School Days

“In those days, the blue-eyed Gaul with hair as yellow as wheat was everyone’s ancestor. In those days, Europeans were the founders of History. The world, once shrouded in darkness, began with them. Our islands had been veiled in a fog of nonexistence, crossed by phantom Caribs or Arawaks themselves lost in the obscurity of a cannibal nonhistory. And then, when the colonists arrived, there was light. Civilization. History. The humanization of the teeming Earth. They shouldered the heavy burden of this world they were raising to the lofty heights of consciousness. We had to strive stoutly so as not to abandon them to the solitude of this responsibility. The teacher wanted to carry the world on his shoulders, too” (121-22).

Chamoiseau’s account of his schoolboy days, School Days, translated by Linda Coverdale, is a touching narrative filled with adorable moments of youthful innocence, curiosity, adventure, and struggle. Like his other writings, his playful, unique style of writing that fuses humor  French, Creole, and inventive rhetoric to encapsulate another world succeeds brilliantly in School Days. As a child growing up in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Chamoiseau recounts his younger, preliterate days as a “little black boy” who irritated his mother and older siblings incessantly to have the chance to go to school. Once in school, however, his Creole worldview and self-identity is challenged by the institution’s Francophile nature and the Teacher’s attempts to make Frenchmen out of black, Creole-speaking students. Nevertheless, the sweet novel, though often heavily focused the destructive impact of the Francophilic tendencies of school on the language and identity of Martinique, exemplified by Big Bellybutton, a poor Creole-speaking child who ultimately concedes to the Teacher his inferiority as a poor, black Creole child coming out of the sugar cane shacks of colonial Martinique, can be seen as ending on a positive note through what may be termed as nascent créolité in that Chamoiseau articulates a fusion of the Creole language, mythology, and worldview of Big Bellybutton and his wannabe French Teacher. This fusion consists of not only the African and European elements of culture and language in Martinique, but also the Indian, Syrian, and indigenous Carib and Arawak presence in the history, cuisine and society of the Antilles.

Besides describing the important moment in his early school days when he would become a proponent of créolité, School Days is an artful example of storytelling that captures the world through a child’s eyes. He incorporates Creole phrases, mythology and magic into the story, evident in their belief in magic and quimboiseurs:

To tie up a Teacher (you’re not hearing this from me), you had to cross your fingers and hold them like that, thrust deep in your pockets; stand on your left food in front of the school; murmur over and over again before he appeared: Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the Teacher…Three dogs three cats tie up the teacher…(You didn't hear this from me…) (125).

This aforementioned adorable quote marks the belief by a young Chamoiseau, Big Bellybutton (whose ‘real’ French name is never mentioned, only the Creole Big Bellybutton) and other schoolboys in their ability to cause illness toward their Teacher, a Frenchman with black skin and a white mask to whom France was a magic word (108). The little Chamoiseau also had his adorable moments prior to school, scribbling on the walls of his home, persistently demanding of his mother, Mam Ninotte, to take him to school like the Big Kids, his older siblings, and strolling through the city streets as Syrian merchants, workers, and other adults carried on with the busy activities of the day. The student bullies, who persecute Big Bellybutton especially, also provide moments of comic relief when the latter pulls out a snake’s head to scare them away or when the poetic rejoinders of Les Respondeurs or Chamoiseau occasionally breaking his third-person narrative provide further commentary on the little black boy’s life.

Clearly, for Chamoiseau, learning to read and write was not just survival, or learning to live despite going to school to “shed bad manners: rowdy manners, nigger manners, Creole manner—all the same thing” (120). Survival entailed learning to thrive through new discourse, one partly indebted to the negritude past but inclusive of all of Martinique’s heterogeneous origins. Chamoiseau, while criticizing the schools’ attempts to make Gauls out of Martinique’s children, teaching them to see the world and read literature from French eyes, when winter snow and rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed days of blond childhood were never part of life for the overwhelming majority of Martinicans, nonetheless found value in the ability to transport oneself to new terrains, new worlds, beyond the island shores of his home. This necessitates a synthesis of Creole and French, the Caribbean and its diverse origins, to represent the world of his youth in this formative period of his schooling. Overall, this is a fascinating account worth reading by anyone even remotely interested in Martinique, French colonialism, Caribbean literature, or the magical realism of the lens of a bright child. To read it in English was utter delight, since Coverdale’s translation retains the artful blend of Martinican/Creole vocabulary with the collective voice of the narrator and Les Respondeurs in addition to Chamoiseau’s characteristic humor.