The Enchantment of Language : ...

When his novel “Texaco” won the French Prix Goncourt in 1992, Patrick Chamoiseau could not have foreseen that it would appear in English at a time when language and art were sitting in the front row of the long-running American play of “race.” Should the African American children of Oakland be taught in their local patois? Should black theater be for “colored people” only when the rainbow is not enuf? These American debates are giving John Grisham and “Les Miserables” runs for their money at bookstores and theaters around America.

Enter Chamoiseau with “Texaco” and “School Days,” a narrative based on his childhood on the tiny Caribbean island of Martinique. Martinique is a little dot at the crossroads of the Americas and the Paris-Dakar axis, a department of France (with the same population as Oakland), a culture of freed slaves, imported East Indian and Asian workers, the remnants of a white master race and all the rainbow mixtures that desire and language can produce. Affranchis, bekes, capresses, engages, bekes goyaves, chabins, with their blend of intensely white and intensely black features, are only some of the delicate Creole variations of pigment and class that define the Martinican population.

Chamoiseau himself is black, a negre, and a cultural descendant of the black-pride movement of the Martinican poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who developed the concept of Negritude back in the 1930s, looking toward Africa for a literary and political solidarity to enfranchise the blacks of Martinique. But Chamoiseau’s language is a curious mixed breed, enough classical French to please the Academy and enough Creole to paint his subject. It is a sophisticated mixture of music and meaning that leaves the debate of Martinique’s northern neighbor in the dust of the playground.

A master storyteller, Chamoiseau needs this subtle and indirect language for his tales. Both “Texaco” and “School Days,” his fictionalization of his youthful beginnings, are tales, gestes, with all the connotations that word carries of histories and heroes and daring.

Eighty-year-old Marie-Sophie Laboreux is the heroine of “Texaco” the novel and Texaco the shantytown named after the absent owner of the oil reservoirs outside City. City is Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique. City is also the force that Marie-Sophie battles from her birth at the turn of the century, the force of authority, the force of French language and government, the force of impoverishment and assimilation.

In the course of her chanson de geste, Marie-Sophie sings the history of French Martinique; the history of her parents, born slaves before the abolition of slavery on Martinique in 1848; the history of her grandparents. It is a history that Marie-Sophie tells first to an urban planner who has been sent by City to renovate the shacks and alleys of Texaco; and then to the Word Scratcher, a man sometimes called Cham-Oiseau or King of Birds, the author himself. She speaks to the Word Scratcher:

” . . . [mixing] Creole and French, a vulgar word with a dear word, a forgotten word with a new word . . . as if at any given point she were mobilizing (or summarizing) her tongues. Her voice, like that of great storytellers, dipped into unclarity. In such moments, her sentences whirled at a delirious pace and I would not understand squat: The only thing left for me to do was let myself (shedding my reason) plunge into that hypnotic enchantment.”

And Texaco, the language of “Texaco,” is absolutely, magically enchanting. As heroic as the tales of Marie-Sophie, her papa, Esternome, and mama, Idomenee, it is Chamoiseau’s chabin language that is the true heroine of “Texaco.” Marie-Sophie’s battles with City are nothing less than the wars between French and Creole, between the classic and the patois, the colonizer and the colonized. But neither she nor her Word Scratcher is a simple partisan of Negritude. Marie-Sophie fully recognizes the power and beauty of the European language. Her discovery comes while working as a domestic for a middle-class black family, from the children’s teacher.

“With him (thank God! . . .), I learned to read and write. If the A cost me 13 yams and the B was only a dasheen, and then from C to Z all I had to do was arouse the pleasure he took in resisting ignorance and the volcanic agony of his libido. All for a kiss on the cheek of this tormented-nasty-one-despite-his-age (to excite me, he’d whisper one of those erotic flowers by one called Baudelaire).”

It is from the master of the house, Monsieur Gros-Joseph himself, that Marie-Sophie develops a taste for books, “in which writing becomes the sorcerer of the world,” and receives an invitation to join the family on a voyage to France, the land of Monsieur’s beloved Montaigne. On the eve of their departure, history, in the form of Hitler, intercedes. Monsieur goes mad, retreating to his library, sometimes reading his books, sometimes eating them, sometimes using the pages as toilet paper. When Marie-Sophie is finally expelled from this Eden, she takes with her four apples--La Fontaine’s fables, a volume of Montaigne, Rabelais and Lewis Carroll’s “Alice,” “wandering from wonder to wonder as in a true Creole tale.”

As Marie-Sophie herself wanders from job to job, from hovel of straw to hovel of asbestos to hovel of concrete, she carries with her these four books, searching for a freedom for her people from the authority of City in the classical French of her library and the native strength of the land.

If “Texaco” projects the wide-screen liberation of a people through language, then “School Days” brings the focus down to a close-up of who we are as individuals, speakers and writers. The hunger for freedom that drives “Texaco” is the same hunger for knowledge that drives the hero of “School Days,” a 6-year-old boy.

A negrillon, a little black boy, he learns, at an early age, to capture the world in chalk scribblings in the hallway of his apartment building--repeating his name. Since the boy is Chamoiseau himself, that name is filled with animals and puns (chamois, chameau [camel], oiseau [bird]). When the paradise of the menagerie is replaced with school, a Francophile teacher soon terrifies and confuses the little boy with morality tales about not picking apples from another’s tree, even though they live in a country where apples have “to be imported . . . by boat in closed crates and arrived half rotten.” The teacher hates Creole, the home language of his pupils, “seeing in it the root of these evils, the ball and chain that would keep the children prisoners of ignorance.” He insists that the children use proper French vocabulary, replacing even their nightmares of zombies with dreamy fairies and will-o’-the-wisps.

Rebellion arrives at the school in the person of the substitute teacher. While not speaking Creole himself, he allows the young boys to use the forbidden language and even introduces the poetry and person of the great Aime Cesaire. But Chamoiseau resists the easy glorification of Negritude over classicism. “Wherever the home-grown Teacher saw White, he put Black. . . . In the face of Europe, he set up Africa. . . . Yet we never felt we were dealing with anyone other than the Teacher. . . . He cramped us in the same way. Conformed us in the same way. The magicians condemned him out of hand.”

This is the lesson that many northern educators and artists have yet to learn. Storytelling, like children, needs all the help it can get. Neither the standard nor the patois are enuf. We have to learn all the music, all the meaning, all the language we can muster. It is a lesson that is not lost on Chamoiseau’s translators. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov have done their best not to bury the machete-hewn path of “Texaco” under an English macadam better suited to another climate. The result is a rich and complex read, in which tense, reference and time shift at a speed that rewards patience. Linda Coverdale’s “School Days” is more immediately traveled, perhaps because the terrain of childhood is universally familiar. “Apiye-konchonni, Rache-koupe-fanne-dwet, Mouch-bobo-senti, Dekale-pa-anba . . . “ translate into the different music of “Scum-supporters, Knuckle-gnawers, Smelly-sore-flies, Draggle-drawers. . . .”

The greatest hero of them all is Chamoiseau’s language. Chamoiseau well deserves the right to play in the great hermaphrolinguistic harem of Salman Rushdie and other literary masters of former European colonies. His medium is not only the message but the savior, a savior more postcolonial than postmodern. Chamoiseau, the Word Scratcher, is like his Monsieur Gros-Joseph who surrounded by the classics, alternately eats the pages and soils them. It is only through mastery of language, that both “Texaco” and “School Days” cry, through the mastery of music and meaning, that one can hope to survive through adversity and find true freedom.

It is a lesson that should be taught in the Oaklands of the northern neighbor, a complex and unsentimental lesson of pain and necessity: That “in this sacking of their native world, in this crippling inner ruination--the little black boy bent over his notebook was tracing, without fully realizing it, an inky lifeline of survival.”