Creolist Mystification: Oral Writing in the Works of Patrick Chamoiseau and Simone Schwarz-Bart

Tcheuyap, Alexie; Mitsch, R. H.

doi:10.2979/ral.2001.32.4.44

Cited by 5 publications

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Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Conteur and the ethics of survival

Tarica

2010

International Journal of Francophone Studies

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This article concerns the Creole Conteur in Patrick Chamoiseau's depictions of the slave plantation in Au temps de l'antan (1988a), crire en pays domin (1997) and Texaco (1992). It proposes that Chamoiseau's vision of the plantation be seen as a parable for contemporary Martinique, one that seeks to reinstate a redemptive history in which the past has a positive claim on the present. The article examines the tensions internal to this recuperative attempt, especially those carried in the relationship between literal and spiritual forms of hunger: the slaves' famine condition and the survival tactics of dbrouillardise compete with the spiritual nourishment found in an emergent collective identity. The article demonstrates that Chamoiseau uses the Conteur to redraw the symbolic boundaries of the plantation from an amoral grey zone to a cohesive Creole social order, making the plantation past relevant to the present day. It explores how Chamoiseau preserves the parable's frame of moral instruction even though, as a survival tale involving extreme duress, it involves a calculus beyond good and evil.

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Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Conteur and the ethics of survival

Tarica

2010

International Journal of Francophone Studies

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From language to literature: The fictionalization of the book in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novels

Galmiche-Essue

2023

International Journal of Francophone Studies

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If Patrick Chamoiseau’s work on the issue of language has been amply studied, this article intends to shed new light on it through an analysis of its relation to the printed book, as represented in the Martinician writer’s novel. The purpose of this article is not only to offer a more developed approach of the contrast between oral and written, which takes into account the role played by print, but also to study the ways in which Chamoiseau creates, through the fictionalized book, his own ‘linguistic mythology’. According to Chamoiseau, this is the ultimate goal of literature as it participates in the renewal of linguistic codes. The writer’s political posture, which seeks to determine which approach is more legitimate, the oral language or the written, Creole or French, is replaced with an aesthetic posture focused on the contribution of Chamoiseau’s personal writing style to francophone literature.

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Remapping the Crime Novel in the Francophone Caribbean: The Case of Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

Knepper¹

2007

Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc. Am.

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Shaped by a history of mobilities, displacements, and creolizing processes, the Caribbean is a significant testing ground for theories concerning the circulation and remapping of genre. Taking Patrick Chamoiseau's theory of generic wandering as my point of departure, I argue that his Solibo Magnifique exemplifies the principle of generic creolization. This is evident in the novel's intermixing of the detective novel, film noir, the spaghetti western, the comic book, the hard-boiled crime novel, and creole storytelling techniques. By manipulating the conventions by which the classical detective, the hard-boiled police officer, and the private investigator are characterized, Chamoiseau's narrative turns from an investigation into one man's death to an interrogation of Martinique, its history and the workings of its neocolonial psyche. Through the example of Solibo Magnifique and its radiating influence on other postcolonial crime writers, I conclude that this principle of creative creolization is increasingly relevant to understanding a world in which genre's radiating and rhizomic web of mobilities involves local and global confluences.

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Creolist Mystification: Oral Writing in the Works of Patrick Chamoiseau and Simone Schwarz-Bart

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Conteur and the ethics of survival

Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Conteur and the ethics of survival

From language to literature: The fictionalization of the book in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novels

Remapping the Crime Novel in the Francophone Caribbean: The Case of Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

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