Lost in Translation's: Texaco vs. City

“It’s around that time, you know, that I began to write, that is: to die a little. As soon as my Esternome began to supply me words, I felt death. Each of his sentences (salvaged in my memory, inscribed in the notebook) distanced him from me. With the notebooks pilling up, I felt like I was burying him again. Each written sentence coated a little of him, his Creole tongue, his words, his intonation, his laughs, his eyes, his airs, his formaldehyde...the written words, my poor French words, dissipated the echo of his words forever and imposed betrayal upon my memory.
(Chamoiseau, 321-322)

In this passage Marie-Sophie realizes the hardships of writing down the history of her Creole father Esternome. With every word she dies a little inside and feels like she is burying her father even deeper. By writing down history in French she is losing the repetitiveness or echo of the Creole language. Western beliefs vs. Creolity are at stake here. How can you remember something when it is impossible to write it down? How can you translate meaning?
The “echo” of Esternome’s speech is the repetitive nature of the Creole language; it is also a way of speaking in which events occur metonymously and repetitively, differently, in the oral community. By writing something down it solidifies the history, pushing details of histories to the margins, or the borders. The hardships of the storyteller telling a history has been described in other books we’ve read such as Glissant’s The Fourth Century.
The Creole language cannot be translated into French, because meaning’s sometimes do not translate and/or are lost in translation. French contains so many rules and regulations in it, forming itself in a linear fashion, whereas Creole has no rules and contains that repetitiveness or multiplicity of histories and contradictions that is needed in telling a story. This difference is represented in the battle between City and Texaco, where City attempts to understand the Creole Texaco through a Western lens. In a westerners eye it is a shantytown of rusted mettle, unpainted hutch’s. But they do not understand that painting them causes the hutch’s to become very hot. As the urban planner puts it
I understand suddenly that Texaco was not what Westerners call a shantytown, but a mangrove swamp, an urban mangrove swamp...
(263)
No, we must dismiss the West and re-learn to read: learn to reinvent the city. Here the urban planner must think Creole before he even thinks.
(270)
Westerners do not understand the Creole language and society and their different meaning’s and interpretations they carry for different signs and take them to be barbaric and unnecessary. While the city is this ordered area, similar to French language, the Creole town is a mangrove or rhizome of multiplicity without the same sort of order that the French language and society contains.
At the end of the novel when Marie-Sophie dies, the narrator, which I assume to be the so-called Oiseau de Cham, narrates that he attempts to decipher what Marie says but as he says she “dipped into un-clarity” and spoke at a delirious pace (388), typical of Creole language. He finds it hard to comprehend what she is saying as she contradicts herself and doesn’t use a linear (French) way of thinking. Although he writes everything down, he laments that nothing will be remembered and that her memories are lost. Of course, he can only write in French and not in Creole. City gobbles up Texaco, in the end, with paint jobs, new little houses and homogeneity (390). The narrator laments that he cannot do anything. All it needed was consideration.
As it turns out it is impossible to translate meaning, Creole into French, without losing something. it is impossible to understand Creole through the use of Western symbols. What must happen, as the urban planner discovers, is that the West must “re-think” its ways and social norms in order to consider the Creole society and its language.