Writer’s Memoir Glows With Rich Language

CHILDHOOD

by Patrick Chamoiseau

University of Nebraska Press

$40, cloth; $15, paper; 123 pages

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Lovers of language, rejoice! A new Chamoiseau has flown north for the winter. If this name means nothing to you, then you’re in for a discovery. “Texaco,” Patrick Chamoiseau’s only novel, won the French Prix Goncourt in 1992 and created a whisper in American ears. With its translation and publication in 1997, along with a volume of “Creole Folk Tales” and the memoir “School Days,” Chamoiseau’s portraits of his native Martinique exploded into the English language in a fascinating mixture of classical oils and Creole colors.

The new Chamoiseau is, in fact, his oldest. This second memoir, “Childhood,” was written first, in 1989, and chronicles the preschool days of the author. Chamoiseau’s cousins-in-memoir are not the Kathryn Harrisons and Frank McCourts of the plot-rich, tortured childhoods, but the Derek Walcotts and Marcel Prousts, whose memories are haunted by ghosts and scents, lodgings and longings.

In the age before teachers, the mother, Ma Ninotte; the sisters, the Baroness and Marielle; and the brothers and Papa play a larger role. But it is the house, “a large reef of wood from the north,” leaky and damp, that looms largest in the eyes of the little boy. “O my brothers, you know this house I could never describe, its noble aura, its dusty memory. From the street it looked like a slum. It represented the gray misery of wood in a Fort-de-France that was beginning to cement its eyes shut. But for us it was a vast palace. . . .”

The episodes in this house are mundane--the baking of cakes, the slaughter of the Christmas pig, the curse of kinky hair, the pleasures of lying ill, movies, church, the torture of spiders and capture of rats. The chief adversary is a king rat of “Nutcracker” splendor whom the little boy hunts from the roof with the weapons of his imagination. “There was the flaming gourd, the infernal jar, the superglue, the rubber band, the guillotine knife, the poison syrup, the terrifying scissors of doom. . . .”

What is glorious, as always, is Chamoiseau’s poetry, whether the subject is childhood (“a treasure whose geography you never clearly reveal”) or twilight (“A tormented red dripping from the sky bloodied the upper facades and the dusty windows. Then--whop!--shadow swallowed everything. Chomp!--like a mongoose at the neck of a chicken.”) It is the grown Chamoiseau’s mastery of language rather than psychology that justifies the examination of the past. “Memory,” he cries in one Homeric invocation, “let’s make a pact long enough for a sketch, lower your palisades and pacify the savages, reveal the secret of the traces that lie at the edge of your brushy borders. I bring neither sack for kidnapping nor knife for conquest, nothing but intoxication and a mighty docile joy at the rhythm (flow of time) of your flow.”

We cry with him, not sympathetic memoir tears of broken bones and broken homes, but with the real pain of time lost.