Departmentalization as Alienating Factor: Patrick Chamoiseau and the Martinican Memoir

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.

Adlai Murdoch - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Adlai Murdoch is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Born on the Caribbean island of Antigua, he holds degrees from the University of the West Indies, Howard University, and Cornell University, where he completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Romance Studies. His particular areas of scholarly interest are French Literature and postcolonial studies, with a special interest in narrative theory and,more particularly, the narratives of the Francophone Caribbean. Professor Murdoch's articles have appeared in Callaloo, Yale French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Sites and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, as well as a number of scholarly collections. His monograph Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel, as well as the essay collection Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, co-edited with Anne Donadey, are both available from the University Press of Florida. He is also the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures entitled "Migrations and Métissages," of a special double issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies entitled "Oceanic Dialogues: From the Black Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific," of a special three-volume issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies entitled "Departmentalization at Sixty: The French DOMs and the Paradoxes of the Periphery," and of a special issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies entitled "Oceanic Routes," as well as of a forthcoming special commemorative issue of Research in African Literatures devoted to Aimé Césaire. He has two forthcoming monographs, one entitled Patrick Chamoiseau and the other entitled Decolonizing Representation: Migratory Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film.