CREOLE IDENTITY IN CHAMOISEAU'S SOLIBO

MAGNIFIQUE AND

CONFIANT'S LE MEURTRE DU SAMEDI-GLORIA

JOHN D . ERICKSON UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY

Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique and Raphael Confiant's Le Meurtre du Samedi-Gloria share a marked similarity in their structure and principal theme. Both novels open with the death of a character central to the narrative and take the form of a "roman policier" or detective novel. The problematic nature of the death of the character leads the police to open an investigation into a suspected crime in Solibo and an indisputable murder in Le Meurtre. In both narratives the police seek to elucidate the circumstances surrrounding the character's death, his identity, and his relation to the community in which he finds himself. The police search serves as a pretext for an inquiry by the two authors into the question of Creoleness, its location in the modem world, the forces impinging on its very existence in terms of the customs and language of the Creole people, and its possibility of survival. The story of Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique centers around the mysterious death of Solibo, a Creole storyteller. Following a preliminary inquiry, police authorities led by the Brigadier-chef Philemon Bouaffesse and his superior. Chief Inspector Evariste Pilon, conclude that Solibo was murdered by some or all of the fourteen witnesses with him in his last momentsincluding the author/character/narrator Chamoiseau, variously called Chamzibie, Ti-Cham, and Oiseau de Cham. After an autopsy eventually reveals that Solibo died not by another hand but by "internal strangulation," the police are forced to conclude that no crime occurred. Meanwhile the characters have been detained and interrogated. Solibo's companions all along explain to the police that his death came from "une egorgette de parole" ("Pawol la bay an gUjet, la parole l'a egorge...," 144 [the word slit his throat]). By the novel's end, the murder investigation, which has led to a dead end, turns into an inquiry into the identity of Solibo. In Confiant's Le Meurtre du Samedi-Gloria, the cadaver of Romule Beausoleil, a "valeureux combattant de damier"' (11) [a brave damier fighter], is discovered on the street in the ill-famed quarter of Mome Pichevin in Fort-de-France, torn and desecrated by a pack of dogs. He died from an ice pick driven into his throat. A police inquiry under Inspector Frederic Dorval, reassigned to Martinique after 15 years with the French metropolitan police force, leads us through a marginal netherworld of the common people living an impoverished existence, a world of jobless people, street vendors, hawkers, prostitutes, fishermen, thieves, etc., whose lives are animated by the combats of the damier, cockfights, movies, and sexual encounters. We also enter the "privileged" world of the white plantation owners and successful mixed-race bourgeois professionals.

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

Dorval constantly sifts through his list of possible suspects: Carmelise (mother of 12 children and pregnant with anotherall from different fathers), who sells sorbet and disingenuously calls herself a "fonctionnaire de l'uterus" (181) [a civil servant ofthe uterus], the beautiful prostitute-capresse Philomene; Waterloo, the damier hero of a rival quarter who was to fight Beausoleil on Easter Saturday (Samedi-Gloria); Chrisopompe de Pompinasse, a "coursailleur de jupons" [womanizer] who seduced Beausoleil's two women lovers; Bertrand Mauville, a chabin [lightskinned] racist who reads Gobineau and believes Beausoleil betrayed his secret (impotence); as well as a host of other suspects. While the investigation goes on, the story shifts between the present inquiry and the past movements of Beausoleil and others. The narrative finally closes with the discovery ofthe assassin, who had hitherto gone unsuspected. One seemingly important difference between Chamoiseau's novel, in which the assumed murder is not a murder at all, and that of Confiant, is that the latter closes with the nabbing of the real perpetrator of the crime. But the difference is in truth of minor importance, for the two novels turn on the truly significant issue of the incompatibility between two spheres of human thought and actionthat ofthe police and that ofthe common people ofthe Antilles. The contrast developed between these two spheres reveals the reason why the authors chose the form ofthe "roman policier" and how that choice opens onto an all-important discourse regarding creolite. Chamoiseau represents the police as generally unsympathetic, disrespectful, and brutal towards the people, who fear them: "La Lwa ka senyen moun!" (89) [The Law causes people to bleed]: Avec elle [la police], arrivent aussi les chasseurs des bois d'aux jours de l'esclavage, les chiens a marronnage, la milice des alentours d'habitation, les commandeurs des champs, les gendarmes a cheval, les marins de Vichy du Temps de l'Amiral, toute une Force qui inscrit dans la memoire collective l'unique attestation de notre histoire: Po lapoliiice! (83) (With the police came the slave hunters of former days, the hounds loosed on the maroons,^ the troops from around the plantation, the overseers, the mounted police, the Vichy sailors from the time of the Admiral [Admiral Robert], an entire Force that inscribed in our collective memory the sole proof that we lived: here come the poo-liice!) The law comes from France, as Bouaffesse says, "et quand elle arrive au pays [Martinique], meme si on la connait, on n'est pas oblige de la re-connaitre"(97) [and when it arrives here, even if we know it, we do not have to observe it]. The law, whose capitalization in the Creole conveys its abstract nature, is foreign in origin and arbitrary. The figures representative ofthe police in Solibo are Bouaffesse and Chief Inspector Pilon. The former, though of African descent, is likened to a "chief on a slave ship or an overseer on a plantation: a black lackey ofthe white

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

slaver/owner. "II etait fait pour etre chef, mais du cote du manche. Diriger, par exemple, une troupe de negres-marrons galeux ne l'aurait pas interesse" (58) [He was made to be a chief, but on the strongest side. To lead a troop of mangy maroons wouldn't have interested him in the least]. Bouaffesse's name, from bouefesse or bois-fesse (mud-buttock or wood-buttock) underscores his at once comic and inhuman nature. Pilon is a pivotal figure in the story. In contrast to the "bougres natifs-natal" [native chaps] in uniform, such as Bouaffesse, inspectors in the Department of Criminal Investigafion were usually "des Fran9ais de France" (104) [white Frenchmenfromthe metropole]. Though a native of Martinique, Pilon (whose name, meaning "pestle," suggests his relentless grinding down of those whom he suspects and grills) is an exception, because he served on the force in France and was trained there. But, after his case collapses, Pilon undergoes a change: he becomes obsessed with Solibo and sets out to learn of storytellers and Solibo in particular. Pilon's counterpart in Le Meurtre is Inspector Dorval. The inhabitants ofthe Mome Pichevin quarter see the police as racist and scornful. The crieur Rigobert tells Dorval: "Vous connaissez 1'attitude des gros messieurs de la police envers nous. Pour eux, on n'est rien qu'une bande de negres englues dans la vagabondagerie. Des zeros devant un chiffre, quoi!"(22) [You know what the big bums on the police force think of us. For them, we're nothing but a band of slimy vagrants. Only zeroes in front of a numberwhat have you!]. The police, according to Rigobert, "se foutent pas mal des negres va-nu-pieds tels que nous. S'il s'etait agi d'un de ces bourgeois mulatres qui parle le frangais comme un dictionnaire, soit sur et certain qu'ils auraient deja remue ciel et terre pour denicher le coupable [the assassin of Beausoleil]. Hon!" (40) [don't give a damn about ragtag niggers like us. If it concerned those bourgeois halfbreeds who speak French like a dictionary, you can be certain that they would already have moved heaven and earth to ferret out Beausoleil's murderer!]. The police colleagues of Dorval think it a waste of time to pursue the murderer of Beausoleil: "Faut pas chercher d'explication trop compliquee avec ces zouavesla. II a du se faire liquider pour une dette de jeu ou alors de combat de coqs. Pas plus!"(92) [There's no use in seeking an overly complicated explanation for those zouaves. He no doubt was bumped off for nothing more complicated than a gambling debt or a brawl over a cockfight!]. Dorval is sympathetic with the common people and becomes, like Pilon, obsessed with finding out the truth. "Dorval promit de tout mettre en oeuvre pour que Beausoleil ne finisse pas dans un carre anonyme du cimetiere des pauvres"(23) [Dorval promised to use all means at his disposal so Beausoleil would not end up in a pauper's grave], which will be Beausoleil's fate nonetheless. Dorval's superior.

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

the commissaire Renaudin, presses Dorval to close the dossier (40-41). But, after 15 years away, "c'est avec felices qu'il [Dorval] se replongeait dans la vie creole" (41) [he happily plunged back into the Creole life]. He thus refuses to close the case: "II eclaircirait ce mystere, dut-il y mettre plusieurs mois. On enterrait trop vite les victimes dans ce pays et leurs assassins se baladaient avec un peu trop de gloriole a son gre"(120) [He would solve this mystery even if it took him several months. They buried victims too quickly in this country and their murderers strutted around with a little too much self-boasting for his liking]. However, more than just a uniform and authority stand between the police and the common Creole people. The very way of perceiving life differs radically between the two groups. Solibo opens with a police report detailing the scene ofthe supposed crime and the disposition of the body, while Le Meurtre closes with a report describing the crime scene, the murder, and the arrest of the murderess, Anastasie Saint-Aude nee Tifina, the wife of Waterloo. The Solibo "case" begins with the preliminary assumption by the police that a crime has been committed, but, when there turns out not to have been a crime, the dossier is quietly closed at the end; while, in Confiant's novel, the police report at the end sums up a bonafide crime and serves as a device of closure. However, true closure never comes about in either novel in regard to the question of creolite. The contrivance of introducing a police investigation assumes in due course the form of an inquiry into the state of being Creole and creolite seeking location in a radically changing world. Location is an "elusive place"(Rushdie, 120), as another citizen of a dislocated race, Salman Rushdie, has said. Like Rushdie's migrants, the Creole people are in effect displaced persons, migrants between multiple places, races, languages, and customs. The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as material things; people who are obliged to define themselvesbecause they are defined by othersby their othemess; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a fronfier. (Rushdie 120, 124-25) To understand their Caribbeanness, according to Edouard Glissant, the Creole people had to keep a "clear consciousness" of their relations with both Africa and Europe, thus needing to scrutinize the chaos of this new humanity that we are, to understand what the Caribbean is; to perceive the meaning of this Caribbean civilization which is still stammering and immobile; to embrace "our space in the world; to explore "our reality from a cathartic perspective; to decompose what we are while purifying what we are by fully exhibiting to the sun of consciousness the hidden mechanisms of our alienation; to plunge in our singularity, to explore it in a projective way, to reach out for what we are" (Bemabe et al 83-84; Glissant cited) From this consciousness is thrown up the barrier of mistmst and suspicion between the common Creole people and the authorities, the whites and their surro-

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

gates. The police report written by Pilon at the outset of Solibo meticulously documents the supposed crime scene: A la gauche du monument aux morts, sous un arbre situe a 6 m 50, en bordure de l'allee, se trouve le cadavre d'un homme d'environ cinquante ans. II porte une chemise blanche, ouverte, un pantalon gris deboutonne, conservant dans ses passants une ceinture de cuir noir degrafee. . . ." (18) [To the left of the monument to the dead, under a tree situated six and a half meters away along the walk, lies the corpse of a man about 50 years of age. He is wearing a white shirt, open, gray trousers that are unbuttoned, with an unfastened black leather belt in its loops.. . ]. The report and the tentative crime theory underscore an unrelenting logic. Chamoiseau explores two worlds: that of police officialdom and that of the common people. The police run up against the wall separating their world of Cartesian logic and western prejudice and the world of the people represented by Solibo and his companions. Through the contrast between the rationalist and reductive perception of the police and the perception of the Antillean people, Chamoiseau locates the Caribbean/Creole perspective that firmly holds to "la croyance dans les forces de l'au-dela" (17) [a belief in the forces of the supernatural]. Pilon "n'appreciait guere le cote irrationnel des 'affaires' d'ici-la. Les donnees de base n'y etaient jamais au fil a plomb, une dose deraisonnable, legerement malefique, embrumait le tout. . ." (117-18) [hardly appreciated the irrational side of these island "affairs." The basic facts were never straightforward, were usually devoid of reason, somewhat malignant, and everything was misted over]. His Cartesian cast of mind, his "efforts scientifiques et de logique glaciale" (118) [his scientific approach and cold logic], often clashed with the "zombis et soucougnans divers" (118) [zombies and diverse supernatural apparitions] he knew of from youth. He persists against the unreason of the country and its people, always hopeful of coming on the ideal mystery, "trace au compas (et a l'equerre)" (118) [drawn with a compass and a square], which would offer a complex but logically solvable challenge. Pilon's ideas and perceptions based on reason and geometrically precise logic contrast sharply with those of the Creole people. One such difference emerges in the latter's sense of time: When asked how long they listened to Solibo's solo voice just prior to his death, they themselves ask, "Le temps, c'est quoi, monsieur l'inspectere?" (145) [Time, what is time, monsieur Inspector]. "Evariste Pilon demeurait insensible a cette question. Pour lui, le temps consistait en secondes, en minutes et en heures, il agitait sa montre, en indiquant les aiguilles aux temoins .. ."(145) [Evariste Pilon ignored that question. For him, time consisted of seconds, minutes, and hours, and he held up his watch for the witnesses to see. .]. Each of

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

the people measures time differently. For Congo, the descendent of an African field worker, for instance, time is manioc time, "[quand] il voyait bien poussait la plante et comptait ses saisons" (146) [when he observed the plants growing and counted the seasons]. As opposed to the natural and experiential time of the people, we sense how arbitrary the measurement of time is for Pilonan artificial clock time. The notion of silence also goes beyond Pilon's kenfor him it is absence, lack, closure, while for those raised in the oral tradition "un silence est une parole. On attendait a l'aise meme [for Solibo to continue his story], car de la parole tu batis le village mais du silence ho! c'est le monde que tu construis"(147) [silence is also speech. They waited calmly, because with the word you build a village but with silence, ah ha! it's a world that you build]. Silence for the people is but another form of voice or speech; it goes beyond closure by opening onto new creation. The narrator tells Pilon that silence is as much a voice as speech: "la parole du conteur, c'est le son de sa gorge, mais c'est aussi sa sueur, les roulades de ses yeux, son ventre, les dessins de ses mains, son odcur, celle de la compagnie, le son du ka [drum] et tous les silences. II faut y ajouter la nuit autour, la pluie s'il pleut, les vibrations silencieuses du monde" (148) [the storyteller's word, it's sound emanating from his throat, but it's also his sweat, the rolling of his eyes, his stomach, the tracings of his hands, his smell, that of the listeners, the sound of the ka drum and all the silences about. To that you must add the surrounding night, the rain if it's raining, the silent vibrations of the world]. The police construction of a crime narrative bases itself on "un long mecanisme de deductions et de logique" (197) [a long mechanism of deductions and logic] reconstructed by Pilon. But Pilon becomes distraught when his reconstruction turns out wrong: "Pilon avait longtemps quete le salut parmi ses notes et ses schemas. Plus de coherence. Le bel equilibre de l'empoisonnement concerte s'effondrait" (217) [For a long time Pilon had sought salvation among his notes and schemes. But there was no longer any coherence. The beautiful theory of concerted poisoning crumbled]. Dorval, though an Antillean by birth, represents the limited perceptual faculties of the western-trained police: Ici [in Fort-de-France], il savait que rien de ce qu'il avait patiemment appris dans son commissariat parisien ne lui serait d'une quelconque utilite. Les interrogatoires, l'assemblage des indices ou des preuves, les filatures et tout 9a n'avaient guere de signification dans un pays ou les meurtres etaient non seulement rares mais n'obeissaient a aucune logique europeenne. (41-42)

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique [Here, he knew that nothing of what he had patiently learned in his Parisian commisariat would be of any use. The interrogations, the gathering of clues or evidence, the leads and all that had scarcely any meaning in a country where murders were not only rare but obeyed no logic known to Europe]

La Creolite The two characters who principally represent creolite, in its varying aspects, its dislocation in the modem world, and the forces impinging upon it, are significantly the two characters carried away by death: Solibo and Beausoleil. These fictional characters are just thatfictions or paper creations standing for something else.^ They are representations created not to convey a mere imitation of supposed empirical phenomena, but creations ultimately representative ofthe specific discourse ofthe authors on important aspects of Antillean society. They are indeed essentially symbolic creations. Solibo is provisionally described in the beginning as a "Maitre de la parole incontestable" (26) [Master ofthe unanswerable word], a maker of "discours sans virgule" (26) [speech without punctuation] which contrasts with the proces verbal, with the words associated with the police that enunciate "l'injustice, l'humiliation, la meprise. Elle [the police] amena les absurdites du pouvoir et de la force: terreur et folie" (27) [injustice, humiliation, scorn. The police brought together the absurdity of power and force: terror and madness]. Solibo's name, meaning fall, somersault or pirouette, suggests not solely the skills of speech but the very decline of speech. The author speaks of Solibo's past when, as a child, after the death of his parents, Solibo roamed the hills, reminiscent ofthe people's "fa9on de marronnage de notre Viel" (78) [maroon way of life]. The maroon past is called an echo ofthe blackman (ibid). Pilon later tells Chamoiseau that "[Solibo] tenait a inscrire sa parole dans notre vie ordinaire, or cette vie n'en avait plus l'oreille, ni meme ces creux ou s'etemise l'echo" (222) [Solibo sought to inscribe his words in our humdrum life, but that life no longer listened, not even those hollows where the echo was made eternal]. Solibo himself had earlier told Oiseau de Cham ofthe time when he spoke to the stones and the bark. Old market women had named him Solibo, "astuce de dire: negre tombe au dernier cranet sans echelle pour remonter" (78) [the craft of telling: a blackman fallen to the last leveland without a ladder to climb back up]. The women told him tales, the stories recounted by slaves on hot evenings and, miraculously, he sublimated the tales, as if he had made their deepest meaning a part of himself (79). A recurring metaphor cluster reenforces the description of Solibo's closeness to nature and natural thingsthat ofthe manioc ants alluded to repeatedly in the text: "cinquante-six fourmis-manioc commencent a sillonner le corps de Solibo. C'estleurheure..." (97; also 110, 136, 151) [56 manioc ants begin to swarm over the body of Solibo. It's their hour...]. The ants denote natural phenomena, and the fact of being found only in Guadeloupe suggests a confraternity of Creoles from the French Antilles. Other characters call them variously "strange" and "mad" (15051). Elsewhere they are described as crawling over Solibo's body, breathing into it

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

"une vie formicante . . . en une obscure choregraphie d'hommage" (151) [a formic life . . . in an obscure choreography of homage]. The ants swarm over Solibo's body parts during the autopsy (214) and only the ants accompany him to his grave (221). Solibo's companions take turns reminiscing about Solibo's life. Charlo' recalls him speaking to a crazed pig about to be butchered. His words calmed it: "devant l'animal Solibo etait une Voix" (81) [confronting the animal Solibo was a Voice]. Ti-Cal, a militant anti-colonialist, says, "Nous sommes en voie de disparition et je resiste. Solibo de meme resistait de sa maniere" (189) [we are on the edge of disappearance and I resist. Solibo also resisted in his way]. Charlo' describes Solibo as living "sans montre et sans calendrier" (191-2) [without watch or calendar]. He was always changing, not fixed, unpredictable. Chamoiseau meets Pilon on the street after the collapse ofthe case, and Pilon, obsessed with Solibo during the previous eight months, tells Chamoiseau of his inquiry about storytellers and Solibo in particular. He had even been brought, with Bouaffesse, to consult a quimboiseur (sorcerer) to understand what "une egorgette de la parole" (218) [strangling ofthe voice] really meant. The latter told them that they must ask themselves "qu'arrive-t-il si la vie n'est pas ce qu'elle doit etreet si l'idee defaille..." (219) [what happens if life is not what it should beand if the idea fades away]. Pilon begins to realize where they had gone wrong and that the real question should not have been who killed Solibo, but rather who was Solibo and in what way was he "Magnifique" (219) [Magnificent]. Pilon tells Chamoiseau that his inquiry brought out the fact that Solibo found himself useless: "Cette transition entre son epoque de memoire en bouche, de resistance dans le detour du verbe, et cette autre ou survivre doit s'ecrire, le rongeait" (223) [that transition between his time of memory on the tongue, of resistance in the turn of a phrase, and the present time when one must write to survive, consumed him]. Pilon describes Solibo's last days: "II avait vu mourir les contes, defaillir le Creole ... il se voyait saisi par cette fatalite qu'il avait cm pouvoir vaincre" (223-24) [he had seen the tales die, Creole steadily fail, he saw himself seized with that fatality he had believed he could vanquish]. Solibo had earlier spoken to Oiseau de Cham about the latter's desire to capture the word in writing: On n'ecrit jamais la parole, mais des mots, tu aurais du parler. Ecrire, c'est comme sortir le Iambi de la mer pour dire: voici le Iambi! La parole repond: ou est la mer? Mais l'essentiel n'est pas la. Je pars, mais toi tu restes. Je parlais, mais toi tu ecris en annon^ant que tu viens de la parole. Tu me donnes la main pardessus la distance. C'est bien, mais tu touches la distance . . . (53) [One can never write the word, only gibberish, you ought to have spoken. Writing is as though we hold up the conch and exclaim:

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique here's the conch! The word answers: where's the sea? But the essential is missing. I'm leaving but you remain. I spoke, but you write while saying you come from the word. You give me your hand over distance. Well and good, but you touch only distance ... ]

The reference to Solibo's departure and Oiseau de Cham's remaining is an allusion to the end ofthe age of orality, replaced by the written worda refrain that often recurs in the novel. Writing, whether that of Oiseau de Cham or the police report, in Solibo's mind, however, distances speech from the object, from real life, just as the police report reveals itself as based on false suppositions. In mapping the historical evolution from past times to the present, the figure of Congo assumes major importance. The clients to whom he sold his handmade manioc graters "l'appelaient Congo, son pere ayant ete de ces negres transbordes au pays bien apres l'esclavage" (204) [called him Congo, his father having been one of those blacks transhipped to this country well after slavery]. His very name thus suggests the Old World, and his ancient Creole, "sa maniere de dire la langue est en disparition par ici"(40) [his way of speaking is disappearing here]. People rarely used his graters anymore, because manioc, the staple food of days gone by, had been replaced by steak and fries. When Bouaffesse saw him, he "decouvrit une etrangete de negre, des yeux d'arriere-monde, une dignite miserable" (100) [he spied a bizarre blackman, with eyes bearing the look ofa bygone age, a wretched specimen]. Congo bemoans the lack of respect for tradition: "Pani hespe, pani lavi, hi bray!" (160) [no respect, no life, that's tme]. "Solibo etait de la parole, mais Congo du manioc" (203) [Solibo was ofthe word, but Congo was ofthe manioc], the narrator comments. Chamoiseau goes on to speak of manioc time. It is no coincidence that Congo is identified with manioc and that the strange ants that crawl on Solibo's body are manioc ants. "[P]our ceux qui le [Congo] voyaient, il eut nos quatres cents ans" (208) [those who saw Congo saw 400 years of our past]. The end of the ancient world is foreshadowed in the death of Congo, who defenestrates himself after the bmtal police interrogation (ibid).Oral storytelling is an art ofthe "ancient world" being lost to writing. In regard to writing, Solibo says to Oiseau de Cham that Chaque creature n'est en realite qu'une vibration a laquelle il faut simplement s'accorder... Cesse d'ecrire, kritia kritia, et comprends: se raidir, briser le rythme, c'est appeler sa mort. . . Ti-Zibie, ton stylo te fera mourir couillon. (76) [Every creature is in reality only a vibration which one must simply tune into... Stop writing, scratch scratch, and understand: to grow stiff, to break the rhythm, is to call forth death . . . Ti Zibie, your pen will kill you like an imbecile.]

10

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

The author links two modes of writing by the phrase "kritia kritia"("scratchscratch"): the writing of Cham described by Solibo and the notetaking ofthe Brigadier-chef at the death scene (85). In Le Meurtre du Samedi-Gloria, the church and the govemment denounce the damier: "cette 'barbarie africaine', qui demontrait que 'le negre avait encore un long chemin a parcourir jusqu'a la Civilisation' (le docteur Bertrand Mauville dixit), la negraille s'entetait a se gourmer au son des tambours-bel-air" (131) [that "african barbarity" that showed that "the nigger still had a long road to follow before becoming civilized" (Dr. Bertrand Mauville said): the nigger-trash still stubbomly went into a frenzy at the sound of glorified dmms]. The art of the damier carries on. The training of Beausoleil consists in his being invested with the spirit ofthe earth ("le frisson de la terre," 84). His trainer, the ancient grand master of the damier. Pa Victor, cries out as he puts Beausoleil through his exhaustive training: "Le damier cousine avec la Mort. II est frere de la Vie. II joue entre les deux. C'est done affaire des negres vaillants, hon!"(85) [the damier is inseparable from Death. It's the counterpart of Life. It plays between the two. It's thus the domain only of brave blackmen!]. To pursue the art, "le damier exige purete et clairete d'ame" (85) [the damier demands purity and clarity of soul]. "[L]a force d'Afrique-Guinee" (87) [the force of Africa-Guinea] is conveyed to Beausoleil through the dmms "Ainsi Romule apprit a unir son coeur aux tressautements de la terre et du tambour" (86-87) [Thus, Romule leams to modulate the beating of his heart with the rhythms ofthe earth and the drum]. Beausoleil is transformed by his training: II s'etait lave de toutes les souillures de l'En-Ville. . . . De sa bouche sortait un Creole pur, si pur qu'il irradiait les choses et les etres autour de lui. . . . II ne vivait plus dans le temps des Blancs mais dans celui de la terre, du tambour et de la langue retrouves. II etait devenu homme-terre. Homme-tambour. Homme-langue. (88) [He had been cleansed of all the defilement ofthe City. . . . From his mouth came forth a pure Creole, so pure that it radiated through things and beings around him. . . . He was no longer living in the Whiteman's time but in that ofthe earth, ofthe dmm and of speech rediscovered. He had become man-earth. Man-dmm. Man-speech.] In the way that Dorval sees Beausoleil as "l'archetype du negre martiniquais en voie de disparition" (68) [the archetype of the Martinican black on his way to disappearing], so is the former like Solibo, who with his times is similarly "en voie de disparition." Pa Victor likewise is a figure of the past: "Un homme-racine. Un homme-courbaril. En communication avec la terre et les nuages, les oiseaux et les rivieres. Un ancetre, quoi!"(204) [A man-root. A man-locust-tree. In communication with the earth and clouds, birds and rivers. A veritable ancestor!]. He also, like Solibo, was treated as a "negre-marron" (by his mistress, 206). When Dorval encounters him, "[il] avait conscience de se trouver devant un etre d'un autre age.

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

11

detenteur d'un savoir surement obsolete et peut-etre intransmissable aux generations nouvelles passees. . ." (208-09) [he was aware of finding himself before a being from another age, possessor of a knowledge undoubtedly out of time and perhaps unbequeathable to new generations]. Dorval compares him to Nai'moutou, an Indian seer, and the black, one-eyed cock handler ofthe beke planter Jonas Dupin de Malmaison, whose magnetism with animals recalls Solibo's relation with the pig: "II suffit qu'il caresse les plumes d'un coq [de combat] pour que la bete lui obeisse" (150) [He had only to caress the cock's feathers for the bird to submit to him]. Dorval concludes: "Deux Martiniques se cotoyaient la a l'evidence sans se rencontrer. L'une finissante, vieillissante, negre, indienne et blanche coloniale; l'autre modeme et blanche europeenne. Implacablement blanche europeenne" (209) [Two Martiniques mbbed shoulders there without meeting. The one on its way out, aging, black, Indian and white colonial; the other modem and white European. Implacably white European]. Survival The question that imposes itself is whether Creole/Caribbean identity and selfdefinition, traditionally oral in origin, faced with the threat of disappearance in a literate world dominated by westem thought and culture, can survive, can successftilly relocate themselves. As Rushdie, in the essay cited, affirms, "Migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world, because of the loss of familiar habitats" (125). The writer Chamoiseau, in Solibo, offers the possibility of a cultural metissage that combines the old and the new and offers the haven ofa new place of relocation. After the interrogations and Solibo's burial, the writer Chamoiseau first wants to forget everything, "meme cette promesse legere de porter temoignage" [even that facile promise to bear witness]. He continues with his ethnographic work on the djobeurs.'' But, after meeting Pilon, he speculates about writing down the last words of Solibo: "je compris qu'ecrire l'oral n'etait qu'une trahison, on y perdait les intonations, les mimiques, la gestuelle du conteur" (225) [I understood that to write the spoken was nothing but treason, one lost the intonations, the movement and gestures ofthe storyteller]. He recalls, however, how previously he had set about describing elusive and dissolving natural phenomena such that he had made himself a "scribouille d'un impossible" (225) [scribbler ofthe impossible]. In the same spirit he sets about to reconstitute the last words of Solibo, to attempt to write the unwritable. What, we must ask, does Chamoiseau suggest as a way to fuse orality and writing, a way that allows creolite to adapt to the modem exigencies? For creolite to survive integrally, what is needed is "[t]o create the conditions of authentic expression," which demands that one exorcise "the old fatality of exteriority"; to locate one's "nature" at the center of oneself; to change the exterior vision typifying alienation into "interior vision" that allows one to shed the "old French imagery" we [the Creole people] are covered with"; to remove the filter of westem values

12

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

through which the Creole people have long viewed themselves (Bemabe et al 76, 85-86). So too, the writer at the end of Solibo sets out to create a new writing, to write the impossible, the unwritable, by "interiorizing" (sublimating) the elements of speech in the written word (just as Solibo sublimated, "distilled," the old slave tales in such a way that they became part of him). An important condition of this sublimation lies in the refusal of the Universal and the insistent search for the local and particular ("Creoleness is an open specificity, an annihilation of false universality, of monolingualism, and of purity" [Bemabe et al 89,90]). The alienation/exteriorization of Creole and the Creole people can be overcome in significant part by the integration of speech and the written word: the "insemination" of Creole into the new writing (36, 97). The authors of Eloge state: "Sans langage dans la langue, done sans identite" (47), a phrase difficult to render into English but that essentially argues that without the concrete, particularized "language" (of custom, habits, and outlook) used by the Creole people embedded in the formal dictionary/grammarderived French, there is no way of affirming Creole identity. The writer Chamoiseau brings the draft of Solibo's last words to Pilon and Bouaffesse to read. After they do so, they tie up the police dossier on Solibo to send to the archives, thus closing the case: ils avaient decouvert que cet homme etait la vibration d'un monde finissant, pleine de douleur, qui n'aura pour receptacle que les vents et les memoires indifferentes, et dont tout cela n'avait borde que la simple onde du souffle ultime. (227) [they had discovered that the man was the vibration of a world coming to an end, a man full of suffering, whose shroud would be made of winds and indifferent memories, and that they were touched only by the last breath he drew.] This is what Solibo represents. The narrative proper closes and there follows the last part, the last words of Solibo transcribed by Chamoiseau, entitled "Apres la parole. L'Ecrit du souvenir"(161) ["After the Word. The Writing of Memory"]. Thus, the writer sets out to fashion the fusion of the spoken word and the written word. Confiant's police Inspector Dorval seems less optimistic. He comes to understand and sympathize with the downtrodden people of the Mome Pichevin quarter. But he foresees what appears to be the end of the Creole way of life. Even as he finds the assassin of Beausoleil, he realizes that "Au fond, ce negre-la, ce Romule Beausoleil, n'a peut-etre jamais existe, fit Dorval, amer. II n'a meme plus de sepulture au cimetiere des pauvres" (274) [In the end, that blackman, Romule Beausoleil, perhaps never existed, Dorval bitterly remarked. He doesn't even have a burial mound in the pauper's cemetery].

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

13

However, the people themselves are more optimistic and determined in regard to their future, for they are preparing, like their maroon ancestors, to resist the authorities who plan to toss out the inhabitant squatters and raze the quarter in the name of "Renovation" (131, 139-40). And even with the death of Beausoleil, one feels that the quarter will find a new damier combattant and that the combat itself will continue, just as the gallodromes will continue to hold their cockfights. When asked if Beausoleil had a family, Philomene answers that, "au Mome Pichevin, nous sommes tous de la meme famille"(20) [in the Mome Pichevin quarter we are all of the same family]. And it is not insignificant that the deaths in the two novels occur during the days of Lent preceding Easter Sunday, days of fasting and penitence in commemoration of the fasting of Christ, who will arise after his death. The event itself seems to suggest that the Creole people will endure, despite hunger and suffering, and will resist the forces that threaten their very existence as a people. As we have seen, the "roman policier" stmcture of the novels of Chamoiseau and Confiant provides a way to a wider perpective that encompasses a discourse on creolite and its location in the modem world. One phrase of Eloge is strikingly worded: "L'ecrivain est un renifleur d'existence" (38) [The writer is a detector of existence (99-100)]. Since a "renifieur" is someone who snifts out, or is on the scent of, something or someone, the phrase prompts us to surmise that the true detectives in the two novels are Chamoiseau and Confiant themselves, who have set out to detect the situation and location of creolite. The authors of the Eloge, two of whom are the authors studied here, go on to say that, "More than anyone else, the writer's vocation is to identify what, in our daily lives, determines the pattems and stmcture of the imaginary. To perceive our existence is to perceive us in the context of [en situation dans] our history, of our daily lives, of our reality. It is also to perceive our virtualities"(100). As writers, the authors of the Eloge speak of seizing "the depth of life in Mome Pichevin," which indeed is just what Confiant manages to do in Le Meurtre. If the authors themselves are the real detectives, what is the real crime? In the view of the neo-colonialists that crime is the commission of creolite itself. The words of Solibo that catch in his throat and suffocate him are Creole words imprisoned in his throat. Other crimes would consist in the actions of Beausoleil and the damier fighters, of the inhabitants of the Mome Pichevin quarter who behave scandalously and resist authority. But those are not the real crimes. The real crimes are committed in the words of the racists who denigrate the people, of the authorities that bmtalize them, of all who condone them or stand by indifferently. The stmcture of the roman policier appears in a more indirect manner in Maryse Conde's Traversee de la mangrove, in which the death of the main character, Francis Sancher, whose body is discovered as the story opens, also leads to a search for his identity and the promised discovery of a national identity for the Antiliean people. The search is not undertaken by the authorities, however, but by his fellow compatriots, some of whom love, some of whom despise, him. The main point of resemblance is that the search/solution introduced is never fully resolved. As in the two novels we have considered, the death of the principal character

14

Journal of Caribbean Literatures

serves as a pretext to ask fundamental questions concerning the writer and the person of Creole/Caribbean origin. All three novels, including that of Conde, lend themselves to fragmentation and dispersal, a lack of a solution, and a problematic (re)solving ofthe death ofthe three main characters remindful ofthe crossing of the mangrove that will never come about in Conde's Traversee because of the tangle of roots and wild growth that confront and confound the searcher. That fact shifts the emphasis from the attainment of the action of crossing to the crossing itself, ever undertaken and ever incomplete. The impossibility of crossing becomes the crossing itself, which emphasizes, on the one hand, the disparate and fragmented character ofthe Caribbean/Creole self, marked by metissage and "strange fiisions"(Rushdie 124) and, on the other, the relentless effort to write the unwritable, to describe and elucidate the character of this people. The impossibility of saying becomes the subject ofthe saying itself.

' "une danse combat d'origine africaine que les autorites avaient decretee hors-la-loi"(17) [an African dance of combat that the authorities had outlawed]. The practice of the damier was introduced into the city ("rEn-Ville") by former workers on the moribund sugar plantations and distilleries. They brought with them "leurs deux seules certitudes a savoir la croyance dans les forces de l'au-dela et la danse du damier" [their two fundamental beliefs: in supernatural forces and in the damier combat], both of which horrified the bourgeoisie mulatre [mulattos] and the city dwellers (Confiant, 17). The latter speak ofthe damier as being reserved for the "negres-Guinee, ceux qui avaient conserve les moeurs d'Afrique et qui refusaient de se plier aux regies de la civilisation"(31) [negres-Guinee, those who had kept alive their African customs and refused to observe civilized rules]. ^ The maroons were slaves from Caribbean plantations who escaped into the hills where they created communities that held out against white authorities. The word "maroon" (Fr. marron) comes from the Spanish cimarron, which originally referred to "domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola... and soon after to Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards as well...." (Price, 1-2). ^ "On oublie [souvent] que le probleme du personnage est avant tout linguistique, qu'il n'existe pas en dehors des mots, qu'il est un e t r e de p a p i e r " (Ducrot & Todorov, 286). [One often forgets that the problem ofthe character is first and foremost linguistic, that he does not exist outside words, that he is "a paper being"]. " * From the English jobbers. The Antillean word designates workers engaged in diverse parttime jobs that allow them to earn a subsistence living.

Works Cited Bemabe, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphael Confiant. Eloge de la creolite.

Creole Identity in Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

15

In Praise of Creoleness. English trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard, 1993 [1989]. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Solibo Magnifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Conde, Maryse. Traversee de la mangrove. Paris: Mercure de France, 1989. Confiant, Raphael. Le Meurtre du Samedi-Gloria. Paris: Mercure de France, 1997. Ducrot, Oswald & Tzvetan Todorov. Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences du langage. Paris: Seuil, "Points," 1971. Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Rushdie, Salman. "The Location of Brazil," in Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. 118-25.