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Writing Selves, Written Selves

Born in 1953 in Fort-deFrance, Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau is one of the most prolific and influential writers in the French-speaking Caribbean today. Like his fellow Martinican intellectuals, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Edouard Glissant, Chamoiseau sees literary thought as key to political battles for liberation from colonial power. Such battles have often been fought in Martinique, but never won. Martinique remains paradoxically both a Caribbean island and part of France. French power in Martinique has grown rather than weakened in the last century as, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it shifted from being a producer economy to being a service economy dependent on the French welfare state (Price xiii). Chamoiseau argues that French modes of thought are now so embedded within Martinican life that they have become imperceptible. His writing investigates the modes of perception and imagination that arise under neocolonial power and those which might challenge it. He has pursued this investigation in a range of genres: theatre; novels; essays; children’s fiction; literary history; screenplays; books of photography. His autobiographical writing, published as a trilogy between 1990 and 2005, explores his memories of childhood and adolescence in Martinique in the late 1950s and 1960s. Une Enfance créole [A Creole Childhood], the abovementioned autobiographical trilogy, bears out Michael J Dash’s comment that Caribbean literature is ‘a series of literary relationships’ (20). Each volume of the trilogy, Antan d’enfance (1993; published in English as Childhood in 1999), Chemin-d’école (1994; published in English as School Days in 1998) and A Bout d’enfance (2005) [Out of Childhood] engages closely with previous Caribbean autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works. Chamoiseau’s autobiographical writing reinforces the project elaborated in his fictional work: that of preserving the memory of Martinique’s past in order to strengthen or create a sense of collective Martinican identity in the present. The autobiographical genre is harnessed to this political project and, in the process, undergoes changes that range from the subtle to the radical. Through the use of the third person and the terms ‘le négrillon’ [the little black boy], ‘l’homme d’aujourd’hui’ [the man today] and the creolised term, ‘l’homme d’à-présent’ [the present-day man], as well as the use of the second person to address memory and a range of apostrophes to people who shared his childhood or influenced it, Chamoiseau undermines any expectation the reader has of autobiography as an introspective genre exploring a unified, Cartesian subject. The frequent apostrophes to ‘frères’ [brothers], ‘répondeurs’ [backtalkers] and ‘partageurs’ [sharers], the use of the indefinite article in the trilogy’s title, and the dedication of Chemin-d’école to all those who suffered a colonial schooling underline the status of Une Enfance créole as an exploration of the nature of childhood in a post/colonial society, rather than the story of an individual life. The expression of collective identity has (often problematically) been seen as the defining characteristic of life writing from colonial and postcolonial societies (Kelly 3). But I would say of Une Enfance créole what Jean Khalfa and Jérôme Game say of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1995, Notebook of a Sara-Louise Cooper