Parkour explained by Jim from The Office

The Vulnerability of Concrete

I find Priyanka’s post on Chamoiseau’s argument for Relation very useful, especially when describing the relation between the country, Texaco, and City.  If City represents life, then the final age of Texaco’s history – the “Age of Concrete” – is “the definite sign of a step forward in life” (356).  Even though concrete incorporates some of the life and comfort of City into Texaco and makes the hutches more stable, Texaco retains a vulnerable relationship with City.  Marie-Sophie describes the growing vulnerability of material loss that coexists with the establishment of immobile modern comforts like concrete when she observes that “with our homes built in concrete we began to feel the need for certainties and for conveniences which, strangely enough, we would sorely miss all the sudden” (365).

The relationship Marie-Sophie describes is not just a dichotomy between urban and rural or the urban and the slums, but a multidirectional flow of people, ideas, and materials.  For example, we talked about the symbiotic relationship between City and the Quarters in class, where the clean modernity of City depends on its displaced victims in the Quarters to perform City’s dirty and menial jobs.  Simultaneously, the displaced in the Quarters rely on the trash and jobs of City in order to survive.  However, the role of concrete – and the other waste products of City and its previous manifestations (i.e. the sugarcane plantations and the sugar factories) – in this City/Quarter Relation seems to counteract this multidirectionality.  The description of the Age of Concrete in the timeline at the beginning of the book indicates a linear flow of influence from City to Texaco “as the fall of economic production inaugurates the reign of the city, glorious concrete transforms shacks into villas” (6).  In this ‘historical’ summary, the city’s concrete transforms the shacks of the Quarters “into villas,” but the Quarters have no influence on the city.  Returning to the theme of vulnerability, concrete ultimately makes Texaco more vulnerable to City, especially after City begins bulldozing unrecognized Quarters around Fort-de-France.  Marie-Sophie again tells the Urban Planner, “And we began, in deathly anguish, to wait our turn – having suddenly understood that despite the concrete our Texaco remained a fragile embryo” (369).  Whereas with hutches made of mobile materials like straw, tin, and even asbestos, Texaco could rebuild after being destroyed, concrete’s destruction is definite.

The issue of translation and time in Chamoiseau’s movement from Créolité to Glissant’s ‘Relation’

While gathering scholarly articles, I came across a 2012 interview with Chamoiseau conducted by Olivia Sheringham for the the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford, as part of the Oxford Diasporas Program(me), in which Chamoiseau talks about how more recently, he has in fact moved away from Créolité, for very similar reasons as to why he first stayed away from Negritude.

According to Sheringham, Glissant’s concept of ‘Relation’ “… refers to the interconnectedness and interdependence of the world and seeks to move beyond atavistic notions of identity”, which is now a stance adopted by Chamoiseau, who was a close friend and collaborator of Glissant, who died in 2011.

In the interview, Chamoiseau discusses his reasons for giving up Créolité in favor of Relation, mentioning the dilution of the original term that was used to discuss Creole language, and the false binary logic of Negritude that feeds into Créolité. Throughout the interview, Chamoiseau points outs the role of language in forming identities, Creole or otherwise, which then speaks to the points on the limitations of translation raised by Maryse Condé, an important Caribbean writer, in an conversation with Emily Apter, published in the journal of Public culture.

Chamoiseau responds to Sheringham’s question regarding the origin of the term ‘Creole’, by stating that in its original form, it was only meant by (Glissant, himself and others) to refer to “… the mechanical constitution of the creole language” and that Glissant himself claimed once “… that the mechanical constitution of the creole language is an echo of the world – showing that the creole language is formed of a mosaic of multiple languages and lexical presences.”

However, Chamoiseau book-ends this statement by saying that historically, the term was used to designate any object, animal, artifact, social identity or food that was created in or “acclimatized to” the Americas, though it first began as a way of describing “… the descendants of European colonisers.” For me personally, this explanation brings us directly to the doorstep of ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, and fills in all the gaps left by Rhys in my understanding of the binary of white creole/black creole set up in her book.

Explaining why he prefers the concept of Relation as it allows for “relational identity, which is an identity that is defined by the fact that it changes all the time without losing anything or being distorted”, Chamoiseau states–

“… I would prefer to get rid of the term [creolization] and to use the term Relation instead. Because the idea of creolization presupposes that we are still in the former absolutes – racial absolutes, black/white, linguistic absolutes – all the former identity markers that elsewhere defined métissage: métissage is black/white that gives us grey.”

I feel that this concept of Relation really does bring the Post Colonial/Subaltern discussion directly into our current time, as it allows for a discussion of the influence of and relationship between multiple times and spaces that both Fabian and Nixon raise as issues faced by marginalized populations all throughout the Global South (in fact, it even challenges the static nature of the concept of the ‘Global South’!).

Chamoiseau stresses the fluidity allowed by Relation, and also when prompted by Sheringham, goes on to place ideas of Globalization, Fixed Identity and the falling away of Absolute concepts in this context of Relation. I feel that Maryse Condé raises many of the same issues in her discussion with Emily Apter of translating Caribbean writing, being as she is fully aware of the ‘Africa Chic’ co-opting within Euro-centric cultures throughout the 90’s and 2000’s.

When speaking with Apter about the translation of her work, conducted by her husband, Richard Philcox, Condé states–

“… if there is a phrase in Creole, he leaves it, but he also includes a translation in the notes (and most publishers resist this). And when he says his translations are market-driven, it really means only in this narrow sense of maximizing clarity and accessibility. He knows that I have resisted being “marketed” in America within the confines of the preestablished “black writers” niche.”

In response to Apter’s question regarding how her work is marketed, she responds with the following:

“Editors tend to see everything in black and white, and they have tried to target the African American reading public in marketing my fiction. But this really doesn’t work, since my books are concerned less with race and much more with the complexities of overlapping cultures, with conditions of diaspora, and with cross-racial, cross-generational encounters.”

Not to say that Conde agrees with everything Chamoiseau and Glissant claim regarding Relation– in fact, in response to Apter’s direct question regarding the Créolité manifesto penned by Chamoiseau and a few fellow writers in 1989, she claims that the term itself “… effaces the history of slavery, of the plantation culture, and the economic foundations of the island. The term créolité makes the cultural laboratory more important than the memory of a sugarbased economy.” While thus making a case for the inclusion of plantation memory in the discussion of the Creole language and culture, Condé still seems to be making a case for a movement away from binaries– It is easy to see how the very act of translation itself ensures that oral tradition, the heart of Creolite, “observes hierarchy as it can only be communicated in translation”, as claimed by Amy Emery in book, ‘The anthropological imagination in Latin American literature’. Emery states:

“The role of the anthropologist or the writer… is to transcribe the spontaneous richness of oral narrative with a minimal amount of authorial intervention. The positioning of the writer and his or her informant is meant to guarantee that the document will be an authentic expression of the informant’s voice, which the literate writer has facilitated, but not produced as such” (70).

This point raised by Emery speaks to the problem of allogenic time as raised by Fabian, which leads me to believe that more than any other sub-set (if you will) of Post Colonial writing, Caribbean Writing addresses the issues highlighted in ‘Time and the Other’ as well as Nixon’s ‘Slow Violence’ by discusses ways in which to decrease the distance between center and periphery caused by the binary oppositions within language and discussions about language, as well as resists the forced hierarchy of translation.

References:

Amy Emery, The anthropological imagination in Latin American literature, 1996.

Emily Apter, Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Condé, 2001. Public Culture 13(1): 89–96.

From Creolization to Relation: An interview with Patrick Chamoiseau http://www.migration.ox.ac.uk/odp/pdfs/PatrickChamoiseauInterview_F.pdf

Assimilation and Integration

Monsieur Alcibiade gives a political speech in Texaco in which he speaks favorably of France but rails against “subjection, the goal of which was to exploit the colony in France’s interest alone.” He later presents the metaphor of a daughter walking side-by-side with the mother to represent the ideal situation of Martinique maturing. Throughout Texaco (thus far), there are a great deal of references to the population’s love of France and French culture. Nelta, while presented as a character who wished to travel the whole world, dreams primarily of Marseille. Aside from Alice in Wonderland, even the skeptical Marie Sophie holds on to books by French authors.

Against our expectations, Martiniquans are never shown revolting against the motherland, even in the face of casualties from the two World Wars. Although Alcibiade serves as an antagonist and no fan of Cesaire, his views do not seem entirely out of step with Cesaire or many of Chamoiseau’s more sympathetic characters. Cesaire’s desire to make Martinique a “department” of France, which would seem to be in step with Alcibiade, seems odd. Why would Cesaire want this?

In “Political integration as an Alternative to Independence in the French Antilles,” Arvin W. Murch conducts a study on Antillean (Martinique and Guadaloupe) leaders’ attitudes toward France and independence in contrast to an earlier study on former British holdings in West Indies. His purpose was to get to the bottom of what seemed like an anomaly (The French Antilles moving toward “closer integration with metropolitan France”) in the “age of nationalism.”

The findings of the study, published in 1968 (the timing of this study seemed appropriate for the novel, particularly the section we are covering on Tuesday) are intriguing. Based on the earlier study of the West Indies, Murch asserts that if the Antilles have not moved toward independence, that it can be attributed to “(1) the absence of an enlightened leadership capabe of mobilizing these demands, or (2) an already satisfactory level of equality in the local society” (546).

Murch provides data proving that Martinique (and Guadaloupe) did, in fact, have an enlightened leadership (by this he means a leadership that buys into Enlightenment ideas such as The Rights of Man), pointing toward more satisfactory economic and human rights conditions. Despite some of the evidence we see in Texaco, Murch does prove that conditions such as an open society and access to education are, at least, better at the time in Martinique than Jamaica.

Importantly, Murch discusses the idea of assimilation, likening France’s policy to that of Ancient Greece, as opposed to the British’s resemblance to the Romans. In the Greek model, the mother/father state “sought to make each holding an integral part culturally, politically, and commercially of the homeland.” (548). Perhaps for this reason, the data shows that a majority of “enlightened” leaders in the Antilles did not see independence as necessary to achieve an egalitarian society.

Importantly, a survey also showed that many leaders believed that independence was not politically or economically feasible at the time. While this hints at more cynical thinking regarding the relationship between colony/former colony and mother country, there is also strong evidence to support that the connection between the people of the French Antilles and French culture was equally as significant in terms of attitudes toward independence.

All in all, the study is a fascinating look at the attitudes of leaders in the Caribbean in the mid to late 1960s. Despite the sound methodology and the reasonable assumptions the author makes based on his findings, this seems to stand somewhat in contrast with Texaco, where overcrowding and poverty cannot be simply brushed aside by a sentence or a favorable comparison with Jamaica. In fact, the only point easily reconciled between study and novel is that the French Antilles enjoyed a relatively open society where there were less barriers to intermarriage. Indeed, Texaco spends a fair amount of words detailing the crumbling barriers between social strata and the changing realities faced by Fort-de-France’s various castes. It also shows a break between the author and the protagonist and Aime Cesaire, which perhaps hints that the enlightened leaders of Martinique were not entirely representative of their constituents.

Some Random and Barely Connected Thoughts on Our Recent Reading

Although Planet of Slums is chock full of shocking revelations and useful analysis, I was most taken with Davis’ illustration of just how global the issue is. Even in our class, which I believe to be made up of forward thinking, enlightened people, I think we have a tendency to equate “global” with “everything that’s not American” or, a bit more broadly, “African, South(east) Asian, or South American.” While Davis–as he should–focuses on cities such as Lagos, the evidence of this problem is as globe spanning as the roots are.

I still cannot truly fathom the slums of Lagos or Manila having never seen them but I believe we see the slum problem manifest itself here in this city. As America has urbanized, Wards 7 and 8 have dramatically declined. While I worked at the DC Dept. of Employment services, the citywide unemployment rate during and after the recession hovered around a depressing 12%, while the rate in Ward 8 was closer to 30%. As working class families, in many cases barely above the poverty line, were forced out of Northwest by increasingly expensive housing due (gentrification, but also economic downturn), neighborhoods east of the Anacostia river saw an uptick in overcrowded housing and crime.

Totaly unrelated to anything above:

I also think this is a good week to mention a bit of overlap between my Film class, which is focused on Alfonso Cuarón. Prof. Middents has introduced to us the idea of transnational cinema with the chief examples being the films of Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, which is interesting in light of the criticisms that we are exploring of not only capitalism but neoliberalism.

In Y Tu Mama Tambien, Cuarón intersperses bits of political commentary, including references to the Zapatistas and the first electoral defeat of the neoliberal PRI party in 70 years. In Children of Men, Cuarón explores the slums of a future UK that is the stable country left after 18 years of global infertility.

The idea of transnational cinema and Cuarón’s ability to show similar issues in vastly different productions–particularly productions that use cast, crew, and money from multiple countries–seems worth exploring in light of this Global Novel course. If you have been interested by the subject matter of our more recent reading, I would recomment Cuarón and González Iñárritu.

Texaco – Narrative, Form, and Voice

Much like Joellyn, I have been very focused on narrative form while reading Texaco. I think it is especially important considering our discussion of the form and particularly the voice found in Oil on Water. Although it describes violence that happens to many, Oil on Water is framed by a singular individual. In a way, the voice itself is apt for describing slow violence. By using first-person limited, Habila confines us to the individual experience – while third person automatically frames a story from an outside perspective, first person forces the reader into the interior of the character. In this way, Habila’s voice is useful for addressing slow violence – it is representative of the kind of hidden interiority that seems to be exemplary of the difference between slow violence and the “quick” violence that makes the news and forces people to pay attention.

However, by limiting the first person to Rufus alone, Habila also limits our scope of the story. Rufus’ voice is representative of the slow violence happening to all of the characters, but because he is the only character whose mind we know, we are fettered in our scope of the story. Although his interiority is available to us, he is still inevitably framing the lens through which we view the experience of every other individual. Chamoiseau seems to attempt to solve this problem in Texaco, because although Mary-Sophie is at the heart of the novel, Chamoiseau weaves many voices around hers in order to complete his story.

This of course begins in the first section, “The Annunciation,” in which we gather different perspectives of the “coming of the Christ.” In this chapter, we are not yet aware of who our narrator will be for the majority of the book, and instead are given a nameless omniscient narrator who moves through the minds of these different characters as they experience the arrival of the “Christ.” Thus, Chamoiseau sets up a framework for this novel that is immediately different from that of Oil on Water. We open with a woven together story, and the rise and fall of the voices allows us to experience snippets of individual experiences.

As Priyanka has pointed out, this allows for a more “authentic” narrative, and I think one of the reasons for this is that it gives us access to a broader range of individual experiences while still allowing each to retain that individuality – in other words, the flow of the narrative does not blur them together but rather sets them up against each other so that a fuller story is told in between the lines that define each character.

Finally, I think that the “excerpts” from various notebooks are certainly worth considering, especially in terms of what Chamoiseau is doing with this particular style of narrative in terms expressing a story without limiting its lens or framework. As has been pointed out by other posts, it is clear immediately that the content of the excerpts does not necessarily align itself clearly with the flow of the story around it. They are purposefully disruptive and arresting, asking the reader to pause and hold another voice in tension with the one that we are already reading. Chamoiseau uses these excerpts as another level of that constant “circling” around the truth that he is attempting to reveal without directly delivering the story from a singular, linear source. In this way, it seems that he is taking Habila’s stylistic attempt to grasp an elusive “interior” experience and fortifying it with a more complex narrative voice, one that perhaps more clearly captures the particular nature of the violence being expressed. 

Sex as Metaphor: Violence and Identity

In a few of the novels we’ve read, sex is described through a metaphor. In Season of Migration to the North, Lalami explains Mustafa’s sex scenes as “a theatre of war” (29). Sex becomes a symbol to the bigger picture of Mustafa’s attempt to conquer Englishwomen and regain masculinity to the African identity. Mustafa explains, “I would stay awake all night warring with bow and sword and spear and arrows” (29). His identity transforms throughout the novel as he performs identity through name changes and sexual metaphors.

In Chamoiseau’s Texaco, the sex metaphor is very different from Mustafa’s violent battles. Sex in this case is described through images of the water—-birds, the tide, a shipwreck and canoes. Oselia is “a starving bird pecking at his skin, pecking his sweet juice, pecking a bit of his blood and the rest of his soul” (66). He becomes a shipwreck that continually needs to be saved from the depths of the water. The violence of Mustafa’s sexual encounters is not seen in the same sense here. The water is a source of violence and in a way can be seen as a reason why Oselia can’t repeat this act with the narrator’s father. Metaphors and phrases of water are continued through the novel. Yet, going back to this specific scene, at the end of that same paragraph the narrator makes herself known again and says that she can only “make a sketch of what happened” because her father “hadn’t done school.” This break in the metaphor shows the reader that the identity of the novel is not fixed—there are tales of others, of herself, and in other voices. Sex in a way, is a means to invoking violence and challenging identity.

In the big picture of this novel, identity is a main concern. As we began reading Texaco, it was at first difficult because it seems natural to ground identity to understand where the novel is going. Chamoiseau makes this attempt difficult for his reader. In “Re-Imagining Diversity and Connection in the Chaos World,” Chamoiseau explains identity as, “In the past, people thought a cultural identity was powerful when it enclosed and defined what belonged to me and not to others; today it is powerful when one is—and recognizes that one is—in relationship with the diversity of cultures. And the more a cultural identity is capable of putting itself into connection with diversity, the more powerful it will be—that’s our big issue, that’s what we want to examine today in our literature.” This is what we see in the structure and voices Chamoiseau uses in Texaco.

The Rise of Slums and the Fall of Gardens

In “Planet of the Slums” Mike Davis describes the rapid growth of slums – urbanization decoupled from industrialization and development – in the developing world since the debt crises of the 1970’s and the resulting IMF structural adjustment programs.  However, Patrick Chamoiseau shows in Texaco that this process began long before the 1970’s, with roots in the slavery-based sugar and coffee plantation system.   The structural conditions that facilitated the urban poverty of modern slums began with the exploitive plantation system, where both the fertility of the land and the life of the slaves working the land were extracted in the form of sugar and coffee exported to Europe.  However, because of the rural nature of the plantations, slaves sustained themselves with the agricultural knowledge they brought with them from Africa; even after the natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes and droughts) that devastated the cash crops of Esternome’s béké, the slaves were managed to survive off the food of their “invisible gardens” and knowledge of the land:

The slaves, used to sagging bellies, brought back from invisible gardens enough to stand on their legs.  What’s more, they were able to grab the river’s crayfish, make the lapia fish drunk with a bark juice, trap the flesh of migrating prey.  And though it wasn’t enough for a feast of first communion, this averted the famine for the Béké and his servants on top of hectares of cane and coffee. (45)

After emancipation in 1848, the newly freed slaves temporarily escaped the exploitive French colonial system by fleeing to hills like Noutéka, but after the industrialization of sugar production and the rise of the Factor, “The great conquests of the hills was piteously going down the Factory’s heap of connecting rods, its greasy straps, its tanks and pipes” (140).  The gardens of the hills and the knowledge needed to cultivate them were the only means to truly attain independence from colonial exploitation in Martinique; by abandoning the gardens and their knowledge, many former slaves returned to the new slavery of the Factory.

Yet this knowledge was not completely forgotten, because even in the Quarter of the Wretched, Esternome tells Marie-Sophie through her narration to “the Christ,” “We still held on to scraps of our survival instincts” (191).  Esternome and other former slaves who had remembered how to garden grew “subsistence gardens around Fort-de-France, like in the old days around the plantation…But it wasn’t enough to feed all of City” (191).  Even though they retain some independence through food, the inhabitants of the Quarter of the Wretched still depend on the City for their livelihoods, since “City composed the Quarter with its mound of scraps, made-in-here, made-in-there” (172).  Eventually, as the rate of urbanization increases and more of the marginalized concentrate themselves on the City’s periphery, land available for the gardens declines, creating the modern slums described by Davis.

Chamoiseau, Habila, and Structure

I keep going back to the way Patrick Chamoiseau structures Texaco – the inclusion of diary/journal pages, the subtitled sections, the altering points of view – and how this structure is both completely different but also similar to the way Helon Habila structures Oil on Water.  Both structures do work in authenticating the stories Chamoiseau and Habila are telling.

In Habila’s case, the narrator is a journalist; his journey both mirrors his own personal story, as well as his journalistic discoveries. We talked a lot in class about the use of fog, how both its physical presence and metaphoric presence conceal reality from the reader and the narrator. By telling Rufus’s story in a non-linear fashion, Habila emphasizes this inability to see clearly until one moves closer to the source; but even when Rufus delves further into the story he is pursuing, there remains mystery – a “fog” – that cannot be dissipated by the truth.

Chamoiseau’s structure does similar work. While Habila uses non-linearity to his advantage, Chamoiseau uses varying techniques in order to keep the reader guessing – and to keep the reader invested in his story. I’m most struck by the diary/manuscript/journal pages, and how they are not only included in the story, but are also archived in a way as to increase their authenticity. Chamoiseau does not just drop the excerpts into the story; he chooses to label them in a way that gives the reader an informative edge. For example, on page 148, there is an excerpt from the urban planner’s notes to the “word scratcher,” archived as “File No. 6. Sheet XVIII. 1987. Schelcher Library.” This level of detail stops the reader in the dramatic present of the story and makes him or her stop to consider where this piece of evidence fits in. It is a discovery and a journey, much in the way Rufus’s story is as well.

This structure is also of special interest to me in regards to the novel I’ve chosen for my Amazon book review. Chris Abani’s GraceLand includes recipes and proverb-like epigraphs that on the one hand, seem to have no decipherable purpose in the story, but on the other hand, seem to say more about the protagonist and his family. It’s an interesting stylistic choice, and it’s one I’m intrigued by moving forward for the final paper.

Distinctly French: the Subaltern travel to and from City in ‘Texaco’ and ‘Pere Goriot’

Patrick Chamoiseau, in choosing to write ‘Texaco’ using shifting points of view, jumps in time, switches in tone and dialect and circularity, achieves what Spivak upholds in her seminal ‘Can the Subaltern Speak (1)?’, which is the creation of a multi-facted narrative where the multiple Creole identities represented (in ‘Texaco’) tell their own story in their own language, at their own pace and in a manner closer to their own oral traditions versus the format or style of western fiction. (Spivak’s criticism was that ‘benevolent’ Western intellectuals can silence the subaltern by attempting to speak for them).

In ‘Texaco’, City is evoked frequently, and one such time is when the “city which was not City” is described in opposition to the Quarter and its hutches—“There was a constant going and coming between the Quarter of the Wretched and the City’s heart. City was the open ocean. The Quarter was the port of registry” (172). We are also given Esternome’s own version of City—

“City’s a quake. A tremor. There all things are possible, and there all things are mean. City sweeps and carries you along, never lets go of you, gets you mixed up in its old secrets. In the end you take them in without ever understanding them. You tell those just-off-the-hills that that’s how it is and they eat it up: but City has just gulped you in without showing you the ropes. A City is the ages all gathered in one place, not just in the names, houses, statues, but in the not-visible. A City sips the joys, the pain, the thoughts, ever feeling, it makes its dew out of them, which you see without being able to point to it. That’s what City is and that was Saint-Pierre.” (173-174).

With this thought in mind while reading Chamoiseau’s ‘Texaco’, I was immediately struck by the similarities between its thread involving descriptions of movement to and from City, and a similar thread in works of French Realism, such as Stendhal’s ‘The Red and the Black’ and Zola’s ‘Germinal’, but for the purpose of this blog post, specifically, Balzac’s ‘Pere Goriot’.
While ‘Pere Goriot’ is not considered part of the post-colonial canon, I’d like to argue that the issues of class, economic status, place and identity raised by the inhabitants of Maison Vauquer, and Eugène de Rastignac’s own constant battle to enter and be accepted by the bon-ton in Paris, in an effort to move away from both the Bucolic South of his youth as well as from the stench of poverty of the neighborhood in which the Maison Vauquer stands, speak to concepts of Subaltern, a field of Post-Colonial studies that focuses on individuals and/or communities that exist outside the hegemonic Center, often but not always represented as City.
Balzac himself was said to have been influenced while writing ‘Pere Goriot’ by the writing of James Fenimore Cooper, who at the time was known for his representation of Native Americans and their often violent interaction with civilization, a theme that certainly influenced Balzac’s use of characterization and dichotomies within ‘Pere Goriot’. It is in the juxtaposition of ordinary citizens against an omnipresent, all-powerful, mysterious City that I feel contains some of the seeds of Subaltern Studies and literature.
At the end of Pere Goriot, the reader is shown an incredibly epic scene: Goriot is dead, and Rastignac finds himself on a hill (I believe he reached here after a walk through the Père-Lachaise cemetery, post-funeral) overlooking Paris, which Balzac lays before him as a glittering, beautiful entity. He starts off towards his dinner with Delphine de Nucingen (which has social implications all of its own) but not before (at least in Loesberg’s interpretation) yelling out, “À nous deux, maintenant!” (“It’s between you and me now!”), presumably directing this challenge at Paris.
Chamoiseau gives Marie-Sophie the ability to co-opt and subvert this idea of challenging a city:

We shoved our way about next to City, holding on to it by its thousand survival cracks. But City ignored us. Its activity, glances, the facets of its life (from every day’s morning to the beautiful night neon) ignored us. We had vied for its promises, its destiny; we were denied its promises, its destiny. Nothing was given, everything was to be wrung out. We spoke to those who looked like us. We answered their call for help and they answered ours. The old Quarters held hands, going around City, families joined them, exchanges linked them. We wandered around City, going in to draw from it, going around it to live. We saw City from above, but in reality we lived at the bottom of its indifference which was often hostile.

The descriptions of movement to and from City gives Chamoiseau’s characters the agency to vocalize what they win and lose in every movement, and allows for multiple narrators and identities in a way that creates a multilinear and thus more authentic subaltern narrative. This more authentic narrative is a feature that distinctly belongs to writing that arises out of the “Overseas Departments” of France, which according to the New Internationalist, Chamoiseau interprets as another form of colonialism (2). I’d like to argue that Subaltern Literature written from within these Overseas Departments (like Martinique) is uniquely placed to vocalize multidimensional stories and narratives in a way other colonies or ex-colonies are not, because of the outlier moving to City (outside moving in) aesthetic that is so firmly a part of French culture, including French colonizing culture, first written about by French Realism authors such as Zola and Balzac.

(1) http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf
(2) http://newint.org/features/2001/10/05/texaco/

TEXACO as Rhizome

Patrick Chamoiseau‘s novel abounds with themes of the ties between nature and people; diaspora and search for a home; intertextuality; the constructed, written, and revised nature of history and storytelling; and the ones who history leaves out.  In her essay “Images of Creole Diversity and Spatiality: A Reading of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco,“ (translated into English by Dorothy S. Blair), Christine Chivallon beautifully connects all of these themes under the explanation of Chamoiseau’s participation in the Creole literary movement of the 1980s.

According to Chivallon, Chamoiseau, along with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant, wrote Eloge de la créolité, or In Praise of Creoleness, in 1989 as a direct response to the négritude movement of the 1930s.  Chivallon quotes the work to define one of its goals, which is to use art “to present insignificant heroes, anonymous heroes, those omitted from the colonial chronicle, those who resisted indirectly and patiently and who have nothing in common with the Western or French heroes.”

The “Creoleness” the movement promotes is one of multiplicity, complexity, and chaos–not, as Chivallon says “any indescriminate chaos, not dehumanized confusion, but that of mobility, of lightness, in which nothing is fixed or rigid, but everything consists simply of traces, of salient outlines…” (318).  As such, it breaks both with previous sociological traditions, which consider the Caribbean tradition either from the viewpoint of alienation and incompleteness or the search for some kind of “authenticity” outside of the formation of Caribbean societies, as in Cesaire’s   Négritude (319).

According to Chivallon, Texaco is, essentially, “Creoleness” in action.  The novel, she says, is “astonishingly appreciative of the way identity comes to terms with space and place” (319).  She traces three major themes of identity in the novel:

• Root identity, which “refers to unity and calls to mind the community whose continuity is linked to territorial belonging” (319).  This is the idea of the community as resulting from memory and/or from place, and leads to the ideas of an “us” v.s. a “them.”  An example of this in the novel is the collective that forms in the Mornes, which is “defined as the odyssey of a magical “Us”…the Nouteka” (322).  However, this cannot last.
• Mobile identity, which “suggests an uncoordinated fragmentation, the absence of collective social norms” (319).  In this scheme, City is seen as an enigma, a riddle, a mobile, multiracial, multilingual, multi-historical, chaotic entity.
• Rhizome identity, which “stands out as the image of Creoleness [Chamoiseau] celebrates” (320).  This final identity, that of “multiple roots,” combines elements of the first two.  This is a “kind of unity that transcends dispersal,” the “union of unity and multiplicity” (327).  It is “simultaneously order and disorder, unity and multiplicity, chaos and coherence.  In its relationship to space, it also unites these two opposing faces: that of taking root and that of wandering” (329).  This is Texaco.

Texaco’s major themes, therefore, act structurally as the rhizome–at times chaotic, at times contradictory or confusing, they combine in order to create a multi-vocal whole nonetheless connected, circling around the figures of Marie-Sophie and Texaco.

 

Making Time Spectacular: the slow, violent journey from Conrad to Habila

What made me feel the most excited about Helon Habila’s ‘Oil on Water’ was the fact that for me, this book marked a clear departure from “classic” post-colonial literature (in particular, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’) towards writing that is far more grounded in the modern, multiple realities of post-colonialism as they exist today. Where the concern in the past was always the colonizing power of the center over the periphery, as well as the role (and use of) dichotomies and unsustainable positions, it can be argued that the concern of the modern post-colonial novel is with the newer forces of colonization, whether it is the privatization of public resources or environmental degradation brought about by the new colonizers: multi-national corporations, engaged in the age old post-colonial hunt for resources.

In a blogpost written for Nieman Storyboard, Rob Nixon points out effective storytelling techniques for approaching the issues raised by the slow violence of systematic environmental degradation or by association, socio-political corruption that has the most deleterious impact on populations that live on the periphery of society. Nixon places importance on these techniques by underlining the need to make unspectacular time spectacular, in order to create an impact on the reader.

For many of us I’m sure, the parallels between ‘Heart of Darkness’ (HoD) and ‘Oil on Water’ began with the opening section of Habila’s novel, which clearly situates the plot as a memory, recalled by the narrator (Rufus) in much the same way Marlow recalls the story he tells his companions as they wait for the tide.  In addition, this same retelling includes references to the role of fog, literal and metaphorical, that accompanies both first person narratives:

I am walking down a well-lit path, with incidents neatly labeled and dated, but when I reach halfway memory lets go of my hand, and a fog rises and covers the faces and places, and I am left clawing about in the dark, lost, and I have to make up the obscured moments as I go along, make up the faces and places, even the emotions.

When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it—all perfectly still—and then the white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the chain, which we had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air.

Previously, we analyzed the mention of fog in Conrad’s HoD as a tool used by the author to convey not only the confusion felt by the white colonizer in attempting to navigate the “dark continent”, but also to describe how moving from the center (England) to the periphery (the African continent) within HoD constituted what Fabian described as a “denial of Coevalness”

Habila in ‘Oil on Water’ however, does not focus on the issue of center-periphery to arrive at a new discourse as much as he focuses on highlighting how the process of uncovering the truth about a situation (here, the kidnapping of James Floode’s wife) moves from a place of false assumptions and platitudes (physically– Nigeria’s urban centers, metaphorically conveyed by Floode’s own attitudes– “you people”– as well as the out-of-placeness of the Lagos journalists) through a “fog” of lies and corruption, towards the final truths revealed to the narrator by multiple voices— Isabel Floode, the kidnapped victim,  being just one– which are situated in Nigeria’s deltaic periphery, namely the island of Irikefe.

One of the storytelling devices Rob Nixon puts forth in his ‘Slow Violence’ is the use of “powerful analogies”, which Nixon suggests is effective when calling attention to the slow and violent fall-out of an occurrence of  environmental degradation. In addition, Nixon goes on to refer to the importance of rejecting “conventional narrative frameworks”, of telling stories “no one else can tell”, of “re-configuring big stories on a human scale”  and of using “striking” imagery.

Habila achieves all these approaches in ‘Oil on Water’, even while in some instances riffing off of Conrad’s HoD– there is a journey by boat undertaken; there are parallels drawn between the two primary characters, Rufus and Zaq, in a way that is similar to those drawn between Marlow and Kurtz; there is oil where Conrad had ivory, and the mysterious character who is overcome and changed forever by living with the natives is not Kurtz but Isabel Floode. There are also parallels between the light and the dark, the aforementioned fog, and the use of the first person narrative.

What I have come to appreciate most about Habila’s techniques and content is that unlike Rhys, who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea as an effort to “write back” with regards to the implications contained within the text of Jane Eyre and thereby was limited by this approach, Habila uses Conrad’s HoD as a jumping off point, linking to it in his writing only for the purpose of illustrating ways in which Nigeria is still being colonized in our supposedly modern and informed world. By doing so, I feel, Habila has successfully pointed out the still-relevant need to study and speak of Post Colonialism in new ways, bringing it out of (reflective, passive) literature and into the active world of International Development, non-renewable resource hunting and environmental degradation, while still having written a literary work that can hold its own comfortably in the Post Colonial canon.