile bliss’ (Chamoiseau 1988: 44). In Solibo Magnifique the narrator is considered by the police inspector as ‘ useless negro’ who does ‘too much of philosophy’ (169-70). Instead of adhering to an ‘etic’ account, the narrator ends up recounting an ‘emic’ experience.

41The narrative figure is rendered all the more complex as ‘l’écrire’ to which he subscribes is not subjected to the division of genres, and structuring it represents a challenge for the narrator. According to Glissant and Chamoiseau, the role of the Caribbean artist is to reactivate the collective consciousness; thus he also becomes an ethnologist, an historian, a linguist, a painter of frescoes and an architect, among other self-attributed roles. The multiplicity of the artist’s roles creates a sphere pregnant with ‘chaos’ (Glissant’s term), both tangible and psychological.

42In Texaco, as soon as Marie-Sophie Laborieux constructs her hut, other huts appear around hers in an anarchic manner but hers remains nonetheless the point of convergence. Since the narrator is not an advocate of the metadiegetic narrative, several stories are juxtaposed, emanating from different voices in the same work. The notion of linearity in the novel therefore gives way to the experiences of these characters. The process of writing is constantly commented on which requires the narrator (and even of the empirical author) to restart the artistic experience ab initio. The subject is thereby separated from the object of his desire.

43Hence ‘l’écrire’ by its narrative structure and constant emphasis on the act of writing becomes a source of suffering and trauma for the narrator. It corresponds to a literary movement, which aims at rooting out alienation, decolonizing and deconstructing the eurocentric vision.

44In his work From Columbus to Castro, Eric Williams emphasizes the importance of being an active agent in forging one’s own historical perspective:

Viewed in the historical perspective, the future way forward for the people of the Caribbean must be one which would impel them to start making their own history, to be the subjects rather than the objects of history, to stop being the playthings of other people.
(503)

45Chamoiseau plays an undeniably significant role in fostering a ‘Caribbean consciousness’ as he is actively (re) thinking the national history and cultural specificity of his native land. His literary and cinematographic discourse is an explicitly Creole and Glissantian one: the notion of identity (and underlying problems of acculturation and alienation), the subsequent search for the past and hence history, are significant themes. Art becomes the spatio-temporal framework, ‘the third space’ (to quote Homi Bhabha) whereby he confronts the Margin with the Centre while contesting and constructing ideologies.

46The film Biguine (2004, with Chamoiseau as scriptwriter) portrays ideological resistance to the imposed French culture during the colonial period and brings to the fore his need to revive the traditions of Creole orality which have their genesis in ancestral African traditions. The figure of the storyteller is the voice that dominates the whole film: she starts the story and ends it. ‘Biguine’ music (‘creolised’ music based primarily on African rhythms along with European musical influences, a ‘polka’ for example) demonstrates the artistic creation of the Martinican people who have been able to create art in spite of cultural oppression. In the film, Creole and the celebration of carnival also come across as a form of resistance to political power and to authority in general. The film portrays holistically how Tiquitaque and Hermansia transcend the trauma of oppression.

47Forging the cultural identity of Black Martinicans is as important as forging their national and political identity or ’consciousness’. In Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha explains what constitutes the idea of a nation:

Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation—or narration—might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from these traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the past. (1)

48In his works, Chamoiseau depicts the heroic past of the Black Martinican man, thereby constructing the social capital (or in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘the symbolic capital’) on which a national identity is based. He also sets out to pave the way for a future collective sense of identity. According to Chamoiseau, this new political identity, combined with Creole cultural identity, can eventually help the Black Martinican man transcend both the memory of trauma and the trauma of memory.

49Chamoiseau’s works clearly reflect the ‘haunting’ influence of his (first) profession. The narrator, in his novels (who is more often than not a (re-) created self of the empirical author) is constantly aware that he is but an ‘observer’ of society rather than an active agent trying to bring about social change. Is this because Chamoiseau considers his literature as a ‘pre-literature’, still in the process of finding its own ‘socioliterary’ space7?

50Chamoiseau often intertwines the double perspective of his writing self and his position as an educator in his novels. This is illustrated in Un dimanche au cachot, which is structurally and thematically conceived as a palimpsest. The diegetic narrator bearing the same name as the empirical author tries to reach out to a young, alienated orphan girl, Caroline, who has sought refuge in the old Plantation jail. Once he is with her inside the cell, his surroundings overwhelm him: ‘In the beauty of the place, through the glistening rain, I perceive the terrible palimpsest’ (30). Chamoiseau intertwines the past with the present, his creative self with the representation of himself, and his position as a youth worker with the nurturing of his artistic imagination as a writer within the novel. The narrator has multiple, fragmented and uncanny flashes of incidents from the past, for instance how slaves were tortured. He feels that Caroline has been traumatised, that she must feel tormented presences from the period of slavery as well, in some mysterious way. Thus he tries to heal her by probing into her past and bringing it to light. Chamoiseau’s writings are definitely ‘haunted’ by his training as a youth worker. Working with alienated youngsters has made him all the more conscious of the necessity of exploring identity, to heal the self—to realise the ‘I’. In his works, the ‘I’ merges into the ‘we’ and splits yet again: Chamoiseau explores both individual and collective memory and experience.

51Reviving the memory of trauma through the symbolic re- (construction) of the identity of the Black Martinican man makes it possible to overcome the trauma of memory. Chamoiseau contests eurocentric ideologies and re-invents the Nation by constructing his own narratives of national belonging. In so doing, his works are explicitly inscribed within a postcolonial critique of Western structures of knowledge and power.