Adlai Murdoch (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
In Chemin d’école, Patrick Chamoiseau initially inscribes himself as departmental subject, in love with language and learning, but ultimately, he must learn to see himself, his country, its creolized culture and their reality of neo-colonial domination as traditions, practices and subjects that are separate and distinct from the undifferentiated Frenchness being disseminated through the system of departmentalization. The resulting (re)generation and recognition of the range of differences that separate Martinique from France function through specificities of language and culture to form the discursive and psychological schéma that undergirds Chamoiseau's objectification and representation of his childhood and family surroundings in Chemin d'école. Here, both memory and trauma play key thematic and structuring roles, for while the retrospective trajectory of autobiography arguably functions through memory, the intrinsic artificiality that overdetermines the role of the latter in the function of the former is continually contested and interrogated by the incorporation of various ludic and self-reflexive strategies, including footnotes and references to several of the author’s earlier works. Further, from a psychosocial point of view, the textual perspective on Martinique and its citizens at work here is framed by the exchange of one traumatic condition, that of colonialism, for another, that of departmentalization. In other words, while, on the one hand, Chamoiseau presents us with a detailed and diverting recounting of the joys and challenges, the discoveries and paradoxes faced by the displaced subjectivity of the négrillon as he grows up in this Caribbean world, on the other he also obliges us to recognize that these (re)constructed representations are framed by the alienation and objectification arising from the departmental condition. Ultimately, both the subjective and the social frameworks take their place as key components of the French Caribbean creole culture. By isolating and valorizing a succession of key moments that emerge from the forced imposition of the metropolitan educational system -- from the depreciation of the linguistically familiar (creole) to inculcating unfamiliar, even foreign flora, fauna and fiction (fairy tales) as prized conformities of Frenchness -- both text and subject develop the political resistance necessary to reformulate and revalorize the department as the historical, cultural, and linguistic counter to the metropole. The complexity of the resulting narrative framework ultimately draws on the négrillon's ongoing fascination with writing and textuality to re-present this world from the intrinsically pluralist viewpoint of his Antillean community.
