Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a French-language novel published in 1992, was brilliantly translated from French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov in 1997. The novel, named after a shanty town of Fort-de-France, Martinique, is essentially Chamoiseaus’s assertion of créolité as the core of Caribbean identity and reality. I first heard of the novel from Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chamoiseau uses language, the countryside/urban divide, history, and the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux as an allegory for Martinican identity. Créolité, an idea proposed by Edouard Glissant, an ideological successor and Martinican intellectual in the tradition of Aimé Césaire, the proponent of negritude. Negritude was essentially an assertion of black cultural nationalism embracing African-derived traditions, music, poetry, and Marxist political theory to resist colonialism and racism in francophone colonies. Though most developed in Martinique, Senegal, and other francophone nations, negritude developed in contact with the Harlem Renaissance and cultural/political developments in the 20th century. 

Of course negritude’s focus on African cultural origin and problems of an ideological monolithic Africa made negritude less appealing to future generations of Caribbean intellectuals. Thus, Glissant, or Chamoiseau, for example, celebrate the heterogeneity that makes up West Indian (an in particular, Martinique) identity. Instead of solely focusing on the black Martinicans, Indians (coolies), békés (colonial whites who stayed in Martinique after abolition in 1848), Chinese (also coolies), Caribs, mulattoes, and French identities are each thrown together to weave a complex family history using elements of magic realism to display the Creoleness, or cultural miscegenation that comprises Caribbean peoples. Indeed, Caribbean peoples cannot be reduced to a simply African origin (despite the overwhelming majority of Caribbean peoples being descendants of African slaves), but considered Creole due to the vast numbers of cultures mixed through the colonial process. Thus, negritude’s limitations become more apparent when one considers the long history of the entire West Indies, which has never been a monolithic Africa, but a product of centuries of cultural mixing. Indeed, even in Caribbean societies that are predominantly ‘black’ and do not appear to be Creole, such as Haiti, one finds that cultural heterogeneity predominates through the long history of mulatto, white, and black competitions for political power and social dominance.

Chamoiseau explores créolité especially through the use of language and internal intertextuality and points of view throughout the novel. The novel has four narrators, the author himself (humorously referred to as Oiseau de Cham, or bird of Shem), the urban planner, known as Christ in the shantytown, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, who dictates her story to Oiseau de Cham and the urban planner, and Ti-Cirique, a Haitian intellectual exiled from Haiti after a failed attempt to overthrow Papa Doc’s regime in Haiti. Each of the aforementioned characters influence the novel’s use of language through editing, excerpts and transcripts of their own notes, which are ultimately layered and reorganized into footnotes and sections by Oiseau de Cham, who divides Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s history into 4 sections or eras in Martinican history, beginning with slavery. The irony of Ti-Cirique, the dark-skinned Haitian intellectual and Francophile, who tries to use the mulatto French that is more French than European French, is overwhelming. Despite his noirist, or negritude-influenced ideology, Ti-Cirique embraces France more than the French, and his voice is best represented through attempts to “correct” Marie-Sophie’s narrative into proper French. This is doubly ironic since many proponents of negritude saw Haiti as the birthplace of the movement, due to the successful slave revolt that gave birth to the nation and the ideological ties to 19th century Haitian intellectuals such as Antenor Firmin. The urban planner, on the other hand, embraces both the “mulatto French” and Creole spoken by the majority of Martinicans, which follows créolité ideology since the truest form of Martinican identity requires both Creole (which is a mixture of African languages, French and other tongues) and French, the colonial language that is part of the core of Martinican linguistics and the state. The Urban Planner also believes in the value of the shantytowns, such as Texaco, which represent the Creole majority and are necessary for the history and culture of the island. 

Thus, he becomes one of the main supporters of the slum, despite government pressure to eradicate Texaco and force the population into subsidized housing within the city proper. Indeed, Texaco developed as part of the City (Fort-de-France), but because mulatto and white control effectively limited the possibilities for the ex-slaves and former rural workers (hill folks) to actually attain political power or become a significant economic power in the City, despite being a majority. So the shantytowns develop based on rural culture, which is a remnant of slave culture, but through contact with whites, Asian laborers, Syrian merchants, mulatto politicians and bosses, and white colonial overlords, and employers, the shantytown dwellers are forced to adapt to a multiracial, urban society based on caste. Marie-Sophie and Oiseau de Cham, concur with the Urban Planner on the necessity of ensuring the survival of Texaco, although Marie-Sophie herself wants her narrative to be “proper” French, due to her father Esternome’s preference for French. So the text of the book (in the original French publication and English translation) is a little confusing since Creole expressions and religious and cultural practices are thrown in, alongside proper “mulatto French.” Furthermore, the novel also explores language through the competition of various types of the Word: oral tradition, Marie-Sophie’s edited narrative (Ti-Cirique edits her notebooks, which are used by Oiseau de Cham, and the Urban Planner hears her stories in person, as does Oiseau) and the final version offered by the author. The notebooks and various points of view represented throughout the text reveal the manipulation of language by different parties and the power of each medium of storytelling. Indeed, Oiseau de Cham considered the written word not capable of truly capturing the strength of Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s stories, which exemplifies a preference for Creole, the spoken language of the Martinique.

In addition to the interesting use of language and its historical ties to French colonialism and creole identity, Texaco uses magical realism and the family history of a Marie-Sophie as an allegory for the nation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende did this more famously for Colombia and Chile, but it’s still a powerful allegory for getting to the root of Latin American and Caribbean identity, since a family is a product of the nation’s society. Like Garcia Marquez and Allende, Chamoiseau is also thorough in his coverage of the nation’s history, and due to the use of magic realism, seemingly impossible events occur without explanation. Beginning with Laborieux’s father’s experiences as a slave and 19th century Martinican life, the world of the plantation and early rural migration to urban centers such as Saint Pierre, which was totatally destroyed in a 1902 volcano eruption that caused the death of Esternome’s first lover, Ninon. Elements of rural Martinican culture survive the progression of time, such as the Mentohs, or spiritual healers and advisors, who save the lives of both Esternome and Marie-Sophie. They’re seemingly eternal beings, and their supernatural powers are never explained, despite Marie-Sophie’s attempts to get answers from Papa Totone, one of the Mentohs. The use of magical realism also suggests that the world of the Caribbean is really “not real,” in that the process through which Caribbean societies developed is unreal due to a lack of historical precedent and the incredible amount of creolization that occurred in the 500 year history, which is more evidence of Creoleness. 

Furthermore, Martinique becomes significantly less “African” over time, with the disappearance of Mentohs and miraculous events in the 20th century. Major events in Martinican history are also part of the story: the abolition of slavery in 1848, the volcanic eruption that destroyed Saint Pierre in 1902, WWI, WWII, the election and rise to prominence of Aime Cesaire, De Gaulle’s visit to Martinique, and the perpetual conflict between the “proper” city of Fort-de-France and the impoverished shantytowns. Marie-Sophie and her family provide a powerfully personal interpretation of Martinican history, and highlight Creolity throughout the piece. Indeed, Marie-Sophie Laborieux herself is multiracial (a capresse, or daughter of a mulatto and black), and her experiences working for mulattoes, upper-class blacks and whites as a domestic provide a window through which one can view the hierarchy of power. As a woman, and not light-skinned enough to pass for mulatto, she also exemplifies feminist thinking through her actions. She rejects child-rearing, subservience to men, and begins the initial hutch that gave rise to Texaco, becoming its leader and main opponent of the white man whose land she builds on. Marie Sophie’s life therefore brings to the fore the importance of woman as agents in history in addition to demonstrating the cultural syncretism that has occurred in Martinique and the rest of the Caribbean.

Moreover, Chamoiseau directly critiques negritude and its impact French Caribbean identity through Aime Cesaire’s character and Ti-Cirique, the Haitian bibliophile and Francophile. Indeed, when Aime Cesaire first speaks to the masses of blacks as their first black mayor and Marxist, Esternome tells his daughter that Cesaire is a mulatto. One of the protagonist’s employers, a middle-class mulatto, also attacks Cesaire for critiquing France and colonialism, yet all of his education came from France. These internal contradictions of Cesaire completely severing Martinican ties to France ideologically and his inability to connect to rural, lower-class blacks show negritude’s shortcomings because France is irrevocably part of Martinique, and Cesaire’s education and speaking illustrate that. Thus, Cesaire endeavors to represent Fort-de-France’s urban poor and shantytown folks, but his refusal to recognize the mixed heritage of Martinique because of presumptions of “African” cultural predominance excludes a large proportion of the population, including those more closely tied to Africa, such as ex-slaves like Esternome. However, Cesaire was able to reconnect to Marie-Sophie Laborieux and the people of Texaco in future decades, ensuring that the city council brings electricity and modern amenities to the poor of the region. Cesaire also remained very popular among blacks in the city, despite the flaws of negritude, which actually bought into a lot of European assumptions about Africa. Regardless, Marie-Sophie Laborieux reads and quotes a line from his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land to finally convince him to help Texaco when she and a group of other residents invite themselves into his home. Ti-Cirique, the Haitian exile living in Texaco also highlights the problems of negritude. Like Cesaire, the negritude literary figures never create a truly unique form of expression that is independent of European or French because they do not write in Creole, the language of the people. Negritude-influenced authors reject European standards, yet continue to write in the language and styles of the colonizers, and Ti-Cirique, despite being part of a group of Haitian literary figures opposed to Duvalier, cannot find value in literature unless it is written in the languages of Europe.

Overall, Texaco does live up to the hype Junot Diaz gave it. Only about 400 hundred pages long, it’s actually quite readable for the most part. The first half, the story of Esternome and his generation is actually more compelling than most of Marie-Sophie’s personal life, but the novel’s use of magical realism in a Caribbean context and approach to Creole identity is fascinating. Moreover, the use of multiple languages and its multiple points of views illustrate the complex nature of Martinican identity, which is essentially a struggle between French and Creole. Like Junot Diaz’s masterpiece, Texaco uses a single family to tell the history of a Caribbean nation, and by doing so personalizes history, mixing the oral and written word to display the undoubtedly Creole identity of Martinique. And despite what some may suspect, my sympathy for negritude is not as great as one would think. It was an important part of black transnationalism and cultural movements throughout the francophone African diaspora, but like any ideology that embraces a single identity or “race,” could never encapsulate the Caribbean world.