Strange Words

Patrick Chamoiseau's Strange Words, translated from French by Linda Coverdale, is his reinterpretation of Creole folktales of Martinique he heard as a child. It was also published in English as Creole Folktales. Writing down these orally-transmitted stories inherently changes the fundamental process through which these stories were told in Martinique, usually by a storyteller with an audience. Indeed, the storyteller also inserted him or herself into the tale, which Chamoiseau replicates in the written form, using several humorous self-referential statements regarding the storyteller's relation to characters in the story, for example.

Unfortunately, the tales themselves are quite short, and with only 12, the journey into the nighttime stories of Martinique ends just as its beginning. That said, these tales are often very dark and full of supernatural phenomena and magic, such as witches, zombi, demons, rainmakers, and tricksters. Indeed, this novel serves as a nice complementary reading to Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique, a short novel about the death of orality and the battle between the spoken Creole word and the colonial French written word. This collection of Creole folktales illustrates how these different languages and their respective worldviews fused to create them in the first place. Thus, Ti-Jean Horizon, the mulatto son of a slaveholder and a black slave, becomes a hero according to the trickster ideal in African-derived folklore, but uses his guile at the end of the tale to simply takeover the plantation of his beke father. If collective liberation were the ethos of this story, which was told in communal settings of slaves, how come an individual's escape from slavery would become more important than the liberation of all slaves on the plantation? Clearly, the individualism and rationalism of "the land of Descartes" clashes with African communalism and solidarity as well as clashing due to differing stances on supernatural occurrences.

Anyway, one should read this short collection of folktales to better understand the worldview and context of the lives of slaves and ex-slaves throughout Martinican history. The horrors of the slave trade, brutality and dehumanizing practices of white planters, poverty and hunger, and resilience of the people themselves become quite apparent. Moreover, women emerge as significant characters, often as female heads of their households. Now, this is not the place or time to discuss in depth gender dynamics in the colonial French Caribbean, but women in these stories run the gamut from helpless beauties to strong, independent heroines. Indeed, in many stories families are introduced with only a mother as the parent, and no mention of fathers appears, which, historically was related to lack of legitimacy in their unions with black men in the eyes of whites and the slave trade, but also related to rape and other factors. Beyond analyzing the stories for how they reveal the historical and cultural background of Martinique and the French Caribbean, these short stories are often fables with important morals against sins or defects like gluttony, or for simply explaining the origin of certain animals, the vegetation, etc. Overall, this was a fun, fast read that aroused the reader's hunger for more oral and written literature of the French Caribbean.