The Living City: Personification and the Impotent Resident

Throughout Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, the city clearly represents much more than just a place of inhabitancy. In fact, the city is more than just an abstract conception as well, for it is essentially the central focus of Esternome and Marie-Sophie’s narratives. The centrality of the city as a major theme is most evident through Chamoiseau’s personification of the city as “City”. In this sense, City is treated as a character and often given physical attributes and human qualities. The city centre is a key point of physical and spiritual well being - it is stressed as place that must be conquered by the enigmatic, spiritual Mentohs, and it serves as a place to reclaim one’s selfhood. The combination of both physical and spiritual roles enable the city to become a source of life to its inhabitants. The struggle for the city is akin to the former slaves’ struggle for independence and freedom - and ultimately for life. Since City appears as a character that possesses life and, at times, physicality it only makes sense that it would be the source of life to those that seek it out.
The beauty of the city’s description is a strong indicator of its value to the individuals describing it. The city in description is no more than any typical site of habitation, economic exchange, and community. It is nothing particularly special and represents just another living space. Esternome’s description of the city to Ninon explores it as a site of extreme beauty and mystical nature. She is taught to behold City’s great beauties, images that Esternome feels intense pride is sharing with his beloved. Such great detail is attributed to an otherwise mundane and incredibly normal scene as a mediocre city centre. Despite its mediocrity, the city represents much more than its bricks and mortar but it stands for the freedom that had not been previously experienced by its newest inhabitants. Freedom and citizenship is deeply rooted in the symbol of the city and that is where the beauty truly lies.
The physical attributes given to the city contribute to its existence as the living entity, City, and its own desire to help its lifeless, struggling residents. The city literally represents a place of struggle for the blacks in the face of the oppression from the bekes and the mulattos; the degree of the struggle reveals the importance of the city and its ability to give the sense of freedom to lifeless former slaves. During the initial migration to the city after the emancipation and the subsequent conflict that ensued between former slaves and bekes, the city’s physical description lends itself to the plight of the oppressed. The imaginary nature of the chaotic massacre is reflected in the imaginary imagery found in the walls of the city “mov[ing] closer as if to choke off all rage” and “each window seemed like a jaw” (Chamoiseau 99). The city is personified and given a physicality that supports its importance as a central figure in the novel. At the same time, City seems to awaken and come to life when the blacks, or those seeking life, are in some form of peril. As a helping force, the city proves itself instrumental to the well being of the emancipated population and as something worth protecting and holding on to.
City is the source of life blood to the impotent former slaves who, in their wretched state, stream into the city seeking the prospects of prosperity. The “impotent old folks [...], people with the yaws, leprosy, tuberculosis, coughing, [and] spitting” would “wash up in City, the heart of the supposed happiness freedom had brought” (112) in order to seek the salvation from a former life of strife. In their perception, City holds the power to aid their ailments and cure their impotence of character. Through the personification given to the city it serves as an extension of the human body, which is ultimately the source of its ability to heal and revitalize its inhabitants.