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.

Texaco: Searching for Eden in the Urban Sprawl

On other days, he had to dig big old holes and go harvest bones which he measured against his own before throwing them in. He'd often think he recognized one of Ninon's tibias. The width of her arm. The curve of one of her ribs. Then he would set it apart, thinking of reconstructing his sweetie. When his pile became too big, he started to make a more rigorous sorting, threw away, kept, threw away. When he got all mixed up, he would just throw everything into the pit, bawling. Then, in tears, led by torturing heart, he would look for his Ninon in that extraviganza of bones. How does one mourne, ye gods? . . .
Chamoiseau, 153

When the Mentohs send Esternome out of his big hutch lifestyle and into that of City, it is with the intention that he “conquer City”, though it is left rather vague as to what this means. Regardless, after spending some time in City and facing some disappointments, Esternome is drawn out of L’Enville and out to the hills, where he establishes his small habitation of Nouteka.

It is here that Esternome gains a bit of respite, and it is here that he learns to create a model for paradise in his “creole garden” of the hills, even while turning his back on City. In the garden, he realizes the importance of mixing plants in the creation of a sustainable and thriving utopia in nature, even if he can’t realize the potential for the mixing of society that the word “creole” suggests. Like the Eden of the Hebrew Bible, Nouteka is idyllic, even while it is impractical in a realistic sense. While the diversity of the plants that create and sustain the garden itself allow it to thrive, the homogeny of its inhabitants causes their culture to wither.

If Nouteka, then, is Eden, then the citation above shows Esternome going through something akin to the fall. Just as Eve’s curiosity tempts her out of the garden, so too does Ninon’s tempt her away from Nouteka, and Esternome after her. Of course, unlike Eve, Ninon is lost in transition between Nouteka and the fallen city, but even here some surprising parallels are notable. Esternome “harvests” bones in the fallen city just as Adam toils in the fields after his expulsion from paradise. He also gives himself the job of sorting things within the fallen city just as Adam is given the job of sorting the animals of the garden and giving them all names, and just as Esternome himself did by lumping all the people of the living city into categories like mulatto, beke, etc., instead of allowing these social groups to work together as a living organism, like in his garden.

Most importantly, this paragraph forms an important turning point as it has Esternome create a new wife for himself out of the city itself. Once again, seeming to imitate God’s creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, Esternome uses a rib from the scorched earth to form the model of a partner for himself. Instead of separating things of the city, as he did previously, this act has Esternome combining the various elements of the city, seemingly ad-hoc, but in his own mind through some order en route to perfection. It is through this act, and through this creation of a new partner out of City that Esternome marries City, in much the same fashion that God is said to marry the people of Israel. As such, he develops a connection that he passes on to his heir, Mary-Sophie, who later becomes both a mother and wife figure to Texaco itself.

From the beginning of Texaco, urban planner is referred to as the Christ, though it is not explicitly mentioned why. Ultimately, it could be said that the planner becomes the Christ by discovering Texaco for what it is—a hybrid culture that is as much a part of its people as they are a part of it. It is by transmitting this message to the urban planner that Marie-Sophie achieves fulfillment of the Mentohs’ instructions to Esternome. By making the urban planner understand Texaco, she makes him, a receptacle for the message of the Mentohs, as built into Texaco by Esternome before her. It is through him that the Mentohs’ message is able to penetrate the world outside the district, and thus through him that City is finally conquered.

Putting Down Roots: Imagery and Identity in Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco

In his novel, Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau uses recurrent imagery to draw parallels between the generations and experiences of his characters. One of these recurring images is that of roots. Chamoiseau describes and compares different groups of people to the image of plants taking root, tying them to the land and ultimately making them a part of Martinique. Esternome says this about the land slaves’ struggle for freedom:

…the land slaves were marching toward freedom by paths more unkind than those the maroons took. More unkind, I tell you: for their battle held the risk of being thrown in the deepest ditches where, without resistance, you took whatever you had coming. The maroons would break from the confrontation but the land slaves would remain in formation, standing over mud as best they could, a bit like those water lilies of the blind marshland, you had to hold on, and hold on, and moor the bottom of your heart in the sand of freedom, without noble gestures, just like a dry seed arrives on the beautiful alluvial lands riding the rain. (Chamiseau 81)

This passage from Texaco, illustrates the difference between the maroons and the land slaves, and we see Chamoiseau using an analogy of roots or plants. The maroons are depicted as “break[ing] from the confrontation” during the fight for freedom while the land slaves “remain in formation”. The difference between their struggles is highlighted here. The maroons help fight for freedom when they want to, but when their position or power is compromised they break away and leave. The maroons already have a great deal of freedom, compared to the land slaves, so their participation in riots and uprisings is half-hearted. On contrast, the land slaves have to be willing to take the consequences for trying to gain freedom. Knowing they will be punished severely and maybe even killed for defying the slave owners (bekes), makes their convictions stronger. They have to “hold on” to “the sand of freedom”.

Here Esternome, is attempting to explain the importance of the slaves fight for freedom to Marie-Sophie. The slaves may fight for their freedom “without noble gestures” but in whatever ways they can. It is a natural impulse for them to want to be free. Like the water lilies extending their roots down into the sand, or those “dry seeds” taking root in the “alluvial lands” the land slaves must take root in freedom and also in the land where they are in order to survive.

Without their knowledge of the land and their ability to grow food for themselves they would have starved when the bekes ran out of provisions. Understanding plants and the land of Martinique ultimately gives them a power and knowledge that the Bekes and Milatoes don’t possess.

Chamoiseau writes, “between the heights of exile where the bekes lived and the milatoes rushed to change their destiny, the land slaves had chosen the land. The land to survive on. The land to feed themselves with. The land to understand, and to inhabit” (82). The land slaves become a part of the land of Martinique, no longer merely exiles from their homeland, through slavery and abolition they have become a new people, one who have chosen to use the land as a key to their survival.

Esternome attests to the risks and necessity of the land slaves’ “march for freedom”. He likens the slaves’ attachment to freedom to “a dry seed arriv[ing] on the beautiful alluvial lands riding the rain” (81). Alluvial soil is that which has been “washed away from one place and deposited in another”(online dictionary). This is a rich soil often created by floods. The land slaves, not unlike the soil, have been taken from one place and deposited in another and must decide whether they will take root in Martinique or hunt always for the return to Africa. When Chamoiseau, through Esternome, compares the differences between the slaves and the bekes and milatoes in the preceding passage he makes it clear that by choosing the land the slaves and former slaves are the ones who truly survive and try to make a home of Martinique.

Esternome is devoted to the idea that City is the best place, despite his return to the hills and the land, and seeing Saint-Pierre destroyed by the volcano. Esternome does not return to the hills but goes to Fort-de-France. The idea of people trying to put down figurative roots, to find a home, is a major theme in the novel. Like the water lilies Chamoiseau compares them to, the land slaves put out their roots in order to hold onto their freedom and in doing so become a part of the land. Similarly, the creation of Texaco, is an attempt by Marie-Sophie, and others, to find a home, to create a place for themselves in the land and the city. The continual destruction and resurrection of Texaco illustrates the importance of these figurative roots. Like a plant that has been cut down and grows up again, Texaco emerges from the attempts to raze it stronger and stronger until ultimately creating itself out of cement and bricks and gaining more permanence.

The urban planner compares Texaco to a mangrove swamp and he says:

I understood suddenly that Texaco was not what Westerners call a shantytown, but a mangrove swamp, an urban mangrove swamp. The swamp seems initially hostile to life. It’s difficult to admit that this anxiety of roots, of mossy shades, of veiled waters, could be such a cradle of life for crabs, fish, crayfish, the marine ecosystem. It seems to belong to neither land nor sea, somewhat like Texaco is neither City nor country. (Chamoiseau 263).

Like the mangrove swamp, Texaco is a confusing blend of people trying to find their roots, trying to create an identity and in some cases just trying to survive. Texaco is not really a part of City, but cannot exist without City. It is not a part of the rural landscape either. It is an in-between place. The residents of Texaco, not unlike the land slaves of the past, don’t have many rights. Texaco doesn’t legally exist, is not really theirs. Texaco is not on any map. Without owning the land or having the land be a part of City, the residents can’t get running water or electricity. The residents of Texaco want to be a part of City, but not at the cost of losing their unique identity. Attempts to relocate the Texaco’s residents are ultimately unsuccessful. Just as the land slaves become a part of the land through their fight for survival and freedom, the residents of Texaco become a part of the City through their fight to establish their place within it. In their fight for survival both the land slaves, and later the residents of Texaco, become an essential part of the land and truly make Martinique their home.

By using the image of roots and plants throughout his novel Chamoiseau clearly ties the characters to the land. He creates for his readers an essential world in which the land and the people, the City and the country are ultimately linked. Chamoiseau portrays his country as a place where, though difficult, people can forge an identity and create a place for themselves.

Works Cited

Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Toronto: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Online Plain English Text Dictionary. (http://www.onelook.com/opted.)

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.

The Power of Silence in Edouard Glissant's The Fourth Century

Throughout his novel, The Fourth Century, Edouard Glissant weaves the recurring motif of silence and its importance. Sometimes this is realized through characters who do not speak, such as Edmee and her mother. Other times Glissant instils his quieter characters with otherworldly powers. The character of Melchior, especially as a child, is depicted as quiet, yet somehow powerful. Glissant writes that Melchior, “took things in passively, neutrally, so that you could not say he was unhappy to be there, but then he also never made the slightest gesture or spoke the least word of acquiescence (Glissant 126). Melchior epitomizes, for Papa Longoue, what it means to be a Longoue. Melchior, for all his silence does not acquiesce, does not accept. This, as Papa Longoue points out to Mathieu early on in their discussions, is what differentiates the Longoues from the Beluses, the maroons from the slaves, “the ones who refused [from] the ones who accepted” (Glissant 50).

The continual interplay between refusal and acceptance, of silence and speech permeates the novel. Though they at first seem divided, the Longoues and the Beluses are tied together. They cannot exist without each other just as the slaves and maroons need each other for survival, and silence and speech need the other to define them. Papa Longoue’s mother Stephanise, “Tall-Stephanise, full of real noise” is contrasted with Papa Longoue’s wife Edmee “with that mouth locked with four locks, that bar across the triangular face”(Glissant 230). It is through her interactions with Edmee that Stephanise “discover[s] to her amazement that stubbornness [can] take root far from shouts and noise” (230). Edmee is stubborn, defiant even powerful, despite her silence.

Glissant’s motif of silence recurs again near the end of the novel when he writes about Mathieu:

He experienced how it was possible for people (he did not even go so far as to say: a people) to leave, to run dry, leaving no descendants, no fruitfulness in the future, enclosed within their death which was truly the end of them, for the simple reason that their speech was dead too, stolen. Yes. Because the world, for which they listened either passionately or passively, had no ears to hear a lack of voice. Mathieu wanted to shout, to raise his voice, to call from the depths of the little land toward the world, toward forbidden countries and faraway places. But the voice itself was unnatural and Mathieu could sense that: he himself, strangely sent off to the frontiers, split there between the straightforward universe of cane and clay and straw (where speech was no help in watching or digging for anything) and the other zone, the one of people who speak but where he sensed that what they said was nothing, just smoke already bluish against the abyss of the great sky. (Glissant 269)

This passage puts one in mind of the postcolonial idea of the subaltern or the “oppressed subject” (Gandhi 3). Mathieu wants, by raising his voice, to speak for those whose “speech [is] dead …stolen” and yet knows at the same time that “the voice itself [is] unnatural” (Glissant 269). He understands that an attempt to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves would, in a sense, take the power of their silence. He also realizes that “the other zone”, where people speak, does not contain the power to return a voice to those from which speech was stolen, if, for no other reason than because those who can speak, truly say nothing (Glissant 269).

This realization by Mathieu helps him to finally understand what Papa Longoue has been trying to teach him all along; that their history cannot be traced down through time simply as a list of chronological events. That history books cannot tell their story because so much of the story is memory and understanding and so many parts of the story are lost through silence. Perhaps the true reason for the enmity between Longoue and Beluse will never be known. Whether it the result of a swap of one man for others with the slave traders in Africa, as Papa Longoue suggests, or not; and perhaps the reason really doesn’t matter. Silence and mystery, that which is unsaid, or unknown, seem to be ever-present in the history of the Longoues and Beluses. Silence plays an integral part in the story by making one acknowledge that some people have no voice with which to speak, no place to speak from which they can be heard.

Works Cited

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press. New York, 1998.

Glissant, Edouard. The Fourth Century. University of Nebraska Press. Lincoln, 2001.

The Interdependence of the Maroon Identity

The social structure found in Edouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century depicts a bizarrely interdependent society initiated and based on the presence of master and slave. Although, power does not solely reside in one set of hands. The differentiation between maroon, slave, and plantation owner society exists from the moment that Longoue and Beluse are brought to island and, therefore, to the paradigm of slave and master. The hierarchy that is established on La Pointe des Sables and the surrounding hills and plains is a three-fold system. Slaves exist at the bottom of this hierarchy and above them are both the maroons and plantation owners. As independent societies the maroons and the plantation owners are mutually as powerful. The owners derive their power from the Eurocentric discourse that legitimates the domination of Europeans over people of colour. While the maroons draw power from their assertion of defiance against the slave system and, consequently, their acquirement of freedom. Both groups clearly recognize each others’ potential and present power which keeps them locked in an interdependent relationship based upon fear, respect, and self-assumed superiority. However, ultimately the maroon needs the presence of both slave and plantation slave owner to prolong his power and special status.

Longoue’s escape from La Roche is an escape from a future of inevitable servitude and a bold defiance to the enslaving structure. Already he is a "maroon from the first day" and even a "maroon from the first hour" (Glissant 38). The existence of the maroon society is a firm assertion that they are not slaves. The maroons will not adhere to being enslaved to the plantation owners, but they also view themselves as superior to the slave. In their minds’ eye, as those who have "refused" the maroons’ defiant spirit will always elevate them above the slaves who have chosen to "accept". At the same time, the maroon needs the presence of the slave to dialectically secure his position as non-slave. Because of their decision to take freedom and assert their power the maroons exist literally and figuratively above and beyond those whom they left behind. As dwellers in the hills, the maroon society literally looks down upon the slave society: a constant reminder of the differentiation. In fact, it is a conscious thought in the maroon’s psyche that questions "why don’t [the remaining slaves] all become maroons?" (90) and turn to the hills and embrace freedom. The two must exist separately in order for the maroon to remain as the powerful overseer.

The maroon society exists apart from the world of the plantation and therefore exists outside of its laws and hierarchies. The maroons were intended for slavery but they have decidedly cast off the slave mentality. They do not fit into the subordination of the plantation for they have physically removed themselves from it. However, from the plantation perspective the maroons, as clearly neither slave nor plantation owner, retain a status similar to their own. Both plantation owners and maroons are independent, self-sufficient societies who do not answer to a higher authority. The power that each holds is mutually respected, for it is recognized that one needs the other to exist to prolong this balance. Specifically, the maroons have the power to greatly damage the La Roche plantation in their revolts; likewise, the La Roche, with enough will, could ultimately seek out the maroons and destroy them. Longoue proclaims that "the whole time [he] protected [La Roche]" (108) from attacks and raids. Both groups are primarily motivated by self-interest and require their interdependence for survival. The maroons need the presence of the plantation to vindicate their existence. They ultimately need something to remain in opposition to: a subject to turn their defiance towards. The initial existence of the maroon society is based upon a dialectic with the enslaving plantation, and without its presence the foundation of the society is negated.

Headache and History:
Mathieu’s Disenchantment and Remembering of the Spiritual Past(s)

“He longed for the place so distant that its light would reach him like an arrow of flame in the region where eyes can no longer see. There was another past, there were other nights to get through before, breathless, he would reach a morning’s half-light. He sensed this with all his body. And of course, for as long as he did not come out there he would be afraid of the dark. And though he was sceptical and no longer believed in the power of the quimboseur, behind that wrinkled forehead and beneath the words spinning faster and faster, he also was watching for a country whose quaking, whose extinguished or forbidden truths now freely rekindled, troubled him even more seriously” (Glissant 265)

“The past. Tell me about the past, Papa Longoue! Just what is it?” (7) Found at the beginning of Glissant’s novel The Fourth Century, and said by the curious Mathieu Beluse, this question sets up the argument for the rest of the novel between a child and a quimboiseur. The previous passage also concerns Mathieu Beluse and is found at the end of. What is striking about this passage is the language that is used, and the importance it has for the psyche of Mathieu at the end of the novel and its importance to history, and how history is fragmented like a rhizome and remembered, which is a main theme that Glissant uses in this novel.
The language in this passage is tremendously loaded with symbols, ambivalence and emotional distress. The first line denotes that what Mathieu is searching for is almost ungraspable. Seeing is related to the linear way of thinking that Mathieu represents; so the part that says “in a region where eyes can no longer see” (265) means that he will only understand the spirit of the ‘pasts’ (or “place”) and will be unable to grasp the past in a linear form that he wishes. “[L]ike an arrow of flame” denotes the militaristic and violent past of the slave trade (allegorized by the brawl between Beluse and Longoue in the first part of the story). Ambiguity is seen in “words spinning faster and faster.” Here, words spin and morph into different meanings, similar to Derrida’s deconstruction. A country that quakes, sounds to me like a country that is on the brink of losing everything that could give them their true identity.
Mathieu is in the hospital with a headache. Mentally, he is fighting with what Longoue has told him; his linear, school-trained brain is having trouble believing that the present is not what it seems and that the past was fragmented in a series of multiple pasts lined up side by side. Beluses fear of the dark means his fear of the past and what might come of him when he understands the anger, the darkness and the rhizome-like nature of the past that Longoue has narrated for him. Although, he is said here to have disbelieved everything that the quimboseur had told him, he is starting to see reality in a different light and is searching for those hints of oppression and colonization.
In a greater context this quotation deals with history and the remembering of history through understanding that their is no “real” history, but multiple histories and pasts, organized in a rhizome like fashion. “There was another past” is a clear example this. Only by understanding and “living” these multiple pasts can someone understand the present.
Mathieu’s struggle is on an epic scale, as he relives the past(s), he is seeing the pain and suffering that has created his present. A present he is now starting to reconfigure as the veil of forgetting has been lifted by the quimboiseur. It s a step forward in the need to remember the past that so many have forgotten.